re: this this this and this

" It is better to be in chains with friends, than in a garden with strangers."
Iranian Proverb

Nobody ever thought they’d be talking about progression, development, maturity or what not when it came to NYC’s premier scumfuck powerscuzz trio Unsane. Indeed, their whole raison d’etre seemed to be a fierce rejection of any such values, they pursued a doggedly ugly, autistic, anti-Art, anti-hipster ethic wallowing in gore and brutality, with a series of notorious real-life splatter stills for sleeves. The trademark Unsane sound is monolithic, crumbling concrete guitar and lumbering punk dynamics topped off, or more rightly middled-out with heavily vocoderized vocals, sunk somewhere deep in the mix, Big Black’s hardcore disco demolished and rebuilt in slow-drying cement. “Bludgeoning,” “gruelling” etc are the trademark adjectives in any Unsane review.

Naturally, Unsane had witnessed the horror of existence both outside and in and, angry, wounded, they were determined to stare all that was most traumatic unblinkingly in the face, confront the true horror of it all and in doing so anneal themselves. (“Maybe if I watch “Savage man, savage beast” one more time I really will stop being nauseated by/terrified of violence and death”) These kinds of sentiments and strategies (which run all through metal of course, especially in it’s abject/apocalyptic modes) are largely those of sensitive, wounded boys and girls who have never been able to get over the early and quite natural shocks that flesh is heir to, Humbert Humberts whose development was arrested at a certain point by the overwhelming power with which some insight or other hit them in adolescence, because a girl cheated on them, their friends turned out not to be so nice after all, or they came too quickly and she looked a bit disappointed/ he came bit too quickly and looked perfectly satisfied. Henceforth they knew: love is only ever a cruel charade, sex always a theatre of power, the body a repulsive, humiliating imposition and that anyone who feels or believes differently is a purblind fool swaddled in illusion. It’s right that Unsane should be such traumataphiles/phobes as Metal is the music, precisely, of the wounded, those who find life unbearable and who are obliged to build a world of their own. For hardier or more robust souls it will always appear ludicrous, but it is that Millenarian sense of a tribe of the elect, those who have truly seen and live with that truth, who attempt to bind the trauma of unbearable insight through ritual, sacrement and alternate cosmologies that gives much metal its quasi/religious character and opens up a different domain to that inhabited by the realist “soundtrack to life” stylee cappuccino-sippers (actually I like a cappuccino myself, better be careful!), indeed, Metal, however “childishly” is fundamentally opposed to such practices, is opposed to “reality”, (hence the disdain it’s held in by “functional” Poptimists.) It expresses (among others) an ontological* antagonism. Unsane embody this in one of its aspects, the desire to assault the consciousness of the unbearably/incomprehensibly contented in all their idiocy, tearing the veil of illusion from their eyes, thrusting the full traumatic horror of their own materiality in their face.

So it may come as a bit of a disappointment to Unsane themselves to discover then that with “Visqueen,” more than anything they seem to have become, after more than a decade of digging for feculent nuggets with which to besmirch our smug, bovine faces, one of the great Rock-groove bands of all time. Not only have they honed their knack for crotch-twangingly fat slabs of viscous Blue Cheer/Iron Butterfly/Vanilla Fudge boogie to a tee, but the riffs are rubberised beyond Bootsy’s wildest expectations, a truly rugged elasticity, conjuring (verily!) to the mind’s eye stock-footage of poorly constructed 1950’s suspension bridges bouncing up and down in a storm. We all know that groove equals funk, equals sex, equals seeing your baby getting sloppy and “Visqueen” is, I’m afraid, downright funky, but rest assured it is a properly abjected, suppurating and syphilitic funk shorn of all that is deodorized, depilated and dolled-up, this is funky in the most feral, horny-handed, and hornery, stale sweat and salty secretions sense. If it is sex music, it’s a bit of warts-and-all, bunioned-and-carbuncled rough, it’s a knee-trembler between the wheelie bins round the back of Wetherspoons, you’ve had your beer bi-focals on and you’ve pulled a pig, it’ll be sordid, probably regrettable, possibly a health risk, but hard to say no to come closing time as yet again the empty bed-blues start cutting through the booze. Unsane’s sex is sex nicely spiced with anger, desperation and disgust. Sex as a battle with and against loathing and fear, dry lips and dripping armpits, pungent, musky, a queasy thrill.

