PMPEP is rather understandably bigging up Guitar Wolf over on Frothing Spleen (actually his smoothly measured, rather urbane prose style should fool no-one!!!!!) which set me to thinking about the way lots of rock has been recycled wholesale but with a retro-pastiche gloss in order to allow the educated to get off on it without compromising their self-image as essentially above that kind of adolescent/unsophisticated/prole/white-male stuff. I guess Guitar Wolf fall into this category (as do, say, Pussy Galore) along with all that Electro Clash and Kitty-YO/Ironic-Hoxton-AC/DC-t-shirt palaver (though PMPEP certainly doesn’t share that approach, I hasten to add (and I also suppose your allowed to listen to Sunn0)), Earth, KK Null’s stuff and so on, in other words bands that are “intellectually” interesting as they allow you to demonstrate your smarts by cross referencing Phill Niblock and Paul Shutze etc* ). You know how it is, you want to be dumb, but in a clever way, you wanna rock out to big, hairy, dick-waggling riffs but maintain your enlightened, Liberal-P.C cred, you certainly wouldn’t want to be seen to be really into it, you appreciate it with the refined distance of the connoisseur (just one more tasty morsel on the cultural smorgasbord of Late Capitalist life, pick and choose but don’t gorge on any one thing, now) and rather than being involved or overwhelmed by anything, agree instead to meet the experience halfway, I’ll listen to you, even dance, but don’t for a moment think I take you seriously, or that you have truly captured my heart, don’t expect me to commit.

There is of course a huge, unconsidered, infra-critical-dignatum area of rock that largely survives starved of mainstream press attention (maybe “Terrorizer” is it’s main outlet in the UK, maybe even “Rock Sounds”) the whole Thrash/Grind/Speed/Black metal/ hardcore fraternity which as far as I can make out has a lot closer ties to some of the hipper, current doyens of the dance/electronica scenes than we might like to admit. (Kevin Martin, Justin Broaderick, Mick Harris, whose Scorn seems to have been a big influence on Dubstep ( and if the “Isolationism” comp is a telling reference in that regard it’s worth pointing out how many old garage-rock revivalists and Metalheads there were on it, side projects from Zeni Geva, Skullflower, Godflesh, Napalm Death, God, ex Loop, Spacemen Three etc).

There’s probably a secret history of Nottingham waiting to be written somewhere.

Presumably the desire for “heaviness” for the disordering/disabling of the senses through sheer crushing immensity is common to both dub and metal, the desire to accelerate perception past the point of any critical/ analytical distance, toward a voiding of its own content through sheer propulsion, is common to lots of dance and to metal too. So why is metal such a no-no, why is it such a dirty secret, why is it so embarrassing? And on another level why is there something so disquieting, something faintly repulsive about it? Because of the hint of zealotry, because they really believe in this? That odd, slightly discomfiting, somehow inappropriate zone of life where actually, they really mean it, man, as both performers and audience. It’s A.W.O.L, Metal, (I mean, can you imagine anyone getting a “ Peaches” tattoo?) Remember the guy who SHOT Dimebag Darryl for splitting-up Pantera?


Given PMPEP’s inability to Blog from YouTube, I’ll do it for him and offer up what treats I can from that dank underworld where it’s not pretty and its not clever but where at the very least, you can headbang without having to pull ironic faces to your circle of similarly conflicted mates every two minutes just to reassure yourself that everyone is in on the joke.

*Am I the only one who picked up that Neurosis DVD on which they, amazingly enough, restaged Alvin Lucier’s “I am sitting in a room” with their own stuff**?

** I Kid You Not!