Slayer

If you’re ever desperate for a concentrated hit of anti-fun, I recommend you attend a photoshoot with Californian metal legends Slayer. Today, we’re down a grubby, piss-stained London alley watching four stern, mirthless men in their forties lean against a black metal gate. Plan B photographer Cat Stevens is attempting to get them to loosen up and act natural, but I honestly don’t think they know how. “Do you guys talk to each other?” she jibes. “Ever?” Cue a ripple of subdued laughter, spiked with a subtle pang of discomfort. She hit a nerve there.

“I put our longevity down to compromise,” confides Tom Araya (bass, vocals and greying beard). “And in all honesty, I think I’m the one who’s been doing the compromising. This could have been through a long time ago. It’d be really easy to break this band up. People ask me, ‘How have you managed to stay together for so long?’ It’s because I’ve allowed it.” Guitarists Jeff Hanneman and Kerry King are men of considerable girth, if you take my meaning. They wear sunglasses all the fuckin’ time, even in their luxurious but actually rather drab and dispiriting hotel rooms. Together, they stride around like the finalists in a Big Bad Wolf contest. Araya and drummer Dave Lombardo are impeccably polite and cheerful. That is, when they’re not around Hanneman and King.

“Another thing,” adds Araya, “is that you’re bound by obligations. You have contracts. At the beginning it wasn’t like that. But now everything is paper and signature. ‘This says here that I own you. Until you’ve met your commitments, you’re stuck with me.’ So, you learn to avoid all that rather than shoot yourself in the foot and have people start telling you, ‘It’s your fault this is all going to hell – you gotta pay!’

“But,” he sighs. “I really believe in this band. That’s the biggest part. I believe in the music we create.”

“I live it every day/Don’t know another way” – ‘Catalyst’

Slayer’s new album Christ Illusion is being hailed as a ‘return to form’ for the band. Those transmitting this particular meme may have missed 2001’s utterly savage God Hates Us All, but more about that later. In any case, Christ Illusion isn’t a return to form, nor is it a case of ‘if it ain’t broke don’t fix it’ laziness, as suggested when it was reviewed in September’s Plan B. Listen to the ouevre from 1983’s Show No Mercy onward and two things become evident. First, Slayer never lost their form. Second, no two Slayer albums sound alike: the AC/DC of thrash they ain’t. Christ Illusion represents yet another shift in the band’s sound, being blunter and more claustrophobic than any of its predecessors. Everything sounds a little too close for comfort, a little too real. If, as Plan B’s George Taylor states, “The real magic has left the stage”, then it’s perfectly consistent with where Slayer are right now. In 2006, they have no use for magic. No time for illusion. No mercy.

Constant throughout all this mutation has been the furious howl of vocalist and bassist Tom Araya. Much of the attention devoted to Slayer has concentrated on King and Hanneman’s riffs and their wayward, almost harmolodic soloing, or Lombardo’s formidable drumming. But Araya’s vocals are an indispensible element of Slayer’s sound, hidden in plain view, yet immediately recognisable and distinct from the generic ‘cookie monster’ style that predominates in the world of extreme metal.

“When I go back and listen to Show No Mercy, Haunting The Chapel and Hell Awaits,, you can hear that I’m trying to sound really angry and aggressive,” Araya smiles. “But on Reign In Blood, I started singing differently. It just came naturally. I guess it became very distinctive. I’m amazed I was able to sing the way I sang on those first three records, because singing that way can really fuck up your voice. Maybe in the studio I was doing that, but when I sang the songs live, I was belting them. So when people say, ‘You’re a singer!’ I say, ‘No, I’m more the screamer in the band. I scream in key’.”

He’s also a consummate character actor, inhabiting each lyrical role with genuine conviction. Songs concerning serial murderers are a staple of metal, but few are invested with the humanity and empathy Araya brings to ‘Dead Skin Mask’ (an ode to Ed Gein) or ‘213’ (a tribute to Jeffrey Dahmer). On putrescently psychedelic numbers such as ‘Seasons In The Abyss’, ‘Bloodline’ and their cover of Iron Butterfly’s ‘Inna Gadda Da Vida’ it is Araya that brings the weirdness, his multitracked vocal lines slipping and sliding over King and Hanneman’s riffs with queasy lubriciousness. Lombardo graciously acknowledges Araya’s contribution to the band’s rhythmic impact.

“When Tom sings,” remarks the drummer, “the guitars become just a floating sound. It’s not something that I follow. But there’s something between me and him, the vocals and the drums, that sets this pulse. It’s amazing. I heard a recent live recording, it was one of the slower ones like ‘South Of Heaven’ or ‘Dead Skin Mask’ and man, we were just dead on! Tom’s vocals were locking into the drums and it grooved so well, I was just blown away. I kept playing it over and over again, telling my kids, ‘Listen to that! Listen to that! Listen how he locks into the drums!’ Everything else didn’t matter. What mattered was the vocals, and the beat.”

Dave Lombardo rejoined Slayer in 2001 after a nine-year absence, but Christ Illusion is the first album to feature his unmistakable double-kick work since 1990’s Seasons In The Abyss. During his time away from the band he established himself as one of the world’s leading avant-rock drummers, working with John Zorn, Mike Patton and DJ Spooky. While his replacement Paul Bostaph did a fine job of keeping the heartbeat of Slayer speeding into the (blood) red, Lombardo brings a non-metal dexterity and suppleness to their music, incorporating the exploratory zeal of the dedicated improviser. “I always wing it,” he nods. “I make it up as I go along and even live, I try to add a little bit more. Because I’ve learned the songs so well, it’s like, ‘Wow, I should have done this in the recording session!’ But I can never go back. It’s an increased courage. I’m more positive and more confident about what I’m doing now. It’s good to be back.”

Lombardo’s stupefying, rapid-fire battery was instrumental in making 1986’s Reign In Blood a serious contender for the title of The Greatest Metal Album Ever Recorded. Around 28 minutes of concise brutality and relentless morbidity, Reign In Blood is the album most owned by people who only own one Slayer album. And perhaps rightly so.