“Against the grain” starts of all Alt-Country-purdy before the fuzz pedal ( a Big Muff, no doubt) tumesces mightily and starts dry humping the rhythm section, tongue out, every few bars the riff slewing into a bit of boss-eyed slide guitar (whoops!-quickly whipping it out- nearly came then!) “This stops at the river” drags a harmonica in to vamp its way through the thick, waist-deep, relentlessly thumping gumbo of guitar and bass. “Line on the wall” has a salacious solo unspooling like a long, spittle-soaked tongue, a wheezily thrusting stop/go dynamic and arthritic-hip-pivoting drum fills, while “Windshield” wazzes off-white ziggurats of bottle-neck guitar all over the listener’s face. Elsewhere the trademark Unsane hardcore cacophony i.e “Eat Crow” (oh, yeah?) is even more mercilessly honed and pulverizingly exciting than before (kind of like the bits where you suddenly speed up for a while but then get a stitch and have to ease off.) Miraculously, as a post-coital treat, just to show their sensitive side, there’s even a semi-industrial, eight-minute number to close, an outright arty/experimental piece that still manages to be rather danceable (a kind of stolid, finishing-off-by-hand.) “East Broadway” is a rolling, slow-building bass rumble layered over with all kinds of metallic shearing and snickering, ghostly sirens and slowly agglutinating guitar, the fruits, no doubt, of time spent in the studio with the mighty Book of Knots.

A fucking stormer, as we say up North.

And largely it’s looking like Metal’s year for all things cutting edge. It’s a critical cliché to reference Hip-Hop’s “furious rate of innovation,” but I wonder whether metal hasn’t been the innovatory form par excellence, both in terms of a kind of hermetic, structural self-transcendence, increasingly pushing the envelope in terms of technical and sonic proficiency out to where non-initiates are simply lost AND in terms of cannibalistic, genre-assimilating hybridity, it’s mongrel vitality nourished on an absorbtion of hip hop, post-rock, ambient, new-folk, world, drone, classical….

Even a cursory glance around what look like the best albums of the year would see metal leading the pack, occupying the avant-garde high ground. First up and suddenly streets ahead in the Album of the Year stakes (in any genre) there’s “The Angelic Process”’ truly titanic debut LP “Weighing Souls with Sand” and this time the trauma is of a planetary kind. If George Bush ever gets his wish and the Rapture comes, this is what it will sound like, not the clouds parting and a few bun-faced cherubs alighting at our sides but the vast irruption of some inimical, alien realm into ours, smelting mountains down into lakes of dusty glass and winnowing out humanity with purgative fire. The Angelic Process as envisioned hereabouts will clearly involve a colossal sundering of the space-time continuum in which megalithic, world shattering blocks of mineralized light periodically scour the earths surface, hoovering up the tattered remnants of mankind. Seraphic, liturgical, funereal this is the sublime in that words truest sense, a kind of exultant horror, a cosmic maelstrom in which the wails of the damned and the ecstatic keenings of the saved interlace as they are swept up as one to undergo the great Tribulation.

You think I’m going too far, but that’s because you haven’t heard it yet. It's Death Metal's "Loveless." Believe!***

Metal, metal, metal. Listening to what’s been best in it so far this year i.e the latest from Neurosis, Grails' magnificent “Burning off Impurities” ( an album that basically fulfills ALL my World/ Metal fantasies and which has been dealt with so well with by Fire in the Mind here that frankly I don’t have much more to add (except to say that his observation that what’s so great about it is it’s very much of this world** seems absolutely spot on) the reinvigorated Savage Republic, Sunn(i)))))’s latest epic, the Book of Knot’s et al stuff like Soul Jazz’s recent “Future Dub” dubstep comp just feels pallid and sapped in comparison.

Lets knock out the top five thus far at the year's approximate half way point, just to keep a tab on things.

