MCLUSKY/ MUDHONEY (GIG-GOING ADVENTURES)

MCLUSKY
The Old Market, Hove, Sat 10th Sept 

Three years later, mclusky are back with their patented brand of catchy noise. Albeit shorn of the asterisk they sported last time and with a different (but equally bearded) bassist. The occasion is the twentieth anniversary of ’mclusky do dallas’, the album which people tend to rate the highest but I don’t have a copy of. (It’s inexplicably more expensive than the others.)

Last time there was a general feeling of old friends re-united. This gig starts like they mean business, songs piling after another like paratroopers out through the bow doors. It’s several songs in before frontman Falco (aka Andrew Falcous) speaks. And from there his chatty self gradually resurfaces. (Seems someone sort of important had died recently. He was unimpressed. More than that I couldn’t tell you.) Though more than a few times the relentless pace resumes. I suppose there will be those keen to tell you they were more on it back in the day. But it’s hard to see how, quite honestly.

The bearded bassist sings a few tracks. And while there’s nothing wrong with these in themselves, it does underline the importance of Falco’s voice in these proceedings, which could cut through finery like a laser, phasers on derision. It’s a voice made to go with abrasive guitar. Giving the de rigeur general thanks at the end, he confesses it’s hard for him to sound sincere.

I said last time their default position was “outside the frame of their songs, pissing in. It’s like a role reversal in which through their songs they heckle the audience.” But their target range may be wider than that, and there are times when the band sound like they’re heckling the band.

Titling a track ’Fuck This Band’, and adding lyrics like “cause they swear too much/It’s an obvious ploy/And irresponsible” already seems like offering up a hostage to fortune. Starting the set with it is like tying that hostage up to an inviting-looking post like Fay Wray. Falco explains another number is “not a how-to guide but a warning from history,” which may well be how he sees the band’s history. The whole thing as one grand folly, but let’s do it anyway.

At which point the not unimportant subject of humour in mclusky should be mentioned. Which is of course of the black variety, but also the funny kind, with lines like “If I had to give you something then I think I’d give you nothing.” Last time I described Falco as exuding a “nihilistic chirpiness”. And the humour keeps proceedings upbeat, even as they’re entirely negative.

You can never be quite sure how much a singer attracts an audience of the same mindset, or simply stamps his personality upon the crowd. But for a noisy punk gig it’s remarkably good-humoured. You come out of a mclusky gig feeling like you had a great time, rather than expressed your frustration with society or some such. About the last thing I heard after the set closed was someone calling out form the mosh pit, asking if anyone had lost their glasses. I bet that doesn’t happen with Metallica.

From Manchester...

MUDHONEY
Concorde 2, Brighton, Mon 12th Sept

…anyway, onto a noisy guitar band that starts with an M. After said after their last sighting, now twelve years ago, Mudhoney are essentially the anti-Nirvana, the Seattle band who stayed Grungey and so bypassed superstardom and escaped unscathed.

Exiting the venue, the inevitable flier thrust at me turned out to be only for tribute bands. Which seemed strangely incongruous for the gig I’d just seen. Yes, all too often acts became their own tribute bands, knocking out the hits each night from muscle memory alone. But Mudhoney seem unwitherable by age, the flame that lit them burning still. At one point they jest they’re all dead, they’re just carrying on anyway. Something I could see happening.

Had Nirvana not ended for too-often-told reasons, could they have lasted this long? It’s an unanswerable question, but my guess is not. There’s a clutch of new songs. And if they’re not exactly wild stylistic departures from their predecessors, they stand up well against their predecessors. More Mudhoney sounds like more Mudhoney. Which wasn’t Nirvana’s way.

Frontman Mark Arm, in what becomes a running gag, tells us the new album isn’t out till April, and - somewhat gleefully - who to blame. In fact they seem a chattier, more genial bunch than the no-nonsense outfit of before. They sometimes joke between themselves off-mike, like they’d forgotten we were here.

And, perhaps linked, there seems a little more high-spirited send-up to proceedings than before. But never enough self-awareness to get clever or knowing. Which is all to the good. Mudhoney learnt much from the Stooges. Including this, it seems.

The only complaint I could come up with is that there’s a long guitar solo, then later (yes, really) a drum solo. Surely we took to Grunge because it offered a cure against such ills! It offered a way of re-aquainting with rock, but only the parts we wanted back. The guitar solo number is followed by the snappiest, punkiest number of the set, an acknowledgement it needed some counterbalancing.

From Glasgow...

“SEE THE CRIPPLE DANCE”: HOLE’S ‘CELEBRITY SKIN’ (TOP 50 ALBUMS)

”I’m Glad I Came Here…”

If Grunge was about reuniting Punk with rock, Hole played a characteristic twist on things. They set the two against one another, and so sounded like an arms race between the anti-social and self-loathing, creating music that was simultaneously furiously assertive and absolutely self-destructive. Tony Wilson famously said that Joy Division had moved music on, from Punk’s credo of “fuck you” to “I’m fucked”. Hole upped the ante with “fuck you, I’m fucked.” A fairly typical lyrical sentiment was “here you are just as ugly as me.”

Albums can split into tracks like libraries divide into sections - the cheery up-tempo one here, the melancholic ballad over there, and so on. Hole just curdled it all into one tangy taste. And with Courtney Love’s lyrics even the metaphors were fucked up, tangling, contorting, turning in on themselves. (“I love him so much it just turns to hate/ I fake it so much I am beyond fake.” Or “If you live through this with me/ I swear I will die for you”) She once said “whenever I write about something I end up writing about something else.”

‘Celebrity Skin’, their third album came out in 1998 and was in part “dedicated to all the stolen water of Los Angeles”, with an accompanying picture of the Department of Water and Power. The title track opened, riffing on the ruined decadence theme of classic films such as ‘Sunset Boulevard’ and ‘Whatever Happened to Baby Jane’, nicknamed “hag horrors” by a crassly cynical marketing machine. (“Wilted and faded, somewhere in Hollywood.”)

But the dominant image is of an LA all surface and superficiality - “Miles and miles of perfect skin/ I swear I do, I fit right in.” (The title comes from a cheap porn mag that went in for paparazzi celebrity shots.) It conjures up images of endless boulevards and avenues, all interchangeable, each only leading to more of the same. Populated by equally interchangeable people, plastic surgeried into sameness, where even those not in movies pass through an arbitrary series or roles. (“Hooker, waitress, model, actress/Oh, just go nameless.”) Guitarist Eric Erlandson confirmed “We used this great hollow city as inspiration for the album.”

