I've completely lost my fucking voice. All that comes out is this weird bassy rasp which sounds more like a broken EDP Wasp than a human voice, accompanied by a sensation akin to some fucker forcing a cheese grater down my gullet. Still, laryngitis aside, I'm actually in a damn good mood, and not just 'cos my throat-soother of choice, Isle Of Jura Elixir*, is so fucking delicious...
One of the reasons I'm in a good mood is because one of my favourite bunch of doom-mongers**, mad Italian space cadets Ufomammut, have got their act together again after a couple of disappointingly Isis-esque (or fucking boring, if you prefer, as far as I'm concerned the two terms are perfectly interchangeable) albums*** and remembered what they're fucking good at, namely riffs that sound like the Sun collapsing, incomprehensible cosmic bellowing, and huge swathes of wibbling analogue synths. Colossally dumb space doom of the highest fucking order, and essential listening for connoisseurs of heavy and stupid. Oh yeah, it's called Oro - Opus Primum and it's on Supernatural Cat, in case you were wondering.
Also on Supernatural Cat are another bunch of marvellous loons who go by the names Lin, Len and Lan, and are collectively known as Morkobot. They may be Ufomammut under another name, they may not, I have no idea, mainly because they have metal cubes for heads, as you can see...
A bass, drums and synth trio, they specialise in angular, convoluted space/noiserock and vaguely remind me of an instrumental Supernova-era Today Is The Day, albiet without the gun fetish and raging misanthropy, and their latest, Morbo, sounds (a bit) like a King Crimson loving spider jamming jazz-rock hardcore with Tar§. In other words, very bendy and very good. Goddammit, they even chuck in lashings of slide bass, and apart from Mark Sandman and me, there really aren't many practitioners of that dark art around. And Mark Sandman's been dead for years, so if you crave the injured elephant call of bottleneck bass you know where to go. They're also so tight it fucking hurts, chucking odd time signatures around like it ain't no thang and they never, ever veer into the dread zone of prog toss. If you like NoMeansNo, you'll fucking shit yrself over this lot. Fucking brilliant.
Right. More later, but the painkillers are kicking in and my brain wants to take a power nap.
*12yo, sweet, fruity and honeyed. Get thee to a Sainsbury's and grab a bottle. You can't buy it anywhere else as far as I know.
**With the emphasis on the mong.
***Eve and Idolum. Really fucking boring. Unlike the preceding three LPs, Godlike Snake, Snailking and Lucifer Songs which are simply fucking sublime.
§Another brilliant AmRep band no one seems to remember any more.
Keeping with the spacerock theme, here's the band that arguably invented the whole thing*, Amon Düül II, knocking seven bells of psychedelic shit out of their classic Phallus Dei sometime in 1968.
*Their bass player, Dave Anderson, undoubtedly invented spacerock bass. There's a good reason he ended up in Hawkwind a couple of years later...
I fucking love Hawkwind*. We know this. And I've always been inordinately fond of the album Quark, Strangeness & Charm, I mean, it may not be the last word in brain-destroying spacerock like Space Ritual, but it does contain Bob Calvert's greatest moments with them and an emphasis on motorik that tends to go unremarked, not to mention a certain stylistic similarity to early Roxy Music. So it is with great delight that I present this clip of Hawkwind doing Quark, Strangeness & Charm in, I'd guess, 1977, on the Marc Bolan show of all fucking places...
All together now:
Copernicus had those renaissance ladies crazy about his telescope...
Oh, where's Dave Brock I hear you cry? Chucking a strop because he's not the frontman. He's not even playing the guitar on this version, it's Adrian Shaw (bass) as Brock didn't even bother turn up to play on the version they'd be miming to because it was on a kids show. Twat. Ah, the 70s.
And yes, Bob does have a hawk attached to this wrist. No, I don't know why either.
*When I say Hawkwind, I mean pre-1980, when, let's face it, it all went tits-up and stayed there except for the very rare nugget of spacey brilliance amongst all the crusty dung. Ginger Baker in Hawkwind? Fuck off. They were never the same after Levitation, an album many people inexplicably seem to like.