1) The Angelic Process “Weighing Souls with Sand”
2) Panda Bear “Person Pitch”
3) The good the bad and the queen “TGTBATQ”
4) Grails “Burning off Impurities”
5) The Book of Knots “Traineater”

Bubbling under: Von Sudenfed, Unsane, Neurosis

* I promised myself I'd never use that word.....

** although thinking about it, the importance of this observation does require a lot of unpacking.

*** I apologize for the incorrect spelling of this word, which remained**** on the post for twenty four hours! I will have myself shot at dawn.

****I apologize for the incorrect spelling of this word, which remained on the post for about an hour and a half. Although if I start apologizing for poor spelling, I'll be here all day.....

this
has these lyrics:

Dog day afternoon by the sea.
I think about you.
What am I gonna do?
Sorrow's hangin over me.

Let me walk with you
cuz it's breaking my heart.
The things that we had,the good and the bad -
now it's parking lots.

Don't let's talk about tomorrow -
Baby, standin at the edge of sorrow.
Let's watch the whole world goin slow.
Let's watch the whole world goin.

I know my way round town.
Used to live around here.
I know the sites to see,
the things they mean to me,and how we tore it down.

Let me walk with you cuz it's breaking my heart.
The things that we had,the good and the bad - now it's parking lots.

Don't let's talk about tomorrow
-Baby, standin at the edge of sorrow.
Let's watch the whole world just goin slow.
Let's watch the whole world goin slow.

Unh-hunh.It was a dream.
Nah, but it was a tin can.
Not a dream - man, it was a tin can.
Ha!Had I not kicked that...Had I not kicked that...
Had it clattered in the gutter when it bounced down the sidewalk...
Had I not...Keep that.

Don't let's talk about tomorrow -
Baby, standin at the edge of sorrow.
Let's watch the whole world goin slow.
Let's watch the whole world goin so.
Let's watch the whole world goin


You're not feeling the genius are you? What's wrong with you people!

Actually, ignore that post below, Owen has just reminded me... THIS is obviously the best song of the Nineties, though THIS is pretty close...or this....y'know....or maybe this ....you get the point....which is why he's bang on here.

The very definition of the word PITHY.

An Outburst!

Thundering arsebilge! No, that’s not the title of the new Keiji Hano release (that is, I believe,“Manfat spasm cavity of arcane nihilification”, (or was that his last one….)) It’s my reaction to discovering that there’s some kind of a Nineties Vidclash going down. “Shitetown”!?* (actually the puns from this point on get progressively worse, so you might want to click away now.)

“Crap”? (err..that’s“Snap”)

"The Twatghan Whigs"? (twatghan/afghan, see?)

"Saint Crapienne"? (if anyone can do better they can have my copy of the "Hug my soul" 7-inch. Don't worry, I'll clean the vomit off first!)

"The Twatima Mansions?" (reasonable phonetic fidelity to the original there, you’ll grant me…)

Is this what we’re going to wake up to being pumped from the re-education camp's loudspeaker at five-thirty every morning and soundtracking our obligatory breakfast of brutalist gruel before we set off to work in the newly collectivised Call Centres once the Kino Fisters have been swept to power on the shoulders of a baying mob of Connells and Whale-starved comrades? I Shudder to Think! Anyway, here’s the best song of the nineties. Yes, yes, it is all so terribly unsophisticated and simplistic, yes, it is a prime example of the dreaded genre of Funk-metal, but frankly if it's a choice between, say, Faith No More and the poverty of Pearl Jam or Sub-Zep shriekers like Soundgarden I’ll take the latter any day. Amongst the five most exciting rock songs of all time, if you don’t agree you’re either in terminal denial or have had your entire nervous system cauterised by a freak lighting strike.

I also notice that bonsai Silverback is coming on all straight-edge over on FS. A great pop song indeed, but is it as good as this?**

You is sick, man.

Nice to see Matt Woebot fessing up to stalking gamine pop-waif Panda Bear (did Matt go to public school, I wonder?) I heartily approve: A) because let’s face it, that Panda Bear album is phenomenally great B) because it’s nice to know that despite Woebot’s no-doubt advancing years and a record collection of Himalayan proportions he can still get a big doe-eyed, heart-fluttering crush on someone, but also and more importantly C) that I also have distinctly Stalkophile tendencies myself, though the object of my particularly unwelcome attentions is no tousled and dulcet-voiced ephebe, oh no, quite the contrary, why, it’s non-other than turbid and tonsured, glowering behemoth, David Thomas!