But while Reign’s place in the canon is secure, I’d argue for God Hates Us All as Slayer’s greatest achievement on their own terms. A grand dramatisation of Kerry King’s bitter disgust at everything, God Hates Us All essays alienation on a galactic scale. It’s a sonic invocation of the secret part of us that identifies with the suicide bomber, the serial killer, the extremist…The part of us that wishes the whole world would just fuckin’ burn, because that’s all we deserve. We’re all complicit in the endless cycle of human misery, whether through inaction, malice or plain human weakness. It doesn’t matter. We’re all the same. Guilty as fuck.

“I hate everyone equally…just me in my world of enemies” – ‘Disciple’

It isn’t solely a case of Slayer – or Kerry King – versus the world. The band’s rage is equally capable of turning in on itself. But while the internal conflicts experienced by contemporaries such as Metallica and Megadeth have resulted in dismembered lineups, substandard music, or both, Slayer are peculiar in that the antagonism that lies just beneath the surface seems not only to fuel the band’s creativity but also ensure their continued survival. During our interview, Tom Araya implies that his unhappiness with King and Hanneman’s tight grip on the songwriting credits almost led to his departure. However he claims to have learned how to use this dissatisfaction as a motivational tool. It sounds debilitating in theory, but check the guy’s track record – it works.

“I have to find an outlet for it,” chuckles Araya. “And it seems to work well for me. It’s that constant drip of oil, fuelling the fire.”

There’s no better indication of negativity fostering creativity than ‘Supremist’, the last song on Christ Illusion. It’s a damn near perfect illustration of why Slayer are still a vital creative force after 20-odd years. ‘Supremist’ is a musical scourge, a purge, a holocaust. Sure, you’ve heard that before. But this song is genuinely horrifying, more so than anything death metal or grindcore has to offer and on a par with the rampant nihilism of Norway’s black metal elite, minus the cartoonish Satanic posturing. Beginning as a waspish hardcore speed-fest, the song warps through various riffacious permutations until it bursts into the final movement, at which point everything just goes off. Tom – frenzied yet excruciatingly human – intones, “Must maintain control of the weak/Must contain the minds of the free”, while Kerry and Jeff lay down an electric hellscape somewhere between classic Celtic Frost, Godflesh and early Swans. Shards of feedback descend like fire from heaven and guitar strings whine like the human spirit crushed under the yoke of tyranny.

I tell Tom that this is the most chilling song on the album, and add that its effect is less to do with velocity or heaviness, but the creation of an atmosphere that is uniquely Slayer-ish.

“When you hear a riff, it’s not a question of whether it sounds like it should be a Slayer riff or whatever,” he agrees. “It’s about creating an atmosphere. It’s got nothing to do with speed, it’s got nothing to do with the cookie monster voice. It’s got everything to do with the mood that you’re creating.”

That old chestnut from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four about a boot stamping on a human face, forever…Well, it’s been a little overused. But fuck it, it applies here. ‘Supremist’ is a stark vision of humankind’s final subjugation and subsequent extinction. In a world where you might be worried about stepping on a bus, train or plane for fear of being blown to bits by homemade explosives, or about the increasingly stubborn weirdness of American foreign policy, or about the stifling climate of fear that we’ve been plunged into over the last few years, this is potent, relevant stuff.

Meanwhile, the rictus grin ‘culture of the monoform’ as described by filmmaker Peter Watkins (Punishment Park, The War Game, The Gladiators) grows ever more firmly entrenched. As the world collapses around our ears, we’re encouraged to keep smiling, keep fucking, keep shopping. Yet also to be afraid. Very afraid. It’s a mad world, for sure. And if any band articulates that madness more accurately than Slayer, I’ve yet to hear them.

Devo

The Devolutionary Oath:

1. Be like your ancestors or be different. It doesn't matter.
2. Lay a million eggs or give birth to one.
3. Wear gaudy colors or avoid display. It's all the same.
4. The fittest shall survive yet the unfit may live.
5. We must repeat.

Devo started a joke which started the whole world crying. Okay, that isn't actually the case. What really happened was, Devo started a joke that eventually came true, a joke which reflected the outwardly vacant smile and repressed urges of the culture that produced them. Nowadays James Murphy may warble about 'North American Scum' to the delight of would-be ironists everywhere, but he's merely producing a comfortably numbed variant - minus the true horror - of the original manifesto originally developed by Ohio students Gerald Casale and Bob Lewis as far back as the late 1960s. Inspired partly by pseudo-scientific objections to Darwinism and, one suspects, partly by their own status in hometown Akron as sexually invisible egghead geeks, the manifesto of De-evolution is an ever-shifting collection of ideas, a satirical prism vital to the dissemination of Casale and Lewis’ cynical world view; Jungian psychology, Reichian Orgone theory, Crumb-esque sexual dementia, Church Of The SubGenius pranksterism all filter through, unified by the central idea that the human race has ceased to develop and is now sliding back towards its primitive origins. It isn't a world gone mad. It's a world gone stupid.
Devo started a joke which became serious at the precise moment Casale witnessed the murder of some of his fellow students by National Guardsmen at Kent State University on May 4, 1970, during a protest against the invasion of Cambodia launched by President Nixon on April 25. Four students were killed, nine were injured.
"It changed my life completely. That was the defining trauma. When you see people shot, when one bullet goes through a 19 year-old that you know, the hole, the exit wound that it leaves, all the screaming, the crying, the slow-motion like in 'Raging Bull'... within hours the university was closed. There were bands of deputised locals roving around in cars with shotguns. And the evening paper put out a false headline, 'Students have shot guardsmen'. So people were looking to kill students."
William Burroughs explained the concept of the 'Naked Lunch' as "the frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork". The Kent State massacre would seem to have been Casale's own frozen moment.
"You watched a complete lie unfold. You watched the hatred. It was basically like a civil war. You've got to remember the people that shot the kids were the same age as the kids, they were national guardsmen, they were 19. And it was at the height of the protests over the Vietnam war, and the illegal extension of that war into Cambodia, without an act of congress, back when people were informed about their government and the constitution and they cared. Today obviously everybody just goes, 'Uh, give me my Frappucino and I'll put it in the cup holder of my SUV.' One lie after another, one cynical piece of misinformation after another, from this moronic junta that rules our world – nobody even turns their heads. It was a different world then. Ideas mattered, and the constitution seemed to matter to millions of Americans. It was real, it wasn't senseless killing, it was directed political hatred."
Casale and Lewis responded to this shocking absurdity with yet more absurdity. Fellow Kent State art student (and now highly successful soundtrack composer) Mark Mothersbaugh soon entered the fold, introducing the pair to the highly entertaining 1924 anti-evolutionary pamphlet ‘Jocko-Homo Heavenbound’ by one Doctor BH Shadduck. Devo was gradually reconfigured from a Dada-esque arts lab to a more focused audio-visual collective, adopting uniforms and embracing pop music as a possible means to an end.
“We were openly subversive in the beginning. But no-one was paying attention, that's the beauty of America – no-one pays attention at all. By the time it gained some kind of traction and got on the radar then certain people would write about it. As soon as we had any success we were viciously attacked as clowns and fascists and anti-humane. Completely misunderstood. People missed the irony and thought we were all for conformity.”