Oh yes, I kid you not, this is indeed the shit. If you like early Hawkwind*, but crave a little more fuck you and a bit less cocking around, if you think that Comets On Fire went downhill from their first LP onwards until they disappeared in a cloud of FM rock wank, if Circle are a bit too clean, a touch too metal and prog for you, and, like me, you worship at the altar of The Heads, then this is the band for you. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you The Men, a band whose spacerock riffing is shot through with a scum-encrusted viciousness redolent of the finest Amphetamine Reptile bands. Pigfuck in space if you like, and I know that you do.
Anyway here's () from their latest LP, Leave Home (Sacred Bones), in which they stomp all over the grave of Spacemen 3's Revolution, and therefore, by default, the MC5's Black To Comm**, and leave a glorious, blown out mess of fuzz in their wake. More later, I've just realised I missed Torchwood and the iplayer beckons once more...
*You should also go to BBC4 iplayer and watch Hawkwind: Do Not Panic as soon as possible. You may notice small objects, such as ornaments, oscillating...
**I love Spacemen 3, but let's face it, originality was never really their strong point...
Even though Lactating Purple was the last of the three records under review here to be released, I've decided to put this up before the Boxing The Clown article, because these three records (massive pretentiousness alert!) feel like a triptych to me, and the centrepiece which is BTC is best viewed in the light of, and between the outer panels, namely The Last Laugh and this glorious bugger of a record, the exceedingly bizarre, yet curiously catchy (by HC's standards anyway) Lactating Purple. It's the most traditionally (again, I'm using that word advisedly here) song-oriented album of the three, and the first to feature what would become his (almost) regular band for the next few years, but it's recorded before they'd settled into the more fixed style his records would display for the next few years.
It's the first with a four piece line-up as well, instead of the previous ever-changing power trio, consisting of the man himself (obviously), Paul Kirk on bass, Paul Della Pelle on drums and Z Sylver on synths and sampler, the slightly higher emphasis on synthesizer lending the record a more Chromeian feel than the previous two, as reflected in the cover art which is a fucking dead ringer for one of Chrome's magnificent sci-fi collage sleeves, yet still retaining that totally fried atmosphere of the previous two LPs, just contained within some of his more coherent and concise songwriting as opposed to the more freewheeling feel of much of the previous LP.
In that, it feels more like a sequel to The Last Laugh, especially as it launches off with another triple header, beginning with the sublime title track, a mid-paced monster featuring some his most densely effected vocals ever, something of a hallmark of this particular release, the (for HC anyway) guitars not quite so prominent, but still squallingly fucking odd spiralling together with the synths to create an tapestry of sublime oddness where it's hard to tell what's what, and we all know how I love that shit. This leads into Flying Through The Either, a piece of psychedelic, weirdly ambient chicken scratch funk smothered in some of the most filtered guitar imaginable and underpinned with that almost ancient feel that creeps into his music courtesy of Z Sylver's droning synth overlaid with seriously fucked with spoken word that smacks into one of those whirling backmasked Chrome jump cuts and launches into Ub The Wall, where that lysergic angle grinder guitar finally roars in with a fucking murderous intent pushed ever higher by the fucking hurtling rhythm section and an hysterical vocal just on the edge of feedback until the whole thing unexpectedly flies backwards again, only to return with increased aggro. I love it so much, just one of the finest ways to open a record I've ever heard.
Next up is the whirling maelstrom of Nebuchadnezzar, another middling speed track featuring yet more astonishing guitar/synth interplay that rides in on some of the best vocal fuckery I've ever heard, then the slower, darkly melodic Modular Green which boasts a vocal so heavily flanged that you may well be sick and acts like this album's parallel to Nirbasion Annasion. The next real standout though is track 7, The Radiated, two minutes of angular spacerock that harks back to the rhythmic complexity of BTC, contains more great guitar than most fucking albums, ends with a fucking big explosion and sets the tone nicely for the next song, Spider. A genuine so-fucking-wrong classic, which crawls along on a bed of profoundly fucked riffage, a spinning, almost Fripp like guitar line and a completely screwed and pitchshifted vocal which tells a warped tale of fuck knows what kind of cosmic degradation before ramping the speed up into a rolling muted riff driven groove that eventually just flies out of orbit before dropping you into the most fucked track on the LP, the gloriously titled Martian Sperm & Bagpipes*, which seems to be an attempt to beat the world record for the most gratuitous flanging and phasing, the vocals pitched even fucking lower and every sound circling and twisting round every other in a desperate attempt to communicate... something. The LP ends on an elegiac note with Amenti, all slow motion synth and guitar held down by the minimal rhythm section, slowly bring you back down to earth in a quite wonderful manner.