With the opening line "oh make me over” it’s in many ways a post-break-up album. And like break-up albums immemorial, it’s full of regret for what’s passed (“It’s the emptiness that’s all you have left”) mixed with the desire to create a new identity for yourself.

And that break-up was in part with Punk. Perhaps not surprisingly after a four-year gap, the new album had a new sound. Well, not just one. It’s generally dubbed ‘alternative rock’, most likely because that’s a tag so elastic it can stretch as wide as anyone might need it to. Which is handy. The transition between the intense, strident acoustic ‘Northern Star’ to the FM/ West Coast sound of ‘Boys On the Radio’ is a particularly memorable leap, but really the album’s full of such moments. The cumulative effect of which is, to borrow a lyric, “hit so hard/ I saw stars.”

But let’s back up… Hole with a West Coast sound? Yes, really. Punk is perhaps at its most cliched with the “we won’t sell out” song, which mostly means “we will never change the record.” On the second track, ’Awful’, they launched into a now-familiar diatribe against Grunge being prettified and presented as mainstream rock. (“It was Punk/ Yeah it was perfect, now it's awful.”) Except it’s pointedly given the mainstream rock sound it ostensibly criticises.

Even with the previous release, Punk purists had been shouting “sell out!” at gigs. And to respond by goading her critics even further, to introduce more of a mainstream rock sound for punkish reasons, seems characteristically Courtney. Ben Hewitt in The Quietus called it “magnificently defiant, like someone raising a middle finger clad in swanky velvet gloves.”

“Have you ever felt so used up as this?”, she asked on her most inspired release. On a later track she states “when the fire goes out you better learn to fake”. And indeed this went on to become their best-selling album.

”All That’s Cold and Cruel”

That dedication continues “…and to anyone who ever drowned,” and the album’s also illustrated by Paul Abert Stick’s painting ‘Ophelia Drowning’. It’s about as lyrically consistent as it is musically varied, with themes and images constantly recurring shaken into different forms. Throughout opposites are juxtaposed, fire/water (even making it onto the cover), but also sweetness/sugarlessness and numerous others.

But most of all surface is contrasted with depth. Except here depth, even when you get it, is only for sinking into. (“Our love is quicksand/ So easy to drown.”) Proceedings turn into a tails-or-tails choice between surface and drowning, between un-life and death, between a headstone and a hard place.

And to understand that, we should remember something about this break-up. When Love sings “I know that you don’t love me any more”, her ex does have a good excuse for that. To try to make a twist out of something everybody knows very well, Kurt Cobain’s suicide had happened just before the previous album was released. So everyone had been waiting four years to hear Love’s reaction. And there is something creepily voyeuristic about all that, as if we’re keen to find out what use she’ll make of such great material.

She would often deflect this by insisting his death didn’t feature at all. And it’s true, none of the previous recordings had come in sunny side up. She’d started wishing she could die on the opening track of the first album. And the title track of the predecessor, ‘Live Through This’, was in memory of Black Flag’s roadie Joe Cole. Yet perhaps that just played up the problem. Simon Reynolds once described her lyrical style as “emotional nudism”. So this type of material, it really was just up her street. The difficult truth is that, however ghoulish it might be, all this did lead to the band’s greatest album, the one Love was born to make.

All of which Love took head on, audaciously and laceratingly. “You want a piece of me?” she spits on the opening track, “Well I’m not selling cheap.” ’Dying’ opened with the audience-confronting line “see the cripple dance”. ’Petals’ featured a violating stripping away (“Tear the petals off of you/ And make you tell the truth”), reprising a lyric from the last album. As if the whole point of the thing was for her to get her scars on show. Underlying the whole thing, Courtney’s stage surname, punned on throughout, started life as her stripper name.

The Rolling Stones’ ‘Paint It Black’ and Patti Smith’s ‘Gone Again’ may bookend musical reactions to bereavement. A jolt of stricken grief against a redemptive coming to terms. Given the time distance from the moment, we might expect from Love something closer to Smith’s. In fact it covers just about every point between, and including, the two.

So there’s anger (“How are you so burnt when you’re barely on fire?”), guilt at failing to prevent his death (“Put me up above the boy/ The one I love I should destroy”), survivor guilt (“I want what’s yours/ Oh I’d give anything/ And I’ll take the pain”), post-relationship bitterness (“And now I understand/ You leave with everything”), no-I’m-leaving-you wilful defiance (“No loneliness, no misery is worth you”) - and more. Quite a lot more, in fact.

And isn’t that how it is? When something momentous happens in your life, a hundred contradictory reactions collide in your head. So ‘Celebrity Skin’ captures them all, not resolving or even cataloguing them so much as externalising them. It’s not the sound of of someone feeling at times angry, at times despairing, at times redemptive. It’s feeling angry and despairing and redemptive, a dizzying whirlygig of emotions and images. The mix may ebb and flow, but each remains in the mix. Just when you think how have an image pegged to a symbol or a track to a theme, something else will appear to throw you off balance.

All of which are typical reactions to bereavement by suicide, about which there’s presumably been psychological studies. Yet because all this happened so much in public there can’t help but be an extra element…

Blaming suicides for suicide is like being one of those right-wing shock-jocks who blame poverty on the poor. Yet at the same time there’s a Romantic fixation with dying young, with screwing your life up to the ultimate degree made as some kind of social statement. People talk of That Stupid Club (which may even have got its name from Cobain) like its some exclusive hip establishment you should be clamouring to get into.

Whereas Love famously told Cobain’s fans to chant “asshole” at him for quitting before break time, commenting (fairly astutely) “so fucking what? - then don't be a rock star.” And this appears on the album too, Courtney knocking down Kurt the Idol of Easeful Death - “I had to tell them you were gone/ I had to tell them you were wrong”. Riffing on his Neil Young-quoting suicide note (“it’s better to burn out that fade away”) she countered “It’s better to rise than fade away”.

”Get Well Soon”

If LA dominates the album, even its sprawl can’t encompass the whole of it. The dark and brooding ‘Northern Star’ seems set in Seattle (or at least Washington state), as a kind of opposite pole. The refrain “run to the pines” recalls the folk standard ‘Where Did You Sleep Last Night’ (also known as ‘In the Pines’), often played by Nirvana. But of course its depth is again that of the grave. (“Praying to the wound that swallows / All that's cold and cruel.”) This reinforces the binary.