My own flagrant attempts to get a bit matey with him are invariable disasters. First I get copiously lagered-up during Two Pale Boys’ shows (smaller venues than when Ubu play, hence exposing him more to potential glad/man-handing from deranged semi-obsessives such as myself) then, as he goes through the ritual humiliation of flogging CDs from the stage edge I approach on the pretext of possibly not owning a particular work (in fact I have everything they’ve ever done) and, breasting the chilly, baleful pall that shrouds the Thomasian permasulk I try to “engage” him in conversation, offering up such icebreakers as, “ You insulted Keith Moline a bit less than usual tonight” or ( nervously gesturing at dog-eared box of CDs ) “The Art of Walking” was one of your low-points really, wasn’t it?”

One of the more regrettable exchange’s ran thus:

Impostume: “You know, I think those lines in “A Dark Suit” really are the best you’ve written”

Thomas:(frostily) “That’s why I said so.”

Impostume:(attempting to dazzle Thomas with his erudition) “Really similar to that Tennessee William’s line about all of us being condemned to solitary confinement for life within our own skin and that personal lyricism is the song of one condemned man from his cell to the others.”

Thomas: (not even the tiniest spark of interest kindled) “I’ve never read that.”

Impostume: “But I’m saying, comparably you know.. you’re a great poet in a particular, y’know American tradition”

Thomas: (icily) “ I just write rock lyrics.”

Impostume: (quick, emboldening swig of fourteenth pint of lager)“ No, but I mean, come on…. you’re a poet!

Thomas: (icier still) “ I write rock lyrics.”

Impostume: (more impassioned) “ You’re a poet, you’re a poet.”

Thomas: (frowning so heavily only his double chin is still visible) “ I write rock lyrics”

Impostume: (determined to impress upon Thomas the depth and profundity of his body of work) “Just accept that you’re a great.." (long-suffering Mrs Impostume intervenes to drag Impostume away, sitting him down in the corner and explaining with the disarming frankness for which the Latin peoples are justly famed: HE DOES NOT LIKE YOU! “But he’s my hero,” blathers the Impostume. HE DOES NOT WANT TO SPEAK TO YOU, EVER! Mrs Impostume re-iterates into husbands misty-eyed, star-struck face.)

Naturally, with the true stalker's inventive zeal I do also employ a variety of other tactics. Buddying up to Keith Moline and Andy Diagram by heaping praise upon them (not that they don’t deserve it) in order to make my general presence less loathsome in Thomas’s eyes, turning up in unexpected places ie, Brussels and suddenly emerging from a mini-throng of polite Belgians to pounce, “As I was saying about you being a great poet….” Actually on that particular occasion I did notice a flicker of irritated recognition ripple over his otherwise oceanic imperturbability, something along the lines of .. “not this cunt again!” Yes! I thought to myself, overjoyed. He is aware of my existence!

Actually this being a “fan”, having some sense of a deep personal affinity, this confusing of the work with the person and the assumption that anyone who can affect you so strongly in one particular way must also somehow be able to answer to some other kind of need is both completely understandable and deeply wierd. An ex-girlfriend actually asked me, quite earnestly, after about half an hour’s worth of tedious exposition on all things David Thomas-y “Who do you love more, me or David Thomas?” I dissembled, naturally, (ever the Gent!) but suffice to say she’s now an ex-girlfriend while the torch I carry for Thomas blazes on undimmed. Clearly this kind of intense cathecting happens most commonly in adolescence ( I had, I’m ashamed to say, a five year obsession with Jim Thirlwell during my teens, partly fed by the sheer unavailability of his records/information/interviews with him, I used to dream about meeting him at parties and when an interview finally did turn up in Melody Maker I read it with such intensity that my eyes practically scoured the words from the page) no doubt all this says something deeply revealing about the Narcissistic personality but then again, if you are deeply affected by someone’s work, and why shouldn’t you be, what’s wrong with expressing it to them…what’s wrong with being passionate about something?

