Buy the Contortions!

Having listened to the whole album start-to-finish 12 times in the last 48 hours I thought I'd tell everyone what's great about it!

Overall, it's 29.58 long, which is still ponderous compared to 'Reign in Blood' or 'Replacements Stink' but snappy enough. Factors of coolness for short albums = a) urgency (to get product out? finish record before band kills each other?) defenestrates typical 'arc' structure that bands think is so mature and perhaps will get them recognised as being TOO GOOD for toiling in a stupid devalued art form like music and be given jobs scriptwriting for Disney by label heads - nah fuck that noise! Enough songs to barely qualify for a full-length release, get 'em out there! Plus these short records tend to end 'inconclusively' (trans. to listener experience = "Did I really hear that? Did it exist?" Like IDM - "are those noises supposed to be there or is the CD fucked?" The great thing about IDM is that now you can listen to EVERYTHING as a potential IDM record, for instance old spoken-word records from yard sales with peat moss and moldy raspberry jam on them. Extrapolating this you can get albums with actual songs on them and consider every single track a 'glitch!' except they're cleverly isolated and sequenced and not layered on each other!

"Design to Kill" - 0.35 - I think I hear "Girl from Ipanema"/"Shine On You Crazy Diamond" (heh heh) in there. This track introduces the dry funk gtr left channel/queasy atonal slide gtr right channel thing. En garde. The ascending diminished chords at 2.42 are cool too.

"My Infatuation" - More atonal clean guitar, with those whooshing sounds you hear from alot of 'downtown' groups. What is that sound, air being pushed through a sax with all the keys down? Are NYC bands' biggest influence those fast'n'bulbous garbage trucks? or do they hang out on the docks alot? The Contortions were like, let's see - a MIDWEST PERE UBU! Or, James Chance/James Brown = Bowie/Johny Ray(x)Bill Burroughs = Roxy/Stax. Roxy is soul all over, yeah. Pianos, saxes, luuuurrrvvve.

"I Don't Want to Be Happy"! Adele Bertei makes first big splash on rec here. Don't you think Thomas Dolby's "Golden Age of Wireless" is great too? "Windpower" = glam-electro. And "Europa" ("look at mah country na-ow")! Also, the very last seconds of the last track ("Cloudburst at Shingle Street") - the part that goes "In love with everything - EEEH! EEEH! EEEH!" with no accompaniment but a delay box or something - prefigure Radiohead's ENTIRE CAREER. Check it out if you think I'm exxagerating - anyway back to 'IDWTBH'. The right-channel gtr is really picking its own scabs here violently, alternating the requisite surfing with that plink-behind-the-nut-then-bend-it thing. Like Wire would've done if they had any SEX to them. Wire was the most sexless band ever, weren't they? The Trekkies of post-punk. How could anybody get excited over them? Oh right, they were into deconstructing sounds and stuff. But their lexicon of sounds is a crude photocopied flyer in comparison to the Contortions' hypertext! There's more DIFFERENT spiky gtr attacks in ONE TRACK by Chance's weirdoes than on every Wire record combined. Actually, let's all bag on Wire for a change. They're like punchable ten-year-olds. "You can't hit me, I won the Science Award and Top Bassoon Student nyeh nyeh - OW! OW! OW!" (Mr & Mrs Smith - "Mark, why don't you hang around with Colin? He's a very bright lad, he won the Science Award" Mr & Mrs Newman - "Don't worry if that nasty Mark Smith bullies you diddums. He's just jealous that he was kicked out of science class! And stay away from those nasty GURLZZZ they will hurt your studies") Plus the line "Once I figure them out they're a waste of my time" has more PATHOS than most. Except for maybe "I woke up this morning and I got myself a beer".

"Anesthetic" Now we're on the "Please Please Please"/"Man's Man's Man's World" end of things. More whooshing sounds. The bass seems tonally squamous and festering here until the ascending riff at 2.40 where it locks in with the keys. More pathos - "Eat all you like, I'd rather starve". The twangy clangy is really clangy here. A sound you don't hear much nowadays because every fucking mastering engineer is going apeshit with the compression and making everything sound the same for radio play, causing everybody to hate guitars, and I don't blame them but I think people who complain about how bad music is when their main source of music is the radio are dumber than a bag of shit.