But the one point that things break from that system is where a third place is referenced. And it gives the title to the single, ’Malibu’. (Disclaimer: Three singles were released in total. But this is the one which sounds like the single.)

The sea is the only non-stagnant water on the album (“Down by the sea is where you drown your scars”). While the titular light on ’Northern Star’ got you nowhere except lost, here multiple stars morph into angels. The second-person address seems (as ever) to slip between her talking to Kurt and to herself. But the overall sense is one of escape - “And the sun goes down/ I watch you slip away/ And the sun goes down/ I walk into the waves.”

Referring to the most redemptive Hole album might be like naming the most danceable Leonard Cohen album or Von Stroheim film made most in colour. But it remains the case. “Can you stand up,” Love rails, “or will you just fall down?” It’s a classic Punk taunt, demanding inner strength and castigating those who lack it. But like all such taunts, the question rebounds on the questioner.

And the answer we got back was yes. But there’s little redeeming about this, no pines-and-sea version of “hello trees, hello flowers”. Ultimately the album may not decide life is worth the living so much as describe survival as a kind of reflex action, the way you reach out when you fall. As Dorothy Parker said many years before - “might as well live.”

MELT-BANANA/ ROYAL TRUX/ OOIOO/ THE COSMIC DEAD/ BRITTEN SINFONIA + BRIGHTON FESTIVAL CHORUS (GIG-GOING ADVENTURES ON OVERLOAD)

MELT-BANANA
Patterns, Brighton, Thurs 1st June

Between buying my ticket and attending the gig, I discovered longstanding live favourite Melt-Banana had slimmed down to a duo. I tried to imagine how that might change their sound, and concluded it would either inhibit them or take them somewhere new. Perhaps further into the power electronics direction they’d embarked on in recent shows.

Turns out, I’m a total know-nothing. The power electronics section was gone and they were, if anything, back to the classic Melt-Banana of old. And about as awesome as ever. Singer Yako operated some brightly coloured console, often brandishing it like a Harry Potter wand, from which the back-up instruments were triggered. (I later discovered this to be a MIDI controller. Gotta control those Midis, I guess…)

And classic Melt-Banana, if we were to reduce it to a formula, is a melting down of noise, punk, no-wave, metal and… yes, really pop. Yako might fire her vocals like a machine gun with a stuck trigger, but there’s strong tunes amid all the noise. And I’m not the only one to think so. Frank Mojica of Consequences of Sound has noted that “beneath the cacophony… were delightful pop melodies.”

Except I’m not even sure about ‘beneath’. Some noise music does have buried melodies, which take awhile to find, like a file with a cake in it. But with Melt-Banana tunes effectively ride atop everything, as if surfing a tsunami of noise. You get the exhilaration of noise combined with the sugar rush of pure prop.

As said over Lightning Bolt, noise music isn’t all angsty or aggressive – in fact it can be joyous and celebratory. John Lydon nailed it many years ago, when he sang “We like noise, it’s our choice/ It’s what we want to do.” And perhaps precisely because there’s more of a punk element to the sound, that’s even more noticeable with Melt-Banana.

And you can see that in the audience response. I’ve never known a mosh pit not to open up at a Melt-Banana gig, and I’ve never known it to become macho or aggressive. It’s souped-up good time music on steroids, but good time music still. You would need, I think, some term which portmanteaued ‘riot’ and ‘party’ to describe the Melt-Banana experience.

ROYAL TRUX

The Haunt, Brighton, Wed 31st May

Royal Trux were one of those Nineties bands who were fellow travellers with Grunge. There was the same desire to get rock music its bad name back, to get back to a time when music was made by and for reprobates and degenerates. Once, a street kid with his arse hanging out his jeans wasn’t ever going to get a record deal. Then, about a week later, he was the only one who was. Trux, only recently dropped by their indie label, were suddenly bunged a million dollars by Virgin. (As a sign of the times, check out this vid of them playing on ‘The Word’. Those scuzzy louts were never going to be allowed among that studio audience without Security intervening. Yet they could be on stage.)

In particular, they shared with Grunge the ability to make music that was both aggressive and languid, which swaggered and stumbled at same time, music you were never sure whether it was intent on fucking you up or fucking itself up. And if rock music’s about capturing the teenage experience, then that’s pretty much it.

Some seventeen years after their dissolution, it doesn’t look like they’ve cleaned up their act any. The set list seems to be decided upon on the spot. Jennifer Herrema is quite unashamedly out of it, slurringly rambling between songs. Some frontmen affect effortless cool, others come across as crazy outsiders and others just look like audience members arbitrarily placed onstage. Herrema seems have all three going on.

As the last time I saw them (pre-dissolution), Neil Hagerty seems both more together and more unassuming. Notably, as they come on it’s Herrema who gets the applause. (From their stage personas, you’d imagine them as having a Chuck D and Flava Flav relationship, striker and team mascot, though that doesn’t seem to be the way they actually worked.)

You’d probably drive yourself mad trying to figure out how much it’s meant to sound that way, and how much its just coming out like that. It is uneven. (And YouTube suggests other nights might have been still more uneven.) But that’s kind of the point. Rock music is supposed to be volatile and unpredictable, something you don’t do right by doing correctly. (Or it least it was before it became a heritage industry celebrated by Tory MPs.)

For a band who always manage to sound just like Royal Trux, there’s quite a variety to their music. Rip-roaring punk anthems co-exist with out-there noise guitar and, at one point, a trance-out groove with mantra vocals.

It’s generally considered that the weight of rock history got too much and snuffed out the creative spark. Bands became merely citational, concerned with keeping a tradition intact, like the worst kind of folk music. Keeping things vibrant meant wiping all that from your mind and just striking your guitar.

Yet perhaps the most interesting thing about this band, formally speaking, is that they quite openly took up rock history, often sounding unashamedly like ’Exile’ era Stones, and even releasing a trilogy of albums which represented the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties respectively. And it never seemed to dampen them down.

From Manchester, a couple of days before...