In 1974, Devo made ‘In The Beginning Was The End: The Complete Truth About De-Evolution’. Essentially an extended music video for two songs, ‘Secret Agent Man’ and ‘Jocko Homo’, the film introduced characters that embodied the concept of De-Evolution. Played by Mothersbaugh’s father Robert, General Boy symbolised 1950s-style paternal authority while his son Booji Boy, played by Mothersbaugh Jr in a plastic child mask, represented the tendency towards poop-playing regression Devo had observed in Western culture. An unmasked Mark in lab coat delivers a lecture to an audience of Jocko Homo (‘ape-men’) who later riot and stab Booji Boy to death. ‘In The Beginning...’ provided Devo with their first big messy splash, winning an award at the Ann Arbor Film Festival. This led to the vocal support of Iggy Pop and David Bowie, which in turn secured the band a deal with Warner Bros.
The film remains an uncomfortable experience. Not exactly funny and not quite serious, it aims for the guts of the audience and succeeds in inspiring a kind of creeping nausea. This queasiness is central to Devo’s aesthetic both musically and conceptually; satire exists to bring sickness to the surface, and songs like ‘Soo Bawlz’, ‘Be Stiff’, ‘Shrivel Up’, ‘Sloppy (I Saw My Baby Gettin’)’, ‘Penetration In The Centrefold’ and ‘Buttered Beauties’ act as conduits for the repressed urges of the American male. If Robert Crumb’s cartoons offered an exploded view of unfettered masculine sexuality reigning over its own uncensored kingdom, Devo’s frantic meditations on mongoloids, vaginal discharge, horny pre-teen mentally-handicapped girls and midgets who “play underneath... mama’s skirts all day” were their musical equivalent. And while their song structures tended towards an uptight jerkiness suggestive of a punishing, panicked bout of masturbation, the frequent squirts of analogue synth (especially dominant on the 4-track recordings collected on Rykodisc’s essential yet sadly deleted Hardcore Devo 74-77 compilations) are rudely redolent of bodily (mal)functions, the burp and squelch of messy sex, flatulence and diarrhea.
The synthetically-minded end of America’s noise underground owes a huge debt to Devo’s dirty-minded emissions. This band set the standard for angry male geek energy and prurient sexuality, and led some commentators to accuse the band of misogyny. It has to be said, they have a point - Devo songs often essay a gynecological curiosity that often spills over into cruelty, prodding and poking at the unfamiliar with a combination of lust and disgust. However Casale sees the band as victims, hapless undersexed outsiders without any hope of copping a feel, let alone subjugating the opposite sex. This seems disingenuous at first - as we all know, geeks can hate women too - but the perverse honesty of Devo’s sexual politics counts in their favour, and if it proves repellent, well... it is. What can you do?
“I don't think it was misogynistic at all. We were more like the Three Stooges, whenever they have girlfriends in one of their episodes they're being brow-beaten and pushed around and man-handled by the woman, you know, pussy whipped. We were passive males of tender tails in Ohio and we were on the short end of the stick when it came to women. What we noticed in culture though, was the complete hypocrisy where on the one hand sex is being sued to sell everything and on the other it's always being presented as bad.”
Something to be feared?
“Exactly. So when Mark wrote 'Penetration In The Centrefold' it was because some big magazine, like Penthouse or something had for the first time ever shown penetration in the centrefold. So he was like telling the news, he goes down to the store and… it was just reportage.”
“We used to put up these satirical and ironic statements that people took at face value, as serious manifestos. We said that ‘Rebellion and individuality is obsolete in corporate society’ and ‘Your mission is to fit in’. And they were like ‘Wow, these guys are fascists!’ You know, that's how Rolling Stone felt. Ridiculous. Clowns, Nazis, you know. While the real clowns and real Nazis were being put on the cover.”
Were the American rock critics a constant adversery?
“From the beginning, absolutely. They did not like what we were doing, it didn't fit in to the whole thing. All the radio programmers were like fake hippies who wore the satin jackets and were getting paid off in whores and cocaine and still liked The Eagles and just hated Devo.”
You mean you never got the opportunity to be paid off in whores or cocaine?
“No. We paid for our cocaine.”

At roughly the same time in England, Genesis P. Orridge and Cosey Fanni Tutti were launching their own offensive against the hypocrisy of decency, first as COUM Transmissions, then as Throbbing Gristle. It’s interesting to compare the two outfits. Like Devo, TG were lapsed hippies with an artsy background, they were inexorably drawn towards taboo subject matter, exhibited a love of synthetic texture and harboured a secret obsession with E-Z listening. They too, attracted accusations of fascism. It’s perhaps even more fascinating though to consider the ways in which the two groups diverged - brought up with pervasive American ideals of success, Devo briefly became the truly subversive pop group by way of their acute observation of such pop conventions as harmony, melody and damnably catchy toons. If this combination proved initially offputting to American ears, it quickly won the group a dedicated European following.
“Europe is where we first gained success. England got us in a big way right away, totally got the irony, the humour. Loved the performance quality of Devo and the multimedia quality. You know, the message was like ‘Ok we get it, great.’ and then they were on to the next thing. We actually probably lasted a little longer in terms of popularity in Germany, and believe it or not, Italy. Up to '84 we were very popular in Italy, so I think that in general the European audience was more informed, more sophisticated.”
But then, Europe was better prepared. There were obvious parallels between Devo and the streamlined epiphanies of Krautrock, especially Kraftwerk - the uniforms, the repetition, the steam-piston rhythms, the mannered, robotic method of playing - and no-one of great significance in America was using synths in such a goddamn European - or ‘faggy’, because in Europe we are all ‘fags’ - way. Devo’s 1978 debut album, Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! was almost an honorary krautrock document, having been produced by Brian Eno at Conny Plank’s studio in Cologne. Although it’s now accepted as a post-punk cult classic, in truth it’s a little too clean, a little too Enossified, and as a result lacks the rough robotic energy and effluent electronic splurge of the band’s pre-Eno material. Casale and the band reputedly tried to convince Eno to perfectly replicate the sound of their demos, leading Eno to brand the band ‘anal’.