Now my devotion to Chrome's masterpieces Alien Soundtracks and Half Machine Lip Moves isn't exactly a secret. But it occurs to me that I've never written about Helios Creed's solo stuff on here before. Which is a little odd given that he's probably my favourite guitarist ever, I'll freely admit that sonically he's influenced me more deeply than any other musician and is certainly the one who opened my ears further than anyone before or since to the infinite possibilities of using a stupid amount of effects pedals*, and crucially, possibly even more so than Matt Bower et al, branded into the core of my musical being that going too fucking far is a damn good place to start.
There are three albums in particular (out of many) that will always be the killers as far as I'm concerned, the untouchable triumvirate of 1989's The Last Laugh, 1990's Boxing The Clown, and 1991's Lactating Purple (all on Amphetamine Reptile)*. A trio of albums that fused together every disparate strand of psychedelia and spacerock, filtered through a vicious hardcore/punk sensibility, occasionally refracted through an angular proggish prism, sometimes infused with a deeply unsettling almost mediaeval ambience in their (admittedly rare) quieter moments all wrapped round a noiserock core of unswerving viciousness and nailed to the fucking floor by whatever rhythm section the mad fucker had got on board for that particular album. Helios Creed used to go through rhythm sections like Spinal Tap go through drummers or the Melvins through bassists, and weirdly, his records were all the better for it then. He never seemed to attain the same heights of ultrapsych lunacy once his band actually coalesced into a stable unit.
The first of the three, The Last Laugh, featuring the rhythm section of Jason Finn (drums) and Daniel House (bass) starts with a three part blast that recalls the disjointed structures of Alien Soundtracks and Half Machine Lip Moves, kicking off with the straight-for-the-jugular Some Way Out, a careering piece of psychedelic hardcore, powered along by that fucking guitar sound, that stuck wah'ed chainsaw that just cuts through yr brain like a monofilament garrotte with the heavily distorted and filtered vocals of Mr Creed insanely gargling through the maelstrom and then suddenly, with no warning, cuts straight into the unsettling ambience of The Dream, all heavily reverbed backward and acoustic guitars, massively detuned chant and and atmosphere of real hypnagogic dread before slamming back into The Diplomat, a mid paced spacepunk cut with some fucking astonishing guitar that sounds like a writhing psychedelic hydra during the solo. Track 3 (I'm not going to go into all the tracks here, I just want to whet yr appetite if you've never heard this shit), Nirbasion Annasion, is one of his greatest moments, like spacerock turned inside out, beginning with a wonderful persian sounding guitar line, it's rolls into full power on an insidious, sinuous bass line and minimalist drums as the man himself unleashes a torrent of just fucking amazing acid guitar lines forwards and backwards (and as ever with Helios, it's sometimes hard to tell which is going which way, or if it's one, two or four guitars), intertwining with each other and the bass to create a philosophers knot of a track, with his relatively buried, and as usual, heavily processed vocals adding to the glorious confusion. It's just brilliant, and deeply weird. It's everything spacerock promises to be, but almost never quite becomes, except when this man pulls his acid soaked finger out of his arse and gets it right like he does here.
Side 2 is just as fucking good, leading off with Late Bloomer, a track drenched in the same paranoid Ballard/Dick atmosphere that was soaked right through Chrome's Third From The Sun, before kicking into the deeply unsettling Where The Children Are. One of the most traditionally structred songs on the album, yet one of the most disturbing, (along with Road Out Of Hell which ends side 1), it's a seemingly innocuous slowish rock song, well, at least until the guitars really get going. The phasing bandsaw is back with a vengeance, allied with a howling, crying solo line that splinters and recombines as Helios deadpan intones the lines "As you wish upon a star, wondering where yr children are" and other lovely sentiments, it's not a song you necessarily want to examine too deeply, there's an undercurrent of reined-in violent perversity to it that's never explicit, just felt as a deep unease in the back of yr throat. The tension built up by that piece of masterful freak horror is perfectly defused by the next song, the most playful track on the LP, The Rant, which is sort of what would happen if you took a fast 60s r'n'b or soul number, preferably one that tells you exactly how to do the monkey, or the watusi, or the boogaloo, and rerecorded it with a Venusian harcdore band. Fantastic madness, and it contains some of the best fucking guitar you can imagine. There's not a duff track on the album, and it would be a stone cold motherfucking classic if it wasn't for the LP that followed it, Boxing The Clown, a record which I can safely say, that if The Last Laugh blew my mind, then Boxing The Clown gave it the single best musical fuck it had up until that moment, and which will be the subject of the next post in this series.