OOIOO

Patterns, Brighton, Mon 29th May

Yoshimi is the only perpetual member of Japanoise ensemble the Boredoms, already acknowledged as a Lucid Frenzy fave, save main man Yamatsuka Eye. For which, given their great musical switches and leaps, there is probably some endurance award. Perhaps it was being made the heroine of the classic Flaming Lips album ‘Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots’.

But pedigree though that is, you should put it all aside, really. As OOIOO are very much their own outfit. Though chiefly known with the Boredoms for playing drums, here she trades in guitar and, on occasion, the trumpet. Reviews suggest they were previously more a solo project with some hired help. But tonight they couldn’t be a more focused live band.

There’s the post-punk of the Slits and Raincoats; the off-kilter rhythms and scatter drums, the songs which seem to construct and deconstruct themselves. There’s also the deranged funk of the Talking Heads’ more out-there moments. But there’s also abundant girl-band harmonies and pumping pop hooks. Better hooks, in fact, than any pop band you’ve heard lately.

Like Deerhoof, there’s the sense that left-field sonic exploits and pure pop aren’t being brought together, but were only ever separate in your mind. As Thrill Jockey say, they’ve “subverted expectations and warped perceptions of what constitutes pop and experimental music”. But more, there’s the same exuberance, the feeling they’re making music for the sheer joyous pleasure of playing it.

But there’s less of the naivete of Deerhoof. In fact the melodic yet skittering instrumental breaks are more reminiscent of what prog did after post-punk had happened by and unplugged it’s mellotrons. Think if ‘Discipline’ era King Crimson had become a Deerhoof covers band. Or possibly vice versa.

And that weird name which sounds like binary notation, apparently based on some doodle of Eye’s, barely pronounceable to the rest of us, Yoshimi manages to say it like it means something.

OOIOO gigs are quite literally a delight.

THE COSMIC DEAD

The Green Door Store, Brighton, Thurs 25th May

Let's start by conceding the point. Yes, the Cosmic Dead is a crap name. Mashing up the name of a couple of classic psychedelic bands is akin to calling a soul group Sly and the Family Tops, or a punk band the Buzz Pistols. But don't judge this book by the cover, okay?

The… polite cough... are a self-styled “psychonautal cosmodelic buckfaustian quartet from Glasgow”. And after seeing Mugstar and entertaining the prospect of the map being bejewelled by numerous Hawkwind-styled bands, the Hertfordshire Hawkwind and the Huddlesfield Hawkwind and so on, it seems there really is a Glaswegian Hawkwind. Okay, alliteration would compel them into becoming the Glasgow Gong. But they sound more like Hawkwind, and when was that ever a bad thing? (Extensive research reveals they've even released a split record with Mugstar.)

Arriving late after being held up mid-Channel tunnel, and sound-checking hurriedly before us assembled folk, they launch straight into their out-there space rock. There's scant regard for song elements to let us in gently. It's all cosmic jams, and cosmic jams today, no stodgy sandwich parts to chew through. There's occasional vocals, but more spacey chants than singing. In fact when they speak, it's easier for them to eschew the mikes and avoid all their assembled effects and delays. (Fortunately their tonsils are at Glasgow decibels, so mikes prove superfluous.)

What does a band need if it's going to get really unhinged? A hinge, right? Tracks are rooted in a powerful rhythm section however far they wander, which keeps things compelling rather than meandering. Rather than float and morph, they tend to shift between quite well defined sections. The result is a set which feels absolutely out of control and entirely driven at one and the same time. Proceedings ends with the guitars looping and everyone bashing at drums. Bar the keyboardist, who adjusts the sound via dials, balanced precariously on an alarmingly teetering stack of amps.

I start to seriously consider that holding a band back from the stage till the last moment, perhaps by 'forgetting' their dressing room key, might actively encourage them to let rip when they finally get there. So we may partly have Channel Tunnel stoppages to thank for such a blistering set. If so Southern Rail could be a gift to the Brighton gig circuit.

Their other remarkable feature, besides being such a good band with so bad a name, is the keyboardist's uncanny similarity to a young Robert Wyatt. I'm not such what the market value of Robert Wyatt lookalikes is, but should there be one this guy could be away.

BRITTEN SINFONIA + BRIGHTON FESTIVAL CHORUS
Brighton Dome, Sun 28th May
Part of the Brighton Festival

This programme, bringing together works by Aaron Copeland and John Adams, was officially about the combining of words and music. Pieces were written around both poems and speeches. But my mind became more fixed on a phrase of Adams’ from the programme. On writing ’Harmonium’ (1980), he said “those of my friends who knew both [my] room and the piece were amused that music of such spaciousness should emerge from such cramped quarters.”

And that very American sense of spaciousness seemed to infuse the works. Someone hatched the ingenious idea to stage Copland’s ’Fanfare for the Common Man’ (1942) with two brass sections placed up at either ends of the circle, granting it a natural stereo effect. But it also gave a sense of physical space to a piece with great musical space, like one of those drawings where little is actually drawn, but large expanses are still somehow suggested.

It was followed by his ’Lincoln Portrait’ from the same year. Now we at Lucid Frenzy towers are less than entirely convinced by the whole ‘Lincoln freed the slaves’ narrative, as perpetuated here. (Brief summary of argument – don’t believe the hype.) Yet a Lincoln quote, if said in 1862, does seem to describe his music: “the dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present… As our case is new, so we must think and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves.” To this day Copland sounds bold, new and expressive, something like Berenice Abbott’s dynamic New York photography.

Copland may be a rare example of a genuinely successful Modernist. If we were to take Modernism at its word, it aimed to rid art of its cultural baggage and just speak directly. Yet most found it challenging, if not indecipherable. To find a value in it, we often have to reject seeing it in its own terms. Yet Copland’s music feels like it’s aimed straight at your heart. It was populist in the positive sense of the term, and even became popular. Both pieces being conceived of as contributions to the war effort suggest art with a social purpose.

’Harmonium’ was written when Adams was still breaking away from Modernism proper, and with it’s sinfonia and full choir must have seemed something wildly different. In fact the choir is dominant for long sections. The brass in particular seemed indebted to Copland, yet also making an appearance is Terry Riley’s ’In C’… in fact, its actual C! In my favourite section the double basses took up a low thrum, which slowly spread through the other instruments before finally sparking the full-throated choir off again. A crescendo, about the thing you least expect from a Minimalist composer.