Yes! Say it Loud and Proud! David Thomas: I Love You!

(Mrs Impostume enters rapidly armed with a Valium and decked out in full tongue-lashing regalia in order to drag flustered Impostume from keyboard)

*Amusing to notice that Professor Infinite has misremembered Whitetown as Whitehouse (revealing her dark, Nordic, S&M side, no doubt! The minx!) Now the universe in which Whitehouse was one of the surprise novelty number ones of the decade really would be one I’d want to live in. Imagine the scene: Dave Lee Travis scraping fingerfuls of tapioca-coloured cum from his sodden beard, “Phew, quite a performance. That was GG Allin still at number two with “Bite it you scum” and straight in at number one, knocking Skinny Puppy off the top spot, it’s Whitehouse with “I’m coming up your Ass!”" Cue whooping applause, cut to emaciated, loincloth and swastika-clad William Bennet hurling buckets of elephant dung and pig slurry into the audience's faces as the keyboard frequencies blow out the studio lights.

** a good point at which to mention that the new Bad Brain's album, produced by the hamster-faced one out of the Beastie Boys,(a man whose rodenticity of feature is perhaps only comparable to that of the aformentioned Zack de la Rocha: in fact, try and spot the difference: Hamster, Yauch, Rocha, ) is amazingly good, and on the best tracks, like "Jah People," both razor sharp/shit-kickingly fast AND sublimely dubbed out at the same time, pissing from a great height on pretenders such as Roots Tonic.***

Who says so? Four people! Me, Myself, I and I.

***Though it has to be admitted that H.R's not exactly Bob Marley, or even Buju, lyrics-wise, is he? Doggeral seems a generous term for lines of the order of: "let me tell you I and I love Jesus Christ/ let me tell you it because he treat us nice/ maybe some people dem a want to make him act like a fool/but what they did to him was a very, very cruel."

Impostume adopts earnestly even-handed, liberal countenance beloved of Creative Writing teachers everywhere: "Yeeeeessssss, I suppose accepting his own mortification/crucifixion in order that we, fallen humanity, may be granted access to the bliss of everlasting paradise was him "treating us nice" in a way, and the Romans did, in a manner of speaking, want to see him trip up and fall into disrepute,"act the fool" as you say.... and of the cruelty there is clearly no doubt, so.. most importantly it all rhymes, doesn't it? So all in all I think this probably merits a distinction...."

HOHO! Courtesy of PMPEP, they're at it again!

Savage Republic are apparently back, though I’m a bit slow cottoning on, and, interestingly, putting things out on Neurot, the label run by Neurosis. I was always a bit lukewarm on them back in the day I have to admit but listening to them now and, conversely, listening to a lot of stuff I used to like at the time on the recently released Wax Trax box set I can’t help but think my eighteen year old judgement was seriously skewed. Most of the Wax Trax stuff sounds more than faintly embarrassing and horribly dated almost twenty years down the line, especially the stuff that was supposed to be ass-kicking, whereas the more muted, less “rocky” acts such as Lead into Gold (whose EP was called “Chicks and Speed: Futurism!”) who I wasn’t all that into at the time suddenly sound like the good stuff the label put out. Many swear by Coil’s “Love’s Secret Domain” but personally I think it’s crap, not a patch on “Scatology” or “Horse Rotorvator”. I can’t help but find something slightly embarrassing, something basically silly about Coil and related outfits (Current 93, Death in June, NWW etc) irrespective of how much I enjoy some of their output. OOH, you spooky wizards, please! You’re shredding my sense of reality with your dark, pagan fulminations!

