THROBBING GRISTLE

Throbbing Gristle scared me in my sheltered adolescence, and even now, as a more worldly- wise adult, I still feel uneasy in their company. The band's transgressive audio-visual ethos was akin to lifting a rock and seeing all the writhing creepy-crawly things beneath it: a part of the rich tapestry of life, but hardly something you want your nose rubbed in.

Their 1997 studio album is probably the quartet's most accessible effort, but with this group that's a relative measure at best, and it doesn't extend too far beyond the parody cover art and title track: a rinky-dink robotic pop rhythm, complete with groovy, whispered interjections like "yeah..!" and "nice!", so forth and so on. Just a touch of ersatz beatnik humor to brighten an otherwise nightmarish soundscape (some editions of the album telegraphed the punchline by adding a naked corpse to the faux-'60s cover photo).

But don't be fooled. Throbbing Gristle was notorious for exploring the darker recesses of the human condition, operating in a dark industrial netherland of post-punk electronics. The German bands that inspired them (KLUSTER, early KRAFTWERK, the first TANGERINE DREAM) were formed in reaction against the horrors of their collective past. But groups like TG embraced those same terrors as a way to confront our darker impulses, without flinching. Torture, genocide, pornography, disfigurement, etc...all set to a throbbing mechanical backbeat, with atonal brass accents, eerie tape effects, and soulless vocals conjured from somewhere beyond the grave.

Disturbing stuff, but...well, you decide. If nothing else, the band offered a challenging antidote to all those vapid synth-pop superstars hogging the limelight at the dawn of the 1980s. For the best effect, play the album late at night, with all the lights off. But hide the knives first.

This Throbbing Gristle album takes the riveting and heathen antics of the band and throws them into the very heart of the production. TG were always about metal, sweat, blood and sex stuffed together in one big hairy ball of uncomfortable silence and unnerving screeching. On Heathen Earth the band has invited a huge gathering of close friends and degenerates to come join them in the studio for a good wank and maybe a couple of beers. I am not kidding here, because this gig was also recorded onto film - showing these night creatures in full floral power watching porn on a TV residing comfortably up on stage...

The music itself is as creepy and industrial as ever - with Cosey Fan Tutte's cornet sounding particularly lonesome and beautifully dreary. That thing slices through the airwaves like a sharp dove! Then when you pair it together with the tumultuous electronics that more than anything sound like the ghosts of dead bees, the cornet suddenly turns supernatural and free - clinging onto every invisible surface within the music like some sort of sonic glue. So beautiful.

The main proponents of these two cuts are the dark universe of one Bill Burroughs, Captain Clark the ferry man, the number 23 and every little thing you can think of crossing these nonsensical things in an endless array of loony tirades. This is surely the real McCoy, and if you are sitting out there thinking about that crappy Jim Carrey movie with all the freakishly weird occurrences featuring the number 23 - then throw it in the river instantly, lock yourself in a darkened room for a day and play this thing over and over again. 23 will never have the same meaning again and you may have developed a fear of electronic music that sounds like it was made to woo old warehouses.

Apart from the obvious cling clangy ingredients of any Throbbing Gristle album, there is still that omnipresent power hiding underneath it all. Some kind of provocative presence that laughs at death with eyes full of madness and a big frothing smirk on its face... Heathen Earth is no stranger to this particular trade, if anything, I'd say that it stands as one of the band's most artistically successful statements. Taking the grey and monotonous cement reality of the 1980s and adding soar thumbs and blood red colours in shimmering static television noise. It's about infusing life in the worthless - resurrecting the alarmingly safe and twisting it around into something altogether more rambunctious and perverted. French kissing the vicar and painting his house gorgeously pink.

To most people, I figure Heathen Earth will come off as music without any real course - a journey into a world of melted signposts where every road and significant land mark remains utterly blurred and unrecognisable....... That is essentially the truth, but then again this blurry world view, where things seem stranger than fiction, was also what some of the psychedelic 60s bands were trying to hint at as well - taking ordinary household names and everyday objects - spinning them around and mystifying them through the power of music. Well, that is exactly what this music is about. Sure, you get fed a stark black industrial universe with hovering smouldering lava oozings of synthesised sound, babbling insane ramblings and those effervescent cornet touches, yet everything is still rooted in that grey everyday world of never-ending white striped roads, cracked windows and eroding houses that stink of death and old mattresses...

The sleeve should be enough to give you the creeps, with the strangely attired band members standing over a dead body at Beachy Head - suicide central - in England. The body may be deleted on the cover... but it's not in the black and white inner sleeve. You'll be glad to know that there's no jazz and no funk whatsoever on this album. You will however get a primitive industrial feel to proceedings, mixed up with lots of electronics and just about everything played being squashed through filters and effects.