The Hornbyite drones of the mainstream music press will tell you that Q: Are We Not Men?... is the only truly essential Devo album, that Duty Now For The Future (1979), Freedom Of Choice (1980), New Traditionalists (1981), Oh, No! It’s Devo (1982) and Shout (1984) are little more the desperate splutterings of a novelty band outstaying their welcome, perhaps grudgefully admitting that motivational S&M anthem ‘Whip It’ from Freedom... is a pretty good tune. This news may shock some of our more sensitive readers, but guess what? They’re wrong. Over the course of these five albums, Devo dispensed with guitars in favour of gleaming, hi-definition (if frequently haywire) synthwork, while the lyrics swung wildly between pitch-black pessimism and pisstake perkiness. Post-debut Devo did not only give us ‘Whip It’, but also ‘Freedom Of Choice’, ‘Girl U Want’, ‘Gates Of Steel’, ‘Through Being Cool’, ‘Peek-A-Boo’ and ‘Beautiful World’. The latter, a bitterly poignant assault on the asinine positivity of the Reagan administration, is Devo at their angriest and most honest. It’s surprising and a little disappointing, then, that Casale considers the end of the true Devo to have taken place as early as 1978.
“I'm trying right now to make a feature film about us. It would start in 1974 and end in 1978 when we go on Saturday Night Live, and were a big hit that night. It's called ‘The Beginning Was The End’ and the way you watch the movie, you know that it’s over that night. That Devo, the real Devo, is over.”
So what was the Devo that came after that?
“Then you get to the corporate meat grinder, and all the things that come with it, both the good and bad. The pressures and the insanity, because basically your fate isn't your own any more. Because you can't really do that many things to control it.”

Of course, the news on every spud’s lips is that Devo are about to tour the UK for the first time in over fifteen years. Good news, right? A ‘legendary’ band returning to our shores, a chance to see something many of us were too young to experience the first time around. Yeah, great. Yawn. But wait - can this world really be as dumb as it seems? Could it be getting even dumber? And could it be that somehow Devo are more relevant now than ever? Maybe.
“Devo was a serious joke. We didn't even really believe things would get this bad. Now we see that we were unfortunately very right, beyond our expectations. De-evolution is real and we're all living in a de-evolved, corporate, futile world. Run by morons, and run by ideologues written by greed and religion of every stripe – it's not just the Muslims, it's our guys right here. They're itching for a fight because they're fundamentalist Christians. Your own guy Tony is in on that, and it's horror. A normal rational person that pays their bills, minds their own business has a high IQ just sits back in horror and watches the world be hijacked by morons and creeps. And pays the price. Nobody cares because there's a mass of sheep out there who are just consumer conformists, who have been turned into an audience. And they download ‘content’. And it's awful. And that's it. There's informed focus group who check an opinion poll and it's all moronic, a circus.”
Still, do we need another ‘legendary’ band clogging up the circuit? Not really. Fortunately Devo are hardly your average legends. Even when they’ve done the right thing, they’ve done it beautifully wrong, and as fellow Plan B writer Emily Bick remarked to me, they’re never going to be an easy hipster sell. Feel a bit queasy buying tickets for the nostalgia show? Good. It’s part of what it means to be Devo. And we’re all Devo.
“When I was in college, I would go and see John Lee Hooker or Howlin' Wolf and it was kind of like a war movie where I was scared but I loved every minute of it. It was intense and kind of threatening. But they were so good at what they did, and you couldn't believe they were doing it as grown men. I think when Devo walks on stage and can still do this stuff aggressively, it's kind of scary.”
Yes, Gerry. It sure is.

Asva

“The appeal of drone stuff for me is that it’s a heady, 'real' experience, internal, meditative. It could be a really good drug, and drone certainly compliments certain drugs. If you’re into that kind of thing.”
The music of Asva reminds me of the one and only time I took DMT. Up on a hill above Hastings, I saw constellations knit themselves into vast scorpion-like starships, a village in the distance take on the appearance of an illuminated medieval castle, control cables descend from the cosmos and the space directly above me solidify into a ceiling, through which a tunnel opened and I was drawn upwards into what I recognised as The Invisible College. Asva similarly cause one to ponder the the hidden geometries of magick and science. The title of their debut album, Futurists Against The Ocean smacks not so much of a genuine opposition as a juxtaposition or superimposition, the rubbing up or lamination of the immersive and mutable against the angular and monolithic. Of course, G. Stuart Dahlquist, Asva leader and avant-metal veteran (ex-Sunn 0))), Goatsnake and Burning Witch) offers his own interpretation...
“The visual and poetic art that resulted directly from the Futurist movement that occurred in Russia in the early part of the last century seems similar to Asva's contribution to our vast ocean of humanity, of listening choices,” he says. “Theres so much crap floating in that water! My hope would be that Asva and like-minded musicians, artists and writers could move to create a different level of listening... not trying to play the heaviest riff or rip anyones head off with some killer show, quite the opposite. Part of Futurist thinking (if I'm getting it right) is making something that hits you differently than smack in the face. Meaning is found through pondering, absorbing whats in front of you with mind, more so than eyes.”
Like his old bandmate Stephen O’Malley and the growing number of kindred spirits operating in the twilight zone between metal and drone, Dahlquist is acutely aware of his music’s capacity for physical and psychological transformation.
“Frequently, when done playing, my ears will pop, like coming up from a deep dive,” he explains. “The sound is what gets me off. Waves of bottom end just pushing right through me, Trey (Spruance, guitar) and Troy (Swanson, Hammond Organ)’s subtle juxtaposition, Jessika (Kenney, vocals)'s shrill screams, her beautiful lyric, B.R.A.D. and his skeletal drumming. I used to meditate a lot... I left my body, got scared, and now I've got Asva. So many times while playing shows, I've had to choke back sobs, the music just hits me so squarely in my emotional core.”
Asva: metal that moves.