Had Adams asked my opinion before composing this piece, I’d have probably told him he was attempting to pull together the irreconcilable and could only end up with the most jack-of-all-trades post-modern slop. Fortunately for us all he didn’t, and the piece works superbly.

As with the previous programme of American music, these dark and orange days seem the most important time to remind ourselves of what is positive in American culture. How much of it came from an immigrant/ New World perspective, of recombining and making new what had come before. And how much it then contributed back to the rest of the world.

This has been not just a great week’s run of gigs, but one where each event has it’s own unique character. You might not expect Copland to sound much like Melt-Banana, and he didn’t. But then neither were Melt-Banana much like Royal Trux, or either like the Cosmic Dead. Everything was best at being itself.

ENCASED IN SOUND (HOW PUNK MET METAL - AND BOTH BEGAT DRONE): 3. DESTROY! ANNIHILATE! INCINERATE!

Our punk/metal/drone comparison timeline reaches the Eighties and even touches on the Nineties. (First part covers the Sixties here while the second recounts the Seventies over here.)

Black Flag: 'My War' (1984)

Black Flag were our man at the crossroads, this is the the point where the streams cross. People argue over who first hit on the phrase “like a cross between Black Flag and Black Sabbath”. But there's no real debate over the first band to do it – and that band was Black Flag themselves. Which makes the crossover more significant. Black Flag hasn't been a hardcore band, they'd virtually been the hardcore band. They were the one who defined the sound – angry, direct, assertive, uncompromising, and above all over inside of two and a half minutes.

Moreover, legal problems had prevented the workaholic and once-prolific band releasing anything for the past three years. (Once off the leash, they released two further albums before '84 was even up.) And in the intervening time their sound had shifted massively, shaving off the punk spikiness for something much more sludgy, more glowering, more ominous – more (you guessed it) Black Sabbath. All of which accentuated the sense that they were not just now slow but anti-fast, like a calculated rebuke to the jock slamdancers. (In that way it also weirdly seems to match the mood of some of the more primal-screamy stuff off Lennon's 'Plastic Ono Band', such as 'God'.)

If it sounds unbelievably bleak, hold it up against their earlier output - it just gets darker. Earlier lyrics slipped into the united third person as easily as the Doors track from the first part (“We are tired of your abuse/Try to stop us, its no use”), this time its all first person versus third. It's like Sartre's 'No Exit' in song form. “You say that you're my friend/But you're one of them” is like the end-point of existentialism, an accusation hitched on the back of an tautology. Notably, Rollins sings as if facing down his audience rather than performing to them. This confrontational interview with him, simultaneously hilarious and excruciating, dates from the same era.

“Destroy! Annihilate! Incinerate!” You have now reached utter nihilism. All change please...

Bad Brains: 'I Against I' (1986)

Followers of Rastafarianism, the band would have been familiar with and probably used the Rasta expression “I and I”. (Used in daily speech, such as “I and I need to sign on next Tuesday”, but to signify spiritual connection - “Jah and I”.) Except of course they invert it to depict modern America as in the most ungodly of states – the war of each against all, which can only serve to bring us all down. In that sense, despite their outward similarities, it's almost the counter to 'My War' - it rails against a situation in which its companion virtually revels. (“I said whose gonna tell the youth about...the rotten stinkin' rackets and the fantasies around the nation.”) Not for the first time HR sounds almost like a preacher as he cries “I tell you the truth is looking straight at you!”

As I often like to point out, great bands are able to straddle apparent contradictions, and Bad Brains could sound heavy at the same time they sounded lithe and nimble. Their roots were as a jazz fusion band and those roots never quite went away.

This was about the point where I'd first left home and was going to see bands. While at school there'd been a virtual Berlin wall between the punks and the headbangers, by then it simply never occurred to me to try and divide up the bands I was seeing into punk and metal categories. Slightly earlier than that other wall, the barriers had been busted down.

More than usual, this next one ain't for the fainthearted...

Swans: 'Coward' (1986)

This is Swans from their early brutal noise era, described by the uploader as “cathartic performance, mountains of sound without melody”. I went a little back and forward about including this, as it could be said to really belong in another timeline. Despite strong similarities to Black Flag's unremitting bleakness, the band came more from the New York noise and art punk scene than from hardcore. Hardcore fundamentalists often nursed an antipathy to 'bohemian' New York, and it may be notable that every subsequent name on this list (with one exception) will be West Coast. For his part frontman Gira despised metal so much he was known to attack audience members for headbanging. (I shall leave it to the reader's judgement whether he himself is headbanging in this clip.)

All of which might go some way to explaining my wondering whether this band actually belong here. But they were perhaps the ultimate in boiling music down to a blunt instrument. Why go for more when you can just have less? The pummelling force denies any concept of release, rock without the roll. (Try imagining dancing to this.) Like the Stooges, its stripped back to such a degree you can't tell any more whether its regressive or avant garde. There's the lyrical parallels between themes of annihilation and transcendence, as can be found in many other places round here. Plus Gira even dedicated a later track ('Just a Little Boy' from 'To Be Kind') to Chester Burnett, real name of Howling Wolf. So the similarities are there, if not the direct links.

(I've written about the current incarnation of Swans not once but twice.)

Nomeansno: 'The Tower' (1989)

The Peanuts character Pigpen was always depicted carrying a cloud of dust around with him. Similarly, Nomeansno always seemed to be wading waist-deep in thick, thick bass. To look at Eighties hardcore and decide what it needed was to be more bass-driven and rhythmic, I'm not sure whether that took an excess of guts or a deficiency of reason. The band have since confirmed that they arrived at that sound simply because in the early days they didn't have anyone to play guitar.

Though perhaps their killer app was to stretch out songs from the standard abrupt hardcore length, and their Bad Brains-like ability to bend the music without breaking the heavy riffing. It was a style described as "Devo on a jazz trip, Motörhead after art school, or Wire on psychotic steroids”. In a scene which too quickly became identikit they were immediately recognisable as hardcore and completely unique at the same time.

I partly picked this track because of the uncanny ease with which they lyrically match punk existentialism to hard rock's dark romanticism. The human figure who narrates and the Tower/black obelisk he encounters are the ultimate irresistible force and immovable object combination. And “The sword is truth is just another weapon/ Let me live for one more second” must be one of the great opening couplets.