None of the TG nastiness has dissipated. It's just awash with better production making this a bit more user friendly than most of their LP's. Kraftwerk's 'Trans Europa Express' is given an outing on 'Still Walking'. (Jeez - Kraftwerk pop up everywhere don't they?) This is a bit less experimental than my favourite of their albums '3rd Annual Report' -but it's by no means inferior. In fact it's probably the best entry point for any new listener. There's a lot more electronics present and more care seems to have been made over the actual recording.

This isn't as visceral as past Throbbing Gristle but if anything it's their best release to date. You actually get musical 'hooks' to grab on to. An unforgettable album that sounds very much as though it was recorded in '79 with all the grime and grayness inherent in scabby Britain at that time. Musical chunks of splinter band 'Coil' are starting to appear throughout.

As usual Genesis P-Orridge sounds like his soul is dead. A ghost with no heart and lifeless corpse-like eyes as he delivers his vocals in the most deadpan of manners. Still, he's always good for a laugh is old Gen. Actually he's not - take a look at him now on google images .... Arrghh! What the?.... Cozy Fanni Tutti does TG disco beat on 'Hot on the Heels of Love' which swelters at 90˚F. This is as commercial as they got, but it still sounds filthy with all those cracking whips.

Genesis P-Orridge delivers the one heavily sexually dodgy number with 'Persuasion'. It's probably best I don't talk about this on the Archives or I may be banned for life. No... I'm being serious...

These are not folks you'd want to introduce to your parents. God knows what would come out of their mouths. You'd be a bag of nerves sitting there, fidgeitting, twiddling your thumbs waiting for something awful to happen.

The continually creepy and degenerate '20 Jazz Funk Greats' is all the more disturbing because you get the idea that they weren't trying to be controversial at all.

You'll either find this album repellent or captivating. I'd set out to give this 4 stars but... hell's bells after 50 minutes of hearing this loveless recording for the 100th time I think it deserves the full whammy!

And blimey! doesn't Cozy look hot?

'Second Annual Report' is not very good if truth be told. The recording is awful. The first side is recorded direct to tape and the second side, a marked improvement, is made using using reel to reel.

A filthy, repugnant recording as you'd come to expect from these idiosyncratic reprobates. Of particular notoriety is the second track 'Slug Bait', which is full of grotesque visions of murder, flesh and pain. Fuzzy bass, scratchy droning guitar and simplistic drum machines are at the fore. It may be rubbish sounding these days, but at the time this spawned a hundred wannabees who went on to create the genre now known simply as 'Noise'.

Unlike the brilliant '3rd Annual Report' this is much more Lo-Fi and gritty. There's so much effect heaped upon everything that it kind of disguises the fact that its actually a very poorly conceived and recorded album. If anything, it sounds like the soundtrack to the original 'Texas Chainsaw Massacre' but more muffled.

'After Cease to Exist' is a 20 minute Charlie Manson inspired improvisation that just seems to drag on forever using warped echoing guitars, strange sound effects, warbling vocals and occasionally pulsing bass.

Even the much improved, somewhat 'poppy' and enormously better recorded bonus single "United" can't lift this one above two stars I'm afraid to say.

And surely to goodness they might have come up with a better sleeve? It's utter rubbish! One of them was a graphic designer after all...

Much better was to follow. This one is mostly for fans.

'Third Annual Report' is one of their best efforts but if you're unsettled by the sleeve, you definitely don't want to see the calendar girl inside. Now that's 'Dodge City Jail Bait' if ever I saw it.

Throbbing Gristle were one of the more adventurous outfits of the 70's comprising four very different musical personalities. At the helm was Genesis P. Orridge with his dead, empty soul and almost ghost-like vocals. Keyboard creator Chris Carter, a self proclaimed lover of Abba. Cosey Fanni Tutti - Soft core porn model and performance artist. And lastly poor old Pete Christopherson who died recently - tape manipulator and electronic percussion master.

Throbbing Gristle were a real rag-tag outfit who didn't fit any genre at the time. They were as 'outside' as you could get.

'Third Annual Report' is their most diverse album. Chopping and changing from one style to another beginning with the 'Kluster' like intro, followed by the punk-like - 'Hit by a Rock' before being thrown straight in to the hard hitting foul mouthed audio recording of some English hoodlums on a street corner. 'Dead on Arrival' is proto industrial in the style of 'SPK' and is very unlike anything else on show in 1978.

Ahhh... these truly were the good old days when some artists could produce whatever the hell they liked and sod the consequences. It just goes to show that in the long run, doing your own thing pays off.

Mr Dead Pan P. Orridge sings (or whines- as many would claim) the rather miserable 'Weeping' while playing a distorted old violin that sounds as though half the strings are missing.