Blue Oyster Cult

"The clock strikes twelve and moondrops burst/Out at you from their hiding place" - 'Astronomy'

I remember embarking on camping holidays with my family in the late 80s and early 90s and a cassette of Imaginos (along with Secret Treaties, Spectres and a compilation entitled Career Of Evil) provided the perfect soundtrack to our inevitably rain-soaked trips to the south coast, or Wales. When you're young and susceptible to parent-induced boredom, music can add the necessary perfume to an imperfect situation, tranforming your predicament into something with the scent of adventure. The rain, sea and stars begin to whisper their secrets. The veil lifts a fraction. Magick is afoot.

"The Oyster boys are swimming now/Hear them chatter on the tide" - 'Blue Oyster Cult'

The concept of Imaginos was originally formulated in 1967 by Blue Oyster Cult manager, producer and lyricist Sandy Pearlman, and detailed in a collection of poems collectively titled 'The Soft Doctrines Of Immaginos'. Fragments of this concept surfaced in early 70s BOC songs such as 'Subhuman', 'Astronomy' and 'ETI' before its eventual shoring up into the album released in 1988. "Basically, it's an interpretation of history," explained Pearlman to Kerrang! magazine in September that year. "An explanation for the onset of World War I, or a revelation of the occult origins of it. Imaginos is the main character, and is what I call 'an actor in history'. He plays different roles in history and was born as a modified child, modified by an alien influence, and his mission is to present the human race with the challenge of evil. The aliens are playing with our history as if it's a game, and he motivates the game and presents the choices to the human race. They react as they will."

"The writing in the notebook/Notation from the stars" - 'I Am The One You Warned Me Of'

The narrative thread of Imaginos - described in the sleevenotes as a 'random access myth' - makes reference to the Spanish conquest of the New World, Haitian Voodoo, the reign of Elizabeth I and her counsel by occult advisor Dr. John Dee (who claimed to converse with spirits using a 'magic mirror' fashioned in Mexico from black volcanic stone), Lovecraftian gods, Egyptian fertility rites, hallucinogenic cacti ("Do the Don Pedro" - 'Les Invisibles'), the discredited Sirius myth of the African Dogon tribe as documented by Robert Anton Wilson in Cosmic Trigger, and the gothic literary traditions of Europe and America. Pearlman weaves a rich tapestry of truth, half-truth and out-and-out fantasy to spellbinding effect, and it is this rigorous dedication to the weird that makes Imaginos possibly the most literate and intelligent rock concept album ever devised. Enigmatic and often wilfully obtuse, Imaginos nevertheless lives up to its billing as "A bedtime story for the children of the damned." The cover image, perhaps harking back to the 'Black & White' trilogy of Blue Oyster Cult (1972), Tyranny And Mutation (1973) and Secret Treaties (1974), is a monochrome photograph of San Francisco's Cliff House Hotel, built in 1863. The hotel glowers on the cliffs, ghost-lit against a skyful of cumulonimbus. If I ever visit San Francisco, that's where I'd like to stay.

"Where witches went mad more than once" - 'Magna Of Illusion'

The unsavoury aspect of Imaginos becomes apparent when one considers its origins as a projected solo album by ex-drummer Albert Bouchard, and what appears to have been the wholesale hijacking of the project by Pearlman and the remaining members of BOC. Bouchard worked on the project with Pearlman after leaving the band in the early 80s, and BOC's label CBS showed interest, but allegedly requested that it be released as under the Blue Oyster Cult name. BOC broke up and the idea was eventually abandoned, but revived following the band's reformation - without Albert - in 1987. The released version of Imaginos contains basic tracks recorded by Bouchard and selected session musicians, with some elements overdubbed by Pearlman and Oyster boys Eric Bloom (vocals, guitars), Donald 'Buck Dharma' Roeser (vocals, guitars) and Allen Lanier (keyboards). Having been shut out of his own album project, Bouchard has expressed disappointment and anger at his old bandmates and manager. It's extremely unlikely that the original line-up will ever work together again.

"I've lived upon the edge of chance/For twenty years or more/And this is what my friends all mean" - 'Del Rio's Song'

Sonically, Imaginos is fucking odd, a disorientating blend of overblown pomp rock, AOR, metal and sea-shanty power pop. 'I Am The One You Warned Me Of', 'Les Invisibles', 'Del Rio's Song' and 'Magna Of Illusion' strike an uneasy balance between the sinister mysticism of Blue Oyster Cult, Tyranny & Mutation and Secret Treaties and the radio-friendly gloss of the group's post-'Don't Fear The Reaper' incarnation. This was clearly no formula for mainstream success, and the album effectively wiped itself from history. But it's the story within the story that makes Imaginos so fascinating. A narrative spanning 200 years of myth and magick, it stands as testament not only to one of America's greatest bands, but also the unsung imagination of Sandy Pearlman, a maverick conceptualist convinced that rock music could be a vehicle not only for atavistic gratification or the expression of utopian ideals... but also for the starry wisdom glimpsed in fever dreams and wild hallucinations.