The Melvins: 'Boris' (1991)

Though the Melvins formed back in '83, and were important from early on, this may be the point they hit their lumbering epitome. (Even if it officially pushes us into the Nineties.) It sounds like a hardcore punk song stretched out and slowed down, like a single played on '33 with the bottom end of the sound turned up all the way. Rather than sluggish, the result is something remorseless. The way the distortion becomes part of the track is very similar to the Stooges or Motorhead. If Swans were like blows repeatedly pummelling you, the Melvins sound like a landslide slowly but surely tearing up everything in it's path. 

By going for weight not speed they allowed hardcore punk to escape from it's louder/faster corner, gave it a way to hook up with hard rock that bypassed all the then-trendy hair metal bollocks and piledrove a road that led to grunge. Though Flipper were also an important band, they were too arch, too bohemian, too native of San Francisco to truly embrace metal. Whereas the Melvins hailed from Washington state.

If Swans don't quite fit the family tree, the Melvins couldn't be any more in the DNA. Dale Crover drummed for an early version of Nirvana, while Buzz Osborne later introduced Dave Grohl to the rest of the band. Ex-bassist Matt Lukin went on to form Mudhoney. They've made albums with Jello Biafra, and legendary Japanese band Boris are named after this very track. The Melvins are one of those foundations bands, who most people haven't heard of but they made so much possible. (More by me on the Melvins here.)

Mudhoney: 'Touch me I'm Sick' (1988)

There's no doubting grunge rescued punk, ended its self-imposed cornering from the rest of the room and got it back into talking with other genres. (Something it had always done before all that dead-end harder-than-hardcore malarkey.) But while grunge did take up from the Melvins, that band had a definite metal influence while grunge was much more focused on classic rock. (Plus, though no-one ever seems to want to mention it, the fuzztoned Sixties garage punk of those fabled Nuggets and Pebbles compilations. Try playing this against the earlier Electric Prunes track.)

The title, simultaneously engaging and threatening, is pretty typical of punk's agitational engagement of the audience, and the band's black sense of humour. Mudhoney were, as an flue kno, the definitive grunge band, even if they weren't the best-known one. (More by me on Mudhoney here.)

Coming soon! The Nineties to the present day...

'SURPASSING ALL OTHER KINGS' (ANOTHER SPOTIFY PLAYLIST)

Click here for another Spotify playlist

Fairport Convention: Stranger To Himself
Emmylou Harris: Strong Hand
Robert Plant: House Of Cards
Abdel Hadi Halo & the El Gusto Orchestra of Algiers: Win Saadi
Life Without Buildings: The Leanover
The Flaming Lips: Do You Realize??
Kevin Ayers: The Lady Rachel (2003 Remaster)
My Bloody Valentine: Lose My Breath
Drum Eyes: Gyanza
Coil: A Cold Cell In Bangkok *
The Drones: I Am The Supercargo
Swans: The Seer Returns
Death Grips: Beware
World Domination Enterprises: Asbestos Lead Asbestos
Hole: Mrs. Jones
L7: Pretend We're Dead

(* I really wanted to use this track by Coil but it didn't seem to be on Spotify.)

”I close my eyes and seize it

I clench my fists and beat it

I light my torch and burn it

I am the beast I worship”

METZ (GIG-GOING ADVENTURES)

Audio, Brighton, Thurs 31st Jan

Through being signed to Sub Pop and with a home page that takes sideswipes at the anti-rockism of the Constellation Records scene, I had thought of Canadian three-piece Metz as a grunge revivalist band.

Which they kind of are. But seeing them live I was more reminded of the phrase “standing on the shoulders of giants.” It's like they're looking back at the history of noisy guitars all the way to the days of garage rock, able to pick up what they choose along it. Yet none of this is done in a knowing or citational way, things are simply picked up for use - the way a differently tuned guitar might be brought into play. They're actually pretty damn lively live, playing that kind of music to which you can't stand still, at one point the guitarist crowdsurfing while still playing.

Perhaps the most surprising ingredient is noise rock. That may be more of an inclination than an element, but it's definitely there. We're talking the imprint of the noise rock scene of the Eighties and Nineties – Big Black, Live Skull and early Sonic Youth – rather than anything that came along afterwards.

What might seem strange. At the time, noise rock was for many of us a gateway drug into fully-fledged noise. Through it we discovered that you could dispense altogether with song structures and other rock elements, and bathe in de-hyphenated, unalloyed, free-form fields of sound. Myself, I may not have taken to much of the stuff at the annual Colour Out of Space festival without that introduction.

Which raises the question, having made that journey - why bother to go back now? After all, once you've learnt to swim, don't you dispense with the water wings?

Yet I'd argue the opposite – why burn the bridges? It seems every piece that gets posted here has to feature one of the axioms of Lucid Frenzy, and this time it's 'in art, restrictions enable'. Pushing the envelope can have more traction than being outside of it, and balancing noise against rock give Metz the same advantages it did the earlier generation. Even the noise acts I rate, such as Merzbow, can sometimes suffer from a lack of context. Having come on like the end of the world turned up to eleven, what do you do for an encore? This kind of noise rock can work on the ears like a sweet and sour does to the tongue. The noise simply sounds noisier when erupting out of the tunes, which for their part sound sweeter when placed against the noise.

Moreover, Metz neatly incorporate the noise into their overall sound. One example would be the way the noise breakouts often occur at the end of tracks. I've always found interminable those extended workouts bands insist on making into finales, with the drummer going up and down his kit like he's stock-taking his instruments. They just sound like those conversations which never quite close - “I'll be off then”, “okay, bye”, “well see you” and so on. By substituting fields of noise into those areas, Metz slip the unexpected into the expected.

In short, a great live band. Guitars are dead? Nobody told these guys!

The gig's closer is probably a fairly good example of the blend I'm on about...

...plus an optical assault course of a video for 'Negative Space'...

THE MELVINS/ SUNN 0))) (GIG-GOING ADVENTURES GET HEAVY)

The Melvins and Sunn 0))) were two of many cult bands I have always intended to get obsessed by, without ever quite getting round to it. But more than that, their sounds seemed to have something of an overlap – not just slow is the new fast, but also heavy is the new loud. So bliss it was in that dawn, for everyone and everything except for eardrums, when they played Brighton within a couple of weeks of each other. (Actually Earth, who played earlier in the year, made something of a trilogy of it, but I couldn't wait to write something about them.)