Honestly, there are barely two tunes on 'Third Annual Report' that sound as though they're played by the same band. However, ALL of them have that dirty, seedy, hot and sweaty feel that Throbbing Gristle somehow always managed to conjure up.

'Hamburger Lady' is rather gross and very intense with swelling, throbbing electronic drones, as we're put through the mill listening to an account of a serious burn victim.

There's some light relief with Cosi Fanni Tutti's 'Hometime' - with a small girl muttering about bunny rabbits and sand pits, accompanied by spacey guitar and massively reverbed effects. Chris Carter cheers this strange, disturbing album up with the purely electronic and upbeat 'AB/7A'. There's more filthy doom and gloom with 'E-Coli' which has those creepy violins screeching in the background along with guitar strings that sound like they're bent at right angles as a Doctor explains the effects of this bacteria.

'Death Threats' are actual recordings from their home phones!. I'm not surprised they had so many enemies. 'Five Knuckle Shuffle' has the classic TG sound and is the most representative song of the band on this album... An odd repetitive electronic beat, with rambling shouty vocals, sound effects and hugely distorted guitar all thrown right in your face.

Definitely not for the faint hearted or fans of 'Genesis' or 'Yes'. I call it a masterpiece for the simple fact that there's nothing else like it. Hugely original and influential in as much a way as Kraftwerk were to electronics.

A really dirty repulsive little album that hits all the right buttons with me.

Chris Carter's subdued electronics, trending ever closer towards straightforward dance music are heavily utilized here, but everything sounds far away and cloaked in a mysterious English fog. Geneis P-Orridge is as creepy as ever with his deadpan ramblings, the standout being the genuinely disturbing "Convincing People." One track entitled "Exotica" gives a clue to the inspiration for the album. There is indeed an element of Martin Denny and Les Baxter's method of creating evocative palettes designed to take the listener away to distant and exotic locales, although here this time it will not be anywhere so safe and welcoming as Polynesia. There's even a vibraphone to complete the tribute.

My favorite track on the album is the borderline mainstream "Hot on the Heels of Love." It is a perfectly produced slice of rhythmic electronica that could easily have been a club hit. It also features the all too rarely heard oice of Cosey, the groups only female member, breathily repeating the words "hot on the heels of love / waiting for help from above" in a tantalizing whisper.

"20 Jazz Funk Greats" is not Throbbing Gristle's best work, but it is an easy jumping off point for beginners, who might be a little intimidated by the band's more aggressive material. More importantly, this is the album that really shows just how influential TG were. Together with Kraftwerk (and maybe Tangerine Dream and Gary Numan) this album played a defining role in shaping the sound of modern electronica.

Out of all TG albums, this one is my least favorite. There are some good songs here, but there is also a lot of songs that just sound like no effort was tried to make this a good album. The two live tracks, Hit By A Rock and Blood On The Floor, are my least favorite Gristle tracks ever probably. They are extremely boring and nothing at all is happening here, to speak. Just some incoherent mumblings from Genesis P-Horrid. The track following Rock is almost as bad as the others, it sounds almost like a field recording of sorts, with some random parts from some B-Movie used to no effect. the rest of the tracks are mostly just okay songs, with the stand out for being, the very Industrial like Dead On Arrival, with it's pulsating synths, and random bursts of noise. Hamburger Lady is one of the most terrifying songs I have ever heard, with it's monotonous bass drum beat, and it's throbbing synth line and moaning guitar, coupled with some of the most absolutely gross lyrics ever. seriously, do not look them up after you ate or if you are a squimish person, because what makes it gross, is that it is a true story..... AB/7A is, unlike every other song on this record, actually very happy and not creepy and sickening, it has some very nice and shiny synths, that recall TD to some extent. It also helps that it is sandwiched between the songs that are the most off putting here, those being Hamburger Lady, Hometime, and E-Coli. Another one that I like is the feedback noise laden, Wall Of Sound, with howling guitar, and lots of severly distorted sounds that makes it so you cannot tell what is really going. It is just a pudding of sounds with an occasional "familar" coming out for a brief second.

With the CD I got, I have two bonus tracks, those being Five Knukcle Shuffle ( yes that is how it is spelled ) which is mst similar to Dead On Arrival with an incessant Industrial beat with some guitar scrapings, and some repeated spoken word vocals, which I cannot make out.

The other is We Hate You (Little Girls) which has some very creepy guy screaming "I hate you little girls" a lot with some very Avant Garde playing in the background, with some very bad ( on purpose ) vilin playing from Gen.

Not TG's best, but if you should still get this as there are some good moments, but just not as many as The Second Annual Report, or Jazz Hits, and if you are new to TG's Avant Garde strangeness, start with those two before turning here.