But I digress……

Fact is that Savage Republic always seemed to be semi-ruined by the unremittingly hoarse and shouty vocals and the “live” production sound. In principle they were a great idea, a kind of fourth-world post-punk trance rock endeavour, disillusioned white-boy’s world music, shorn of tourist sentiment (their LP covers routinely featured decaying ports in banana republics etc), an intriguing attempt at a possible music, with one foot in the tenements that spawned No Wave’s metal banging and dissonant guitar assault and the other in the favellas and townships of the third world, an attempt to marry up all kinds of “ethnic” practices, combining the musics of the globally dispossessed and maintaining a conversation between them. It seemed not only that they might have taken “Bush Of Ghosts” seriously, but might have found a way of translating its ethic into a standard band set up. The music itself, however, just fell short of fulfilling its promise and it seemed that no matter how far they travelled for inspiration they routinely brought back a curate’s egg. I’d largely forgotten about them until I happened across the most recent Ep “Siam”. The first track is a rather typical, thin, quasi-live sounding, shuffling shoutalong, but after that it picks up, offering some rather lovely glittering and glistening eastern inflected polyrhythmic rock that culminates in “Siam”, the longest and best track. By the end of it all I’m basically left wanting more, (must hunt down that neglected back catalogue) which is a rare enough thing these days. It’s interesting that Neurot are putting their new stuff out (partially in tribute I suppose) and it suggests that there are still those underlying affinities between world and metal and that there are possibilities for rock/world that needn’t be either Gogol Bordello’s (much as they charm me) Uncle Sam(ovar)-ishness, trading on their crazy “exotic” traditions to bring in the punters or the Jools Holland “this-is-serious-music” jamathon. .

The question of course, must be, why does this matter, other than that it aesthetically enriches stale rock and gives jaded hipsters-in-denial like yourself something to coo over tediously on your blog? And the answer would be, at a guess, because it would be an alternative, globalized music culture that expressed and insisted on the particular local traditions in the face of the global ascendancy of Hip Hop and Indy (it’s no surprise that Jay Z and Coldplay are mates, is it?) that breaks with the endless pattern of hollow truimphalism and whimsical melancholy that these two forms have instituted as the only two possible forms of artistic expression and into a mode where curiosity, innovation, involvement and difference dominate, which is open and dialogic, that looks out instead of back and helps to reposition music politically as well, helps to reorient culture, especially youth culture into a recognition of a shared condition (i.e. that of being fucked over by the global elite), shared sets of concerns and practices that largely undercuts the sanctioning of the Media Priests: something genuinely international something that, for example, Live 8 for all its spectacular global reach simply cannot achieve. If the western avant garde has reached a dead end and if were to escape either Gilles Peterson style soft-eclecticism (the world as sonic supermarket, the DJ as your Personal Shopper ) and if we're also to avoid simply looking to other cultures for novel "misreadings"/nominal reshapings of our own culture (Japanese rock, baile funk, desi beats etc) then a more complex interrelation a more open-ended two-way dialogue needs to be developed, one that is equally happy to learn and listen in humility as it is to judge, assess and dissmiss.

“One world?”No thanks. Multiple Worlds in constant dialogue and endless flux!

Three solid days of pickled cabbage, dumpling and lager with PMPEP almost finished me off there, folks, but never fear, after seventy two hours sleep, a liver transplant, a course of antibiotics, some intense counselling, twice hourly vitamin injections and the tenderly remonstratory ministrations of fair Mrs Impostume, I’m as good as new (or back to square one, take your pick)