THE MELVINS

Concorde 2, Mon 28th May

“What's the most horrible way to die?”

“To have a nail banged through the back of my neck. Slowly.”

That quote, from Lindsey Anderson's 'If', sums up the sound of the Melvins better than anything I could imagine. Often described as Black Flag meeting Black Sabbath, they've been at their distillation of hardcore punk and pounding metal for nearly three decades now. Which is more than long enough to get good at this.

The twin drummers don't just keep time, like an onstage click track, but make up much of the body of the sound. You feel the set as much as you hear it. The room vibrates. People headbang. Not just nod merrily along, but proper actual headbanging. I can't remember when I last saw that at a gig!

There's a virtuous combination to them. With their Simpsons-style look, they seem like four crazy guys found in some nearby alley were thrust on stage after the actual band failed to show. But they also put on the smartest, tightest, kick-ass show you will ever see. They push one riff to the very limit of endurance, then seamlessly break off into something else. Though (whatever naysayers claim) you can perfectly easy tell their tracks apart, they pretty much run them together live, sensing their sound's about relentless intensity. We cram in cheering when we can, like an upstaged understudy.

There's a clear 'take it or leave it' attitude from the band, like they're long-used to polarising audiences and there's precious use talking about it. But let's make some attempt...

Actually, there's a double virtuous combination to them. They don't have a fusion sound, stirring elements of hardcore and metal into a concoction, they fuse them together into a single sonic assault. They're a malt not a blend! They unceremoniously jettison the downside of metal, the uber-theatrical stageyness, the chest-puffing frontman, the overlong screechy guitar solos. But they also play the same trick on hardcore...

The best hardcore bands (Bad Brains, Fugazi, the Minutemen) were wild but disciplined, with a surprising but distinct undertone of restraint. The worst hardcore bands were wild and undisciplined; listening to them was like thumbing a lift with an inexperienced joyrider, one big jolt and it was all over. The Melvins took Bad Brains' discipline and combined it with the lumbering force of metal.

The worst hardcore bands were like one of those latter-day zombies who move fast, they'd constantly jump up only to get dispatched. The Melvins are like the true, original zombies. They're slow, but you just know they're going to get you.

Music histories, when they mention the band at all, pair them with Flipper as an influence on grunge. Which is an influence that can't be denied. First drummer (they now have two) Dale Crover played on Nirvana's 'Bleach' while their original bassist, Matt Lukin, formed Mudhoney. But this rather limits their influence to a single direction. The doom drone band Boris named themselves after a Melvins song, while there's an obvious overlap between their sound and noise rock bands such as Live Skull. Wikipedia claims they pioneered a whole genre of 'sludge metal.' (No, I've not heard of any of the bands either.)

But beyond that pairing them with Flipper blunts the unique appeal of both bands. There's no real metal element to Flipper's sound. Unusually for a West Coast hardcore band, their music was made by bohemians - languid, arch and disdainful. A huge part of their appeal was the combination of overwhelming force with the sense they could barely be bothered to play. Perhaps relatedly they were a volatile element, which burnt brightly but briefly. No wonder they weren't heavy metal, they were actually something more sparky - maybe magnesium.

The Melvins are much more like a bluecollar band, they play a gig like they're working it. 'The Water Glass' is almost their anthem, their equivalent to the Ramones' 'Blitzkrieg Bop', or perhaps even the Seven Dwarves 'Heigh Ho': “Here we go/Everyday/Here we go/All the way/In the groove/On the move... Pain!/In my head/Pain!/In my back/We don't care/We like it there.”

But worse this influence business makes the band a mere linking device, a component, not a thing in their own right. If they were a huge influence on others, that's hardly their story spent. There were many bands in that era who were influential without being particularly good. (Have you listened much to MDC in recent years?) Yet I saw Mudhoney in this self-same venue a couple of years ago, and as the record shows I thought them awesome. But the Melvins were better still - more out there, more relentless, more doing their own thing.

They're are a classic band who's stayed cultish, filling the venue with a clearly devoted following but without a 'Nevermind' to their name. We might wonder why not. Perhaps the greater success of Mudhoney, let alone Nirvana, stems not just from them sounding more accessible but also being more personalised. See them live and Mark Arm comes out at you, confrontational and engaging. The two drummers and two guitarists of the Melvins are arranged symmetrically, with a distinct centre-stage gap where Arm had stood. Vocals sit inside the general mix, rather than riding on the top. Audience banter is not prevalent. (Disclaimer: they made two albums with Jello Biafra, one of the great frontmen of punk if not of music. But that's the exception, not the rule.)

But if the game is getting down to the essence of rock and roll, isn't this nearer to it? Adolescence isn't challenging and articulate, it's sullen and noisily introspective, disdainful of communication. This sound channels the black cloud of adolescence much better.

Before the gig, I get drawn into a conversation on how it took American bands to marry metal to punk. On first sight it's odd. People argue about who pioneered heavy riffing (early Kinks or Black Sabbath), but either way it's a British band. And at the height of British punk came the perfect crossover invite, Motorhead, a metal band loved by punks to a man. Why no British punk band who completed the circle by appealing to the metal heads? (The one exception to this rule, Discharge, I confess have never appealed to me as much as to others.)

Perhaps coming from Britain was the very problem. Only when seen from outside did it become clear how well the pieces could join together. And in Britain music was notoriously tribal. In America, Talking Heads could play bills with the Ramones without comment. In fact, greater geographical distances instead made for city tribalism within music scenes, as evidenced by the notoriously titled Boston hardcore compilation 'This is Boston Not LA.' Joining sounds was easier, joining people was harder.

As I suspect you need to hear a few tracks to get the band, I'm posting longer links than usual. If you like this (the first of two twelve-minute clips from Brighton)...

...then I think you'll love this. (Over an hour live at Hellfest, from last year. Sit back. Enjoy.)

My Spotify playlist for American hardcore and punk...

This Is America (80s/90s Punk +HC)

SUNN O)))

Brighton Coalition, Sun 10th June

You could probably spend all night playing compare and contrast between the Melvins and doom drone outfit Sunn 0))). Both do slow/heavy like you've never heard it before. But against those double drummers Sunn 0))) have little if any percussion. And if the Melvins eschew metal's theatricality, this lot actively play it up. They poured so much dry ice over us I swear at times I had trouble seeing the person standing next to me. Combined with the feedback, reverb and delay which characterises their sound, there were times where the band could have left the stage ten minutes ago and we would be yet to notice. When a passing break in the clouds allows you to see the band, they're cowelled like monks. They go in for upraised fists and held-aloft guitars.