"Contort Yourself" - far better than the 'disco version' that showed up on 'Off White', kind of a cross between "Express Yourself" and "Tighten Up". Speaking of 'contorting' did u know that I can put BOTH shoulders behind my neck and impersonate a Thalidomide baby? Try it, it's really difficult! Then again don't, you'll probably break your spine. I think Chance/White/whatever-the-fuck-his-name-is got the same thing of "Live at the Apollo" as I did - ie, WHERE ARE THE VISUALS? "There was a Time", there's these long stretches where applause bursts out for no particular sonic reason so obviously they're reacting to something JB is doing, and the breakdown of "Contort Yourself" is a(n?) heroic effort to address this problem by creating a sonic analog to the visual and integrating it into the structure but maybe they just wanted to bring the 'Breakdown' back into widespread usage, and unfortunately they failed because nowadays if the music stops for even one second then everybody stands around like a spare prick at a wedding muttering "Sack the DJ" etc., nothing must intrude on dance music ppl's bubble womb of continually undifferentiated steady-state flatness. Well if I wanted to be in an intrauterine state I wouldn't even leave my house, much less go to a club, but whatever yanks your crank.

"Roving Eye" - Slide gtr. Guitars are the only instruments that will triumph amid the imminent collapse of the chromatic scale (along with the rest of Western Civ), so take all those pitch wheels and stick them up your ass. You can't play and wiggle the portmanteau stick AND hold a cigarette at the same time so who needs it? BTW has anybody ever sampled this track? It's probably too late now, it's got a sort of vibe that would sound dated in hip-hop but is still years ahead of nu-garage's crayon-scribblings in this direction
"Throw Me Away" - the live version's better. For some reason this track seems really long even though it's only 2.40. Still, maybe it's the polyrythms. Tricky things those, as they either make a track seem hypnotic and propulsive or just really really long, I imagine the idea is to achieve both so the latter effect intensifies the former, so an inverse correlation between length and propulsion sometimes works in a physics-defying manner here, but at least unlike 'Remain in Light' (which I still like) it doesn't sound like they got the idea from their community college drum workshop. "Born Under Punches" - I just CANNOT get into that track no matter how I try! "Look, here's cross-rhythms!""Oh, I thought you had orthopedic shoes on"

"Twice Removed" - I love this. Dry noir. Looking forward in time to Big Black's "Bad Penny" and Brainbombs' "Drive Around" ("For fifty bucks your ass is mine!" cf. Rorty's use of the word 'sadism' - ah, now THAT's what I like about being a privileged member of late capitalist society. Call me Brother Marquis - ref. 2 Live Crew, sampling "Ain't Talkin' 'bout Love" for "The Fuck Shop" is more revealing/interesting/multilayered etc. than anything the Pet Shop Boys ever did, but then an unreconstructed 'sadist'/heterosexist WOULD say that wouldn't they?) More guitar greatness on the right channel at 1.54! The same sort of theremin-simulator thing (NOT "theremin on reverb", whatever the hell that is, Mr I-won't-answer-dave-q's-question-on-rockcritics.com-probably-cuz-it-struck-a-nerve Robert "should NEVER attempt to use gearhead/muso terms EVER" Christgau. BTW the question was "How does it feel that all the albums you gave an A+ in the 70s are forgotten and all the bands you hated are still massively popular and succesful?" Which he answered with some shit about - oh I don't fucking know, made about as much sense as my drummer. Plus he said he 'liked the Crass for putting James Chance in the hospital'. Oh you're such a tough guy. Do this crit-weiners play up the stormtrooper act for obvious nerdy reasons, or because they're afraid of getting beat up themselves? Either way, it's contemptible) as Slayer would use later, except it's sounds a lot more abrasive WITHOUT all that distortion and wall of Marshalls.

"Bedroom Athlete". Use a pump, or use a stump. Mine's electrocuted.