As usual what really struck me about being outside the UK was basically how civilized life is. OI, wanker! Define civilized!!! Well, let's just say that the omnipresent anger and incipient violence, paranoid defensive/combative fractiousness that you feel close its clammy hand over your soul the minute you get on the train back from Stansted, just isn’t there. Or let’s put it another away, recreational violence isn’t the main pastime, being aggro isn’t the goal. I lived in Barcelona for a year and certainly spent every night in any number of its least salubrious bars. I never saw one fight. I never saw a fight on the street. I certainly knew people who got their bags snatched/ wallets lifted, and one guy who got punched in the face a few times by a gang of kids, but your Saturday-night Kebab shop bloodbath, your, “oh fuck who are they, are they going to kick off”, your posses of hard cunts out on the piss looking to intimidate, just wasn’t there. Twelve o’clock there’s families out drinking tea in cafes with their kids. I always smile to myself when people tell me that in South America you have to be very aware of who is around you, vigilant, on the alert, it’s not like it is in England they tell me, at which point I want to say, well, have you ever walked home on your own at closing time through any reasonable sized English town or city of a weekend….vigilant? Getting back unscathed (especially as a lanky sixteen year old Goth) after a heart-thumping, eyes-and-ears-sensitised-to-a-superhuman-degree lunge homeward, trying to judge who was round the next corner, whether I should overtake these three pissed guys in front or hang back and risk the big drunken blokes behind me singing “ You Lost That Loving Feeling” catching up with me instead… well, it felt like Armistice Day had been declared when my house came in sight. You made it this time, will you be so lucky tomorrow night? It’s no wonder we drink so much, if we didn’t we’d never have the courage to leave the house. Whenever I think back to my pre-University years (which is infrequently) in Barrow-in-Furness (yes, honestly) I remember nights out with a kind of tunnel vision, a friend's face in the foreground and whatever pub we’re in as a kind of background/ peripheral blur. Because, of course, I couldn’t look round, I couldn’t just glance around the pub in case I made eye-contact with someone who might take offence and start a fight. Getting your head kicked in really was one lapse of attention away. Never relax, never become complacent or your fucked. Vigilant! Ha!

Now this dimension, or at least the extreme degree to which it’s present in the UK, is one I largely step out whenever I go to Europe, or South America for that matter. In some ways I feel safer in Buenos Aires than I do in London. Ok, there is a higher chance you’ll get shot or kidnapped (err.. by the Police) or what have you, but the endless, daily meting out of bruised ribs, broken noses, blackened eyes and worse, this Jekyll and Hyde, masochistic beer bingeing/brawling doesn’t seem to be there. At risk of making a tasteless analogy there’s a line in Primo Levi’s “If this is a man” where he wonders how the Germans can so routinely dole out blows without any anger, without any direct provocation and English violence does have that quality, a vast, free floating violence that sits over the Island like a cloudbank, rote, mechanical, ritualised. It’s this underlying (at best) expectation of violence that’s so depressing, that’s so dehumanising, that’s so estranging of us from each other. Being robbed by someone who needs to eat, or who needs drugs I can accept. Though it’s a terrifying, traumatic prospect, it doesn’t serve to undercut my faith in humanity, recreational violence certainly does. It’s sad to say that my typical position in most interactions with people I don’t know in bars abroad is wariness, consequently I’m always misjudging situations ( who the fuck are you? why are you talking to me, what do you want?) until after a few days I get out of my default protective cynicism and realize oh, ok, there just being friendly (weird..…)

Still, most importantly, the current Young God’s live set includes their death metal version of “Massie Mecker” as an encore ( along with “Speak Low”) and TV Sky’s standout track “ Night Dance” is now along for the ride. The venue was great, nice and small, the crowd extremely appreciative, the band evidently enjoying themselves. PMPEP was, surprisingly, a perfect host(ile), despite making some simply factually and objectively incorrect statements , to wit, that The Rolling Stones are better than the Velvet Underground (!!!!!) and not only that The Jesus and Mary Chain are a better band than the Smiths but that Psychocandy is the greatest record of all time(!) His fundamental criteria for current musical quality seems to have boiled down to: quantity of shouting and brevity (presumably that 0.5 second Electro Hippie's track that's just a clipped "Gluuoorgh!!!" is the fullest distillation of this ethic). Truly, age can not mellow him nor custom stale his infinite spleenality. Disconcertingly, he also saw (un)fit to take his shirt off during the Young God's gig. He’s never done this before, regardless of how sweaty the venue's been and I can only apologize to anyone standing nearby who may have inadvertently witnessed his torso in the full, sweat-slicked glory of its high hirsuity (initially I thought he was wearing a small, moth eaten, white and black mohair cape, then i realised, ah no, it's back hair!) though, leaping up and down, pounding his chest, whooping and generally “letting himself go” as he was ( I maintained the grim, slightly bedevilled, patrician air that all true Englishmen assume at moments of high excitement/orgasm) he resembled, greying now with the years , nothing less than a horribly gone-to-seed Silverback staking out it’s territory… but you know, obviously on a much smaller scale.. a kind of bonsai Silverback…..
.........and thus a new nickname is born!!!!!!!!!!