It helps that we're in a venue hollowed out from the seafront arches, which is essentially a cave. But that image of monks with guitars before a wall of speakers, like some Seventies SF-on-drugs film, will stay with me a while. Yes it was ritualised. But in the good sense of the word. What might sound gimmicky or just plain daft, works so well with the music you wouldn't wish it any other way.

If with the Melvins you felt the music almost as much as you heard it, here you hear it almost as much as you feel it. It wasn't (no small boast) just one of the loudest gigs I've attended. The music was omnipotent and all-embracing, as if it was a physical object, filling the room as much as the dry ice. You don't stand outside listening to it, like the audial equivalent of looking at a picture, you're in it.

...which means the way you need to hear them is live. The Melvins may be primarily a live band, but Sunn O))) are a live experience. There's recordings of them in the same way there's fuzzy photos of the Loch Ness Monster, that's just after-the-fact documentation.

It's certainly an approach that splits reaction. As soon as you agree some music has to be loud, some get dismissive. Just like your parents used to cluelessly complain, they repeat the mantra “it's just a noise.” But it's like saying the pyramids have to be big. That doesn't mean they're just big, just that the bigness is an essential component. And if they seem to sound like thrash slooooooowed doooooooown, you're not the first to say that. And besides, that's a good thing.

And being somewhere where you had to be there, having an experience that isn't YouTubeable in our streaming, twittering age... that's appealing in and of itself. (I don't bother reading YouTube comments much, but it's notable how negative a reaction Sunn O))) clips tend to invoke. One clip poster was driven to mention “Drone metal, if you don't like it, don't listen to it.”)

...which isn't to say that the band have assembled some cross between a wind tunnel and a travelling fairground ride. At first their resounding drone sound hits you so hard it might appear merely a sound. But as it progresses and your ears become more accustomed to it, more and more variety within it opens up. The gig posters and tickets were in sheer black, which on closer inspection turned out to be slightly different shades of off-black. (Leading me to wonder if there had been a brisk trade in counterfeit tickets cut from black card.) Which seems a pretty good metaphor for their music. It's like going into a dark room where all seems indistinguishable, but the longer you stay there the more objects take form. (Disclaimer, I did previously use this metaphor for Mechanical Children. But if the shoe fits...)

In fact, conversely to such expectations, the whole set was one long piece which seemed closer in structure to classical music than to rock songs - not just composed of movements but reliant on you discerning the overall shape of it.

Andrew Rilstone (aka World's Smartest Fan) once said of fantasy fans: “This is the key to why Tolkien became so very important to me... What I wanted was the idea-of-elves, the idea-of-orcs, the idea-of-caves and the idea-of-dwarves. I read Tolkien because it was the only place I knew where I could get them... If you could find a way of separating the archetypes from the boring business of having to read then that would do the trick.”

It seems to me there's something very similar for us out-there music fans, except with us we found a way to make it happen. Take a classic rock song like the Stones''Satisfaction.' The words are sharp, witty and at times eminently quotable. But they're entirely secondary. Their job is to hang out with the music, complementing it where necessary. It's the music that lets us plug into that yearning, burning feeling.

Haven't you at some point found yourself obsessively playing one track over and over? By ceaselessly pressing the replay button you can almost put it on a loop. But what you really want is to dispense with the intro, the guitar solo in the middle, the verse/chorus structure, all the intrusive paraphernalia that turn the track into a song. You want the audial equivalent of an art installation, something you can step inside and stay there as long as you want.

Not that adolescent angst of 'Satisfaction' is necessarily the emotional experience on offer here. In a music scene dogged by accusations of Satanism since the Black Sabbath days, all that religious imagery may seem a hostage to fortune. (Though 'Satanism' strikes me as tedious rather than threatening, quite frankly.) But, having only recently questioned the quasi-religious iconography of 'Live_Transmission', this time I found it the thing to do. (Perhaps partly because it wasn't focused on an individual.) The amps as altars, the guitars as crucifixes... they're intended not to wind up Moral Majority types so much as celebrate the transforming power of sound.

That name conveys our solar system's most powerful force, the band's preferred supplier of amps and a pictogram of the waves of force emanating from both. (You're not expected, incidentally, to try and pronounce the 0))) part.) One day I will post something which just lists the axioms of Lucid Frenzy. (We had “beware all projects” only recently.) This time let's go with the one about art being at root a shamanic process, a ritual event aimed at inducing altered states of consciousness. It feels entirely appropriate for Sunn 0))) to be playing on a Sunday. It really does.

The assembled crowd are part of the sense of the event but, especially when the dry ice settles around you, the experience is very individualised. If headbanging was the audience response of choice to the Melvins, many in the crowd here keep their eyes closed. You're aware of the mass of people, but the focus is the effect upon you. It's individualised and collective. You couldn't get more shamanic than that.

Only recently I was arguing that folk music combines a sense of the strange with one of the strangely familiar. Something similar seems true of this seemingly quite different style of music. Just as it initially appears an overwhelming monolithic force which later reveals subtleties, similarly the sonic assault appears dark and menacing but inexplicably shifts into something warm and even peaceful. As one (unusually articulate) YouTube poster puts it, “it sounds like heaven and hell have just come together, that's the only way I can explain this song.” And yes. Yes it does.

Seeing gigs... even good gigs... starts out as a thrillingly unpredictable venture but becomes like seeing films after a while. It stops feeling like a physical, interactive experience, it becomes safe and measured. You know what time you'll be in and out, and pretty much what will happen inbetween. Then sometimes you go to a gig which seems so strange and other-worldly, it's like you need a whole new set of words to describe it.

Go and see Sunn O))) if you ever get the chance. It's beyond description. It really is.

After telling you the whole thing was non-YouTubeable, I am inevitably about to post a YouTube clip. Particularly with a set that's one long track this snippet is woefully inadequacy, but might serve to give you some flavour...

There's plenty other tracks and live clips on YouTube (if bugger all on Spotify), but this one was my favourite, 'Orthodox Caveman' playing (in a stroke of genius) over a video of the critical point of water.

My YouTube playlist for 'Slow is the New Fast' (Suggestions for additions gratefully received.)