W“
me Pal-K, one Tennents Live Festival
through the new releases Time to sharpen your axe and put a scarey gleam in your eye. While they may be a backlash waiting to happen. S'M'A'S'H consistently fail to disappoint. ‘(I Want To) Kill Somebody‘ (Hi Rise) is a clamorous. heroic treble racket wrapped around ragged. desperately direct lyrics. At the very least. it makes you want to jump about. shouting. Unashamedly. Encouragingly. seeds of cross-fertilisation are sown in the Keith LeBlanc/Gunshot/dub/hip -hop treatments. Unfortunately. by the time you read this. the record‘ll have been deleted. Ho- hum. Still. the money you were just getting set to spend can instead go towards the second release from the wonderful Portishead. ‘Sour Times‘ (Go! Beat) finds Harry Palmer‘s girlfriend fretting over her beau‘s disappearance and trying to distract herself by reading about Rita Hayworth's empty world while her neighbours play their entire record
Wholesome jukebox favourites of Summer Bay and Ramsey Street. Frente! offer tip a fragile acoustic whisper through New Order's ‘Bizarre Love Triangle’. the perfect accompaniment to cold beer. river noises and the sun on your stomach.
Rollins-style hardcore discipline on ‘Midnight At The Oasis‘ (ffrr) from Brand flew Heavies. ()h. all right. it‘s actually a slick. jazz—tinged summer nightclub reworking of a country noodle from the 70s and the best record to mention camels for quite some time. Rollins-style hardcore discipline (honest?) on ‘l .ardrooin' (Beggars Banqnet/Americanl. a five-track lil’ from Barkmarket. whose singer sounds like a genetic splicing of Anthony Chili Pepper and David Sylvian. No. really.
Tinkerbell’s Dope Ring seem to enjoy collecting comparisons. so I‘ll chuck in The Psychedelic Furs for ‘Tangles And Knots‘ (Floppy). which both proves that they could get by without the overly quirky (yuk) flip side. ‘Mindless‘. The XTC revival continues apace on ‘Punkture'. track two on Bone lying Down‘s ‘Negative One Friends‘ EP (Abstract). though the one lingering in the brain is the psychotic ‘Cheat On Me'. available on the CD only. Charming. eh. vinyl avengers?
collection very loudly. Nice.
JULIAN COPE Autogeddon (Echo) Just when it seemed Julian Cope might be settling into a role as affable ; jester in the court of the rock ’n’ roll ' gerontocracy, along comes ‘Top Of The Pops’. There he was, railing, flailing, ; squatting, girning, ranting, raving and not wearing any pants. ‘I gotta wa-wa- g wa-wa-walk,’ he screamed. The cause i of his angst and upset? The bad car- ; ma of the not-so-humble automobile. Julian Cope has found a new vehicle for his wayward genius.
flamed after lleathcote Williams’s
anti-homage to the car, ‘Autogeddon’
I sees Cope inspired to new heights of cosmic cerebration: mulling over the
root conundrum that, really, ‘there ain’t no gettin’ round gettin’ round’. Copey is seriously wound up (again). So he can get himself in quite a fizzy here, losing the plot and climaxing this (thankfully single) album with an insane prog-rock death-rattle, ‘S.T.A.il.C.A.ii. (eleven minutes and wilting). The rest, though, is sharp and I to the point, spilling out the fried 3
.
I
Gotta Walk’.
blues of ‘Autogeddon Blues’, ‘llon’t Call Me Mark Chapman’s rock opera and that psycho-stomp headcase, ‘l
‘ Julian Cope: you know he (just) l ' ,. makes sense. (Craig McLean) l \
_ cousoqureo
Business Of Punishment (london) lio one toes the hardline like Consolidated. Their hip-hop, industrial, funk and metal are seared together in the red-hot crucible of their personal politics. Some jackasses don’t get this. House Of Pain, for example. They threw the San Franciscan three off their current tour after one date - playing Stuttgart on Independence Day, HOP pulled the plug on Consolidated’s customary end- of-show open mic session, where the crowd get the chance to speak their piece. Seems like ever-sound Everlast doesn’t like people ‘dissing America’. Consolidated only diss America
because that’s where they live and that’s where the issues they grapple with (the abuse of those different from the common herd, basically) are taken to their most ludicrous, scarey extremes. Contributing its own crossfire is the anti-PC backlash. Consolidated’s third album is caught in the middle. Cramming into raps the complexities of pornography and prostitution, abortion and even musical fads makes for unwieldy, verbose rants - no matter how crunching, crushing and pounding the spark-spitting music. ‘Worthy Victim’, though, is great rap-rock that plots the decay of humanity and conscience in these blighted times. Other times, the message dwarfs the medium. And eventually numbs the head. (Craig McLean)
9 TURN/KAHN/BOZZIO
Polytown (CMP) Former Japan bassist Mick Karn ioins
forces with guitarist David Torn and ex-Zappa percussionist Terry Bozzio for a proiect which explores very
different territory to his work with Sylvian, and his own solo projects. Tom and Bozzio are both much closer to a jazz ethos, and Karn is left to find his way into a distinctly loose, improvisatory electronic sound world. His stint with these players in trumpeter Mark Isham’s band was clearly preparatory in that respect, but the music they make together quickly evolves a distinctive character
of its own. Torn’s shimmering, spectral ; guitar lines weave their way in and l around Bozzio’s restless, agile, industrial weight percussion, while . Karn dabs and darts, felnts and l weaves his way through the evolving ; mesh of sound. It refuses easy categorisation — it’s
!
not rock, not ian, not ambient, and is a little unfocused in places, but it has elements drawn from all three, a taut sense of energy and a wide-ranging sonic palette. Torn can also be heard
amid the shifting textures of another new CMP release, Mark Hauseef and Miroslav Tadic’s The Snake Music, while percussionist Nauseef in turn is on guitarist Jimi Sumen’s Paintbrush, Bock Penstemon. (Kenny Mathieson)
I'- THE ROLLING STONES
Voodoo Lounge (Virgin)
In places, this made me want to rush to put on ‘Cive Out But Don’t Give Up’, in much the same way that album made me rush to put on ‘Exile On Main Street'. Work that one out.
Side one’s not at all bad, by current Stones standards. it kicks off with three acceptable, but not exceptional, rockers plus there’s Keith’s country ballad ‘The Worst’ and Jagger being a lot more convincing than usual on ‘Out Of Tears’ and ‘liew Faces’ - Stones in classic harpsichord ballad mode -
d 31 st at Strathclyde Park
3 wherein he frets about losing his woman to ‘a slip of a youth’. Catches
up with us all? Try telling Mick Jagger - elsewhere, he’s still kidding on that he’s sixteen.
(in side two, the going is very rough indeed. There’s woeful funk (‘Suck On The Jugular’), trite, pseudo-political observations (‘Blinded By Bainbows’), and then along lurches ‘Baby Break It Down’ — you’ll believe a band could be arsed getting out of bed to record it. Keith’s ‘Thru And Thru’ is epic in a kind of Bobbie Robertson way, and almost redeems the preceding guff. I would suggest taping the best cuts off a friend, but how many of your friends will be buying this? (Alastair Mabbott)
38 The List 29 July—ll August 1994