So yeah, part two will be coming when I have the time as I suspect this week could be a bit chaotic, and I can't be arsed to write any more this evening because those lovely blue valium tablets someone very kindly gave me last week have just kicked in and I'm starting to giggle at everything, so yeah part two very soon. And yes, I'm much less discombobulated now, and that's not because of the valium, but because I now know what I really needed to know before. Cryptic? Yeah, but you know me.
I wouldn't normally post anything from youtube without any visuals, but I don't have Nirbasion Annasion on any digital format, but the man himself has posted the bugger up there so I'll make an exception as it is such a fucking amazing piece of psych. Enjoy. Or run away...
*A live engineer once sneeringly asked me do you think all those pedals are really necessary? To which he received one of my two customary answers to the fucking stupid things some live engineers come out with, that is to say a look of withering contempt coupled with a skull fracturing blast of phased to fuck feedback, followed by the one word answer "yeah". The other answer is just "oh fuck off", it depends how much of a cock the engineer is, and what sort of mood I'm in at the time.
** The preceding LP, Superior Catholic Finger (Subterranean) is fucking excellent too, as were the two LPs that followed these three on AmRep, Kiss To The Brain and Planet X, but that's for another day and another article.
Thor's Helmet has returned to the revolting confines of our rehearsal space a couple of times now, and I can confidently say that I am delighted by the results so far. The level of wrongness achieved at the last session was pretty impressive to say the least. We resurrected what is possibly our most unacceptable song, the deeply sleazy blues Snakeskin Woman, a track which, shall we say, pushes the boundaries of taste both lyrically and musically. It's basically the bastard offspring of Elmore James and hardcore porn smothered in a fucking ton of sludge and slurry which I fucking adore playing because I get to flex my bottleneck muscles in a manner I don't get to very often, because much as I fucking love blues, most people who play it are nothing but copyists and purists so far up their own arseholes that they start to resemble human Klein bottles, who completely lack any sense of fucking humour and totally fail to understand the idea of originality.
It's a fucking rare joy just to let rip with the slide with no regard for taste or decency whilst Garuda bellows his fucking head off with some of the most downright disgusting lyrics this side of Whitehouse, plus it acts as a nice bridge between the twin epics that bookend the set; the ever-ascending Chromeish motorik lunacy of Lay, and TH's signature outrage, Epsilon In Malachandrian Red, half an hour of cosmic ranting, ultradoom and spacerock insanity that never fails to make jaws drop due to the utter shamelessness it radiates like a newly born star, as it gives us a chance to relax a little and regroup before EIMR, which is a fairly intense piece to play, to say the least, and we'd probably all have heart attacks if we had to go straight into that fucker after Lay.
And speaking of Lay, that song sounds so fucking strong compared to when we used to play it, especially after I rewrote the main riff and now that Indrid's bass is augmented with enough effects and fuzz monstrousness to be on an equal footing with my wall of cosmic death guitar, the fucker's sounding like a hideous cross between Jack Bruce in fuzz loon mode and Lemmy/Duncan Sanderson at their crankiest, and there can be no higher praise from me for a bassist in this context. As Donald "Duck" Dunn would say, we got a band powerful enough to turn goat's piss into gasoline, and I reckon two more rehearsals like this and we'll be setting the dates for the live shit, and all I'm going to say is we've got some ideas for films, backdrops etc. that if we can pull 'em off (matron) will match the music in terms of utter galactic foolishness. Oh, and if y're really, really (un)lucky, we'll do Tales Of Brave Ulysses with me on vocals. I can't fucking wait...
*When I say blues, I mean real fucking blues, not the fucking White Stripes.
We're back. Again. It seems our notoriety has increased in our absence, and our nation's scrumpy reserves have finally reached a level able to sustain the space-rockin' beast that is Thor's Helmet once more. I've dusted down and oiled the 7-string. The Book Of Ylem has been opened for the third time and it's forbidden knowledge will once again seep into the world's unconscious. Get ready, because things are gonna get messy.