"So ladies fish and gentlemen/Here's my idle plea/See me in the blue sky bag/Meet me by the sea" - 'Blue Oyster Cult'

Gescom

Although many assumed it to be the case, Gescom were never a mere dangleberry hanging from the hairy backside of Manchester anti-dance duo Autechre. Or were they? It's hard to tell, given that the exact personnel behind their frequently anonymous releases remains a closely guarded secret, or at least one its keepers can't be arsed to make public. Perhaps it's more productive to speak in terms of what has been suggested. In which case, it has been suggested that Gescom is a collective involving up to 30 individuals including Autechre's Sean Booth and Rob Brown, noise terrorist Russell Haswell, Darrell 'Bola' Fitton and Rob Hall of Skam Records.
Minidisc was originally released in 1998 on the OR label and was the world's first Minidisc-only release. One of the selling points of this shiny new technology was that there was 'zero seek time' between track flips, something that now comes as standard on most digital media. It was Gescom's intention to exploit this feature, so they came up with 88 tracks designed to be played at random, theoretically offering the listener a brand new listening experience every time they pressed 'Play'. It reads like a smug contrivance, a clever-dick irrelevance. But when you listen to Minidisc in sequence it's impressive but ultimately really fucking dull, an interminable trudge through chops, bits and bytes seemingly designed to show off just how crazy a few geeks can get with a jolly bit of DSP. It's soulless, shallow, tiresome.
Use Minidisc in the manner its makers intended, though, and the project instantly comes alive in your ears. The juxtaposition between industrial drone and chopped-to-fuck hip-hop beats, twisted metallic klang and flatline hum creates something utterly compelling in its rapid-fire weirdness. Each of these 88 fragments work so well as random elements (rather than constituents of a fixed, finished whole) that the result forces a revision of how we listen to music, perhaps also foreseeing our culture's current predilection for Party Shuffling brief tinny bursts of digital sound. Of course, you could pull the same trick with any album. The crucial difference with this one is that you're meant to. And Minidisc is remarkable because it only becomes a coherent, cohesive piece of music when chance is allowed to configure its pleasures.
Hmm... did I say pleasures? Minidisc is much more noise than electronica, more Whitehouse than Boards Of Canada, and digital is perhaps the ideal format for noise lovers of a masochistic bent. Whereas analogue synthesis is generally mimetic of the sounds of the human body, the clean crackle of digital is alien and therefore instinctively threatening. When it doesn't sound sharp, brittle and invasive, it sounds crushed, fibrous and itchy. There are times when, listening to Minidisc, I recall the sting of fibre-glass on my hands from years ago, the tiny fragments stuck beneath my skin and the angry irritation that resulted. Digital isn't malicious or capricious, as analogue often is, it's merely uncaring and austere, a robot reconstruction of how things should be. This, of course, makes it fascinating, especially when users give up attempting to humanize its null flow and instead focus on the very lack of nourishment at its centre. Those seeking pain from their noise may have found a perfect, distant dominantion in its cold embrace. One of the things that characterises Gescom's - and Autechre's - music is an interest in sound as object in itself, rather than conveyor of meaning or emotion, which itself is suggestive of the dissociative nature of fetishism.
But there is poignance as well as blind sensation to Minidisc's constant flux, a layer of melancholy attributable to the fact that this album has been reissued on the very same format the Minidisc was designed to supplant. It's an acceptance of failure. Minidisc therefore enters a second lease of life as a requiem for futures past, a hymn to obsolescence.

Electrelane

“Luminessence/Essence of the will/Time and fire/Turning burning still/Upon the hour table /Dreams of light are laid/But I’m not sleeping.”

- ‘Light’, Meat Puppets

I know a guy who loves Electrelane. That's understandable. I mean, what’s not to love? Thing is, the guy’s a misanthrope. He seems to have little faith in human nature, or the concept of love, or the redemptive quality of random acts of kindness. He is ‘into Crowleyian magick’ yet fails to divine the magical properties in a smile or a kiss, or even sex. All the world is merely grist to his dark Satanic mill. So here’s what I don’t understand: he dwells in darkness, whereas Electrelane largely trade in...
LIGHT! The same light eulogised by the Meat Puppets on their neglected 1989 classic, Monsters. The blinding flash, the eternal flame of illumination, the white-out, the O-mind. Sunshine through stormclouds, the silvery glint of a Greyhound bus, the shimmer of the sea in mid-July. Y’know, that kind of thing. How, then, can a misanthrope love Electrelane? Their music may have undercurrents of darkness, of mystery, but it’s so alive, so free and so fucking optimistic. It travels. It gets out a bit. It makes new friends. It feels a tug of remorse when it has, inevitably, to leave town. But it stays in touch.
Electrelane’s new record, Axes, is for me characterised by the sheer joy it radiates. Not dumb joy, if there is such a thing, but joy at being alive and able to feel not only happiness but pain, loss, absence, fear and all the rest. And sadness doesn’t equate with darkness, by the way. It’s just a different kind of light, like the stroboscopic light that dapples your face on a long train journey in summer. I put it to Verity Susman, Mia Clarke, Emma Gaze and Ros Murray that the sheer amount of travel involved in being part of this band (originating in East Sussex, they now live, variously, in Berlin, Prague, London and Brighton) must contribute to the feeling of perpetual motion that characterises much of their music.
“I don’t think it’s a conscious idea,” replies Mia (guitar). “But I mean, we were travelling a hell of a lot last year. We were away a lot.”
Verity (vocals, guitar, keyboards) elaborates. “When you’re just sitting there staring out the window, with things going past... it probably stuck, it got lodged in our heads somewhere.”
There’s the sound of the train on ‘Gone Darker’, too, which you join in with as the song builds at the beginning. Do you enjoy all the travelling you do?
“I love it,” claims Emma (drums). “It’s my favourite thing.”
I mumble absently about the melancholy nature of travel, the feeling that you’re constantly leaving something or someone behind. This strikes a chord with Ros, the band’s new bassist .
“I was talking to someone the other day and they were saying that the saddest object is a suitcase,” she relates. “Which I thought was really funny, because I saw it a different way. Whenever I think of a suitcase I think of being really excited and happy. Then they said that, and...”
They ruined it for you.
(Laughs) “It depends on what colour it is.”
I wonder if I’m wrong to hear so much exuberance and delight in Axes. Perhaps I’m hearing what I want to hear, screening out the parts I’d rather not confront, like I know I often do in the ‘real’ world outside of music. Is mine a wilfully inaccurate impression, then? Could it be the side effects of the Cipralex? Or perhaps it’s the upside of all this motion: constantly in the process of getting somewhere and thrilled by the prospect of never actually arriving. I used to want to live on a train. I was only put off by the fact that even trains have to stop sometimes.
“It’s like you were saying about travelling, that it’s where sadness and happiness kind of cross, and yeah, I totally agree with that, ‘cause it can still be sad and celebratory at the same time,” says Verity. “I think we get a kick out of when it’s quite sad, and then making it really happy; like, how can you get out of that minor bit into the happy part again.”

