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album // Y
As I've listened to more and more music
over the past few years, I have become more and more of the opinion
that post-punk was far more interesting than the punk that inspired
it. The likes of The Birthday Party, Joy Division,
Magazine, Gang Of Four, Wire and
others were considerably more inventive than anything punk had to
offer, which is why post-punk endured far longer than punk itself.
The Pop Group were another post-punk
band who towered high above the almost comedic nihilistic punk music
that preceded them. Formed in Bristol in 1978, The Pop Group –
who weren't pop at all – consisted of Mark Stewart
(vocals), Gareth Sager (guitars), Simon
Underwood (bass) and Bruce Smith (drums,
percussion). Sager would go on to work as part of Rip, Rig + Panic,
whose occasional vocalist was Neneh Cherry, thus cementing The Pop
Group's position in a fertile musical scene that would encompass
Massive Attack, Tricky and Portishead in the Nineties. Y
was produced by the band and Dennis Bovell, who worked with Linton
Kwesi Johnson and I Roy and also Madness and Orange Juice - not
that this sprawling mess of sonic ambition sounds much like any
of those acts. It certainly doesn't sound like Bananarama, who Bovell
also worked with.
Stewart, who would go on to work with On-U Sound's
Adrian Sherwood and who, as a solo artist and with The Maffia,
would produce a series of dub-inflected angry missives for Mute,
shouts and spits his politically angsty way through the tracks included
on Y. At times he sounds like Nick Cave
during The Birthday Party years, braying and hee-hawing seemingly
uncontrollably. Meanwhile, guitars whine and cut in like out-of-control
chainsaws, dub effects send the drums and percussion spinning up
in the mix like toxic dust clouds and the bass is so deep and funky
as to give these songs an urgency that it makes you want to dance
even though you don't quite know how. At times James Chance or Borbetomagus-style
horns skronk into view; at others, piano notes sneak in, feel out
of place, and sneak off again.
Y is a frequently unpleasant listening
experience at the best of times, but a rewarding (if ear-cleaning)
sonic misadventure. It is harshly dissonant, and at times feels
not just under-produced but utterly devoid of production whatsoever,
with only the careful layering of traditional dub effects feeling
like a conscious intervention by Bovell. In that sense, Y
seems to stand apart from other post-punk albums which feel comparatively
glossy when listened to next to this; in contrast Y does
feel like something that should have been realised by a band who
would have frequented the likes of CBGBs, like a Mars or The Contortions
only birthed somewhere between London and Bristol. The closest reference
point to the main post-punk proponents would be The Birthday Party,
whose decadent looseness occasionally threatened implosion; The
Pop Group, in contrast, sounded like the sound of that implosion
and its aftershocks.
Y was originally released on Radar and
was re-released as an expanded CD in 1996 followed by a remastered
edition by Rhino in 2007. The CD reissues bookend the sprawling
Y with The Pop Group's first single, 'She Is Beyond Good And Evil'
and its infectious dub-funk B-side '3:38', released ahead of the
album in March 1979. The band would release one further LP, For
How Much Longer Do We Tolerate Mass Murder? on Rough Trade
in 1980, before fragmenting a year later.
lp/cd:
1. She Is Beyond Good And Evil (CD bonus track)
2. Thief Of Fire
3. Snowgirl
4. Blood Money
5. We Are Time
6. Savage Sea
7. Words Disobey Me
8. Don't Call Me Pain
9. The Boys From Brazil
10. Don't Sell Your Dreams
11. 3:38 (CD bonus track)
single // She Is Beyond Good And Evil
Review forthcoming.
7"/12":
A. She Is Beyond Good And Evil
B. 3:38
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