Axes was recorded largely live, in one room, the band able to look each other in the eye as they played. If Electrelane weren’t so active in rewriting rock, this would come across as somewhat clichéd, the kind of thing tired old hippies, punks and vinyl obsessives love to harp on about. But Electrelane make it all seem so new and inviting, and no, not because they’re female but because they’re still growing as a band. They’re still seeking and striving on their third album, the point at which most bands find themselves apologising for their recent past and going back to basics in an altogether less becoming fashion.
“Because we were all recording in one room, it was impossible sometimes to replace one part, so most of the time we kept the basic tracks, the live take of everybody playing together even if there were mistakes here and there. In the past we’ve been more neurotic about ironing any little inaccuracies out. This time we didn’t really think about that and I think the freedom in the songs is much stronger than on the last album.”
This may have something to do with Verity coming into her own as a lead vocalist. On ‘Two For Joy’ she conveys pure emotion so forcefully and unaffectedly, you’re knocked back for a moment; you don’t quite know how to react. Her delivery is blissfully uninhibited, flawed and unaffected in its soulfulness. When the song reaches its peak and Susman’s excitable whoop (possibly the most rock ‘n’ roll thing you’ll hear this year) gives way to a final, valedictory burst of Farfisa organ, you’re finished. There’s a new confidence there, but also something greater, an open-heartedness that transcends the vagaries of that most elusive yet overrated of commodities, ‘cool’. Which means that while Axes will kick your arse no problem, it’ll kick you even harder in the heart.
“I think the vocals this time were easier to do because we toured so much last year, so I just got used to singing a lot,” Verity states. “And then when I went in to record I had a much clearer idea of how I wanted the singing to sound. I tried not to do too many takes and it was normally the first one that would be the one that I’d keep. With singing, more I think than with anything else, once you start repeating it over and over again it starts to become laboured.”

From listening to the records and talking to the band, it seems that Electrelane’s methodology revolves more and more around the removal of the unnecessary, anything that could be interpreted as contrived, or as Verity puts it, “laboured”. But in paring back the components of their sound to the bare essentials, they are able to maximise the emotional impact of what’s left in. In keeping with this, all additions are made judiciously, not frivolously (like the hint of klezmer that suffuses the giddily romantic ‘Eight Steps’) In Mia’s words, Axes is “clearer” than their previous records. The sound is still dense, but it breathes. This breathing space is clearly precious to Electrelane; Verity frequently uses the word ‘freedom’ when expressing her happiness with the new material. Given that improvisation forms the basis of Electrelane’s aesthetic – all the songs on ‘Axes’ started out as jams – I ask whether the band intend to pursue this freedom even more when they play live.
“I think we’re gonna improvise a lot more on stage than we have done in the past, just because we’ve done so many tours,” she states. “I think we’re probably more confident now, playing together and playing live, to be able to risk something completely messing up (laughs).”
But would you ever consider doing something completely free?
“I think that’s what we wanna get to. Yeah.”
“But not totally improvised. I would shit myself!” laughs Mia. “Like, we played in Austria with Tony and Andy from The Ex, and obviously we hadn’t rehearsed or anything, and they were like, ‘Oh yeah, we’d really love to come on and play’ and it was like ‘OK, cool!’ [nervous laughter] I mean, I enjoyed it, but only after the fact. While they were on there, ‘cause you’re so used to just hearing three other people...”
“They have very distinctive ways of playing,” says Emma.
“...so I’m trying to listen to the band, and then Tony and Andy were like, ‘Eek! Eek! Eek! Eek! Eek!’ with screwdrivers and everything...it was like, ’What’s going on?’ [laughs] It was fun, but it was very frightening.”
That Electrelane can admit to this fear makes them even more valuable. After all, fearless people are either mad (not their fault), stupid (not their fault either, but you can blame them for the success of Razorlight) or just plain fake (unforgivable in most cases). Fearless people are also rather dull, as they have little to lose and less to talk about. Electrelane are none of these things. Their music expresses humanity, frailty and the strength that comes from clinging onto light even in the darkest times. Perhaps that’s why the misanthrope loves them. And perhaps that capacity for love will ultimately redeem him. Here’s hoping.

Municipal Waste

"We love partying, we're very serious about that,” affirms Ryan Waste, guitarist/vocalist/hairy hottie with Richmond, Virginia thrash reanimators Municipal Waste. “We're serious about the music, man. And we're serious about the paycheque, hahaha! We're serious about fun. How about that?"
Municipal Waste are perhaps the third or fourth best thing to death in terms of escaping the sickening realities of life and embracing chaos. For all its communal nature, partying is a form of denial, inevitably so, because what is there to party about really when one takes in the constant bomb threat modern life has become? Partying is about denying reality you’ve been handed and creating your own, a responsibility-free zone. Selfish? You bet. It isn’t party for your right to fight, as Public Enemy once detourned their labelmates, The Beastie Boys. It’s party for your right to party. Harder than ever. Til it hurts.
So as the world gets shittier, the grimily hedonistic hi-energy buzz of thrash metal is understandably enjoying a criticial and commercial resurgence. The surprise about this revival is that it seems to be throwing up a few bands who sound vital and venomous enough to survive the fickle attentions of the music media (ourselves included). Nottingham’s Earache have smartly bagged three prime movers; Huddersfield’s Evile, Merseyside’s awesome SSS and the big bros of them all, Municipal Waste. The latter’s three full-length albums to date, Waste ‘Em All (2003), Hazardous Mutation (2005) and the new The Art Of Partying may bring to mind the spotty, split-ended Metallica that recorded Kill ‘Em All, the DRI that unleashed Dealing With It and Crossover and especially the Exodus of Bonded By Blood, Pleasures Of The Flesh and Fabulous Disaster, but they hardly sound like a tired, money-minded re-run of something that worked better twenty years ago. And in person, they seem 100 per cent sincere - these dudes shit metal, which is probably uncomfortable, but they seem happy enough, considering.
"I think metal got pushed over the edge,” says vocalist Tony ‘Guardrail’ Foresta, a likeable fellow whose face habitually forms what can only be described as ‘a shit-eating grin’. “Like in the past five to ten years, it got shitty, and then it got shittier, now you got dudes dressed as girls wearing fuckin' make-up playing fuckin' screamy breakdowns, and all these people who grew up listening to Priest and fuckin' Slayer look at it and it's like, 'What is this bullshit?' Y'know?"
"I think a lot of those bands, they write the music and it's just kind of accepted that you write lyrics about violence and dark imagery,” states bassist/vocalist Philip ‘LandPHIL’ Hall. “They're just like, 'Ok, whatever...' and just pump out a bunch of lyrics. It's just kind of accepted if you have a death metal band then you write about gore, y'know? So they're just like, 'Alright, we'll write about gore...'"
"The funny thing is,” continues Ryan, “when we write about gore, people just laugh at it. Our shit's gory as hell! If you really read the lyrics it's like, 'Damn, that's kind of negative!' But everyone's laughing about it, because we're just having fun with it."
At this point in the interview, I think about what I’ve heard from other music journalists about Municipal Waste. Apparently, some interviewers have found the band hard work, too boorish for their delicate sensibilities, too keen to proselytise on the joys of cheap terror, good beer and nice tits. I can see why some might find all this a little lowbrow for their tastes. But would it be too blunt to suggest they pull the baguette out of their arse and loosen up a little? Let’s look again at that list: cheap terror, good beer, nice tits. Fuckin’ hell. What’s the problem here? Now, beer is righteous (hmm... kinda) but why talk about it when you can drink it? I decide to skip over that and aim straight for the terror and tits. Priorities, right?
So what films inspire the lurid goo-spattered vistas of Municipal Waste tunes?
Tony: "Repo Man."
Ryan: "We sample that on one of our old records. It's a classic."
Have you seen Tarantino and Rodriguez’s ‘Grindhouse’ double feature yet?
Ryan: "I like ‘Planet Terror’, the first half of it. That one smokes the other one.”
Tony: "I like them both. I think the second one, the Tarantino one could have been edited by about 20 minutes."
Ryan: "The dialogue was just annoying. It's a man writing women's dialogue and he didn't know what the fuck he was talking about."
LandPHIL: "Totally."
Ryan: "The first one was just so over the top. If we could make a Waste video that looked like 'Planet Terror'... I mean, the toxic element's there."
LandPHIL: "Lots of green, lots of gore, hot chicks!"
Ryan: "Choice use of cursing like in old '70s movies... 'Shee-it!' Hahaha!"
Dave Witte: “Those dudes are in love with the original ideas, the history. Which is kind of close to what we're doing. Everything has been manipulated and bastardised, but we go to the roots of it. A lot of people don't recognise the start - it gets lost. Then the bands get shitty, people get bombed out. It's all cycles."
Drummer Dave Witte (ex-Discordance Axis/Burnt By The Sun) is vaguely reminiscent of Jeff Bridges’ character The Dude from the Cohen Brothers’ ‘The Big Wachowski’. His manner is similarly laidback yet authoritative, and he clearly commands respect from the rest of the Waste. However his attempt at steering the interview at least part-way towards music is only partly successful.
Ryan: "We wrote a song about ‘The Thing’. 'Blood Hunger' on Waste 'Em All is about 'Blood Diner', a bad movie that I just can't stop watching."
LandPHIL: "'Leprechaun In The Hood'."
Um... what’s that about?
Ryan: "A leprechaun's in the hood and he's hanging out with rappers, he's doing bong hits and he kills someone with a bong, he gets locked in the fridge and he just smokes weed..."
Tony: "They did 'Leprechaun In The Hood' as part five of the ‘Leprechaun’ series and it was so popular that they did a sequel to it... so it's like a sequel of a sequel, hahaha!"
Ryan: "And you forget it's about a leprechaun, man, it's just like a hood movie or a gangster movie. But then it's like, 'Woah, a little leprechaun! And he killed somebody!' Hahahaha!"
Given your collective interest in cinema, what are the chances of a Municipal Waste feature film?
Tony: "I was talking to Ryan about that a little while ago, I said, 'I just think we should write a fuckin' script!' It would be awesome."
Ryan: "We might work with [infamous Troma founder and cheapo filmmaker extraordinaire] Lloyd Kaufman for a video. He's interested."
Tony: "There won't be any CGI in that shit! Hahahaha! 'We got ketchup...' Hahahahaha!"
LandPHIL: "Man, the cornier the better when it comes to special effects and shit. To see Tony, like, rip out his guts, even if it looked bad, it would still be so badass."
Tony: "I'll rip out your guts! Hahahahaha!"
Something at this point - can’t quite recall what - leads me to believe that it would be a good idea to admit that I have repeatedly masturbated to Stuart Gordon’s supremely trashy 1988 Lovecraft adaptation, ‘From Beyond’. Whatever the reason, it does seem to steer the conversation towards tits, as planned. Result!
Tony: “He jerks off to ‘From Beyond’! Hahahaha!”
LandPHIL: “Did you ever masturbate to ‘Basket Case’ too?”
To ‘Basket Case 2’? No. Never seen it.
LandPHIL: “Horror movies were where I saw my first titties as a kid.”
Ryan: “You know it’s good if there are tits in the first or second scene. That’s a horror rule.”
Tony: “Our next video’s gonna have tits. I insisted on it.”
Ryan: “Our last video, there were tits after the shoot.”
Tony: “Yeah, there were.”
LandPHIL: “There are titties on the new album.”
Tony: “They’re gross, hahahaha!”
Ryan: “We poured blood all over them.”
I think I’m growing my own right now. It’s a bit of a worry, really.
Tony: “Hey we’ve been in Europe, man. That beer’s thick, dude! It’s killer.”
LandPHIL: “We saw this band in Australia and all of us were like, ‘Woah!’ This one dude was playing bass and he had the biggest tits I’ve ever seen on a dude. Everybody in the audience was like, ‘Look at the tit meat!’”
Tony: “But he didn’t give a fuck, man, he took off his shirt and he had man tits. Wear the man tits proud. Juggle ‘em out, man! Show ‘em what you can do with those things.”
Thanks, Tony. I will.