Metal Box -- does anyone hate this as much as me?

More other: Jim Walker mentioned in an interview that there's also addtional material for First Edition. He talks about a track called. "You Stupid Person" that supposedly was to be the second single. According to him it has "one of Levene's most blistering guitar lines." In Walker's opinion many of the discarded tracks like "You Stupid Person" are much better than what was included on the first album. If these exist I want to hear them too.

It doesn't even sound like Wobble, anyway.

Reading this thread is depressing me - are y'all just flexing your anti-canon muscles? "Albatross" is one of the greatest lead-off songs evah. It has the otherworldy quality of an alien consciousness made flesh, simultaneously spacious and claustrophobic, sensuous and stringent. As a statement of purpose or level-setting of expectations it can't be beat.

Being able to find Second Edition in almost any record store in America during the 80s was a hope beacon for the disaffected drowning in a sea of spandex and glitter. And it still sounds as peculiar as it did then. People can brand Metal Box an arthouse joke, but there's a rigorous approach driving the music.

Compare it with The Flowers of Romance (which I prefer as an album overall) - they won't be mistaken for each other, and each coalesces into a singular statement. If you took any track from one and put it on the other, it would stand out as dissimilar. They aren't some random collections of sound farted out in the studio.

Certainly Lydon et al were pricks to everyone they met who wasn't stuffing blow up their noses at the time, but the same could be said of musicians from Miles Davis to the Beastie Boys. At least PiL pushed the enfant terrible schtick to the max, and made great theatre out of it - the American Bandstand appearance and the riot at The Ritz being prime examples. It's the lack of such chutzpah that reveals most current indie fux0r bands to be mere fashion victim cutouts, shadows of rebellion, when they reach the national stage.

(My EDITOR ought to be doing this sort of thing...)

-- Alfred, Lord Sotosyn (soto.alfre...), July 11th, 2006.

All due respect to you and Dan, but saying "that guy can't sing!" and "how tedious!" are two of the least interesting observations to be made about Metal Box and The Flowers of Romance. The latter is one of the most out-there breakup albums ever recorded.

http://www.yousendit.com/transfer.php?action=download&ufid=6F0D4EDC2718739D

Marcello, perhaps while he's cleaning up the "Albatross" paragraph, you can get him to help you with an entry on Edward III's theory that Flowers of Romance is the most out there break up album in history. I'd be extremely interested in reading that.

Still, I'm w/ Mark: "Albatross" doesn't sound a thing like Mr. John Wardle.

My first copy of "Commercial Zone" was a cassette, and this started with the instrumental "The Slab" as side one, so with that you have one long wait (until track three) with totally unfamiliar PIL music, ten minutes in and you could convince yourself there'd been a mistake.

Why?

-- Jesus Dan (djperr...), July 12th, 2006.

As Ned would say, we're entering ninja of the obvious territory.

-- Jesus Dan (djperr...), July 12th, 2006.

Guess I wasn't sufficiently clear; saying "that guy can't sing!" and "how tedious!" about PiL is akin to saying "Phillip Glass is repetitious," "Sonic Youth is noisy," or "The Beastie Boys are obnoxious." The band's making a clear + conscious decision to operate in a certain manner; observing that they're abrasive and difficult listening doesn't do much aside from pointing out the obvious.

Hope you're being ironic when you say something "sucks" immediately preceding an accusation of making lazy blanket assertions!

I'd say this was patently untrue until punk broke in the mainstream.

Maybe you were posting under another name and my quick skimming of the thread failed me, but I thought all of your comments were about Lydon's voice and singing capability except for one where you agreed that the album is tedious!

Is there really any reason that someone who heard an album once, nearly twenty years ago, can give any opinion that goes further than "I thought it was ok / I didn't like it"? I wouldn't be surprised if the singing and a sense of tedium are really all you remember, which is still pretty damn good for a couple decades.

Carol Channing was always more of a character performer than a SINGER and she was doing this in an arena where character voices are commonplace; I don't have a problem with her but she's not my favorite performer in the world.

Maybe you were posting under another name and my quick skimming of the thread failed me, but I thought all of your comments were about Lydon's voice and singing capability except for one where you agreed that the album is tedious!

2 + 2 = ???

There is a post upthread where I state that I didn't think PiL gelled until they released the generic album. One could deduce from that that I don't think PiL did anything particularly great before then and, due to the subject of my other posts, the overriding reason is because the people involved didn't know what to do with Lydon's limited voice.

haha xpost

what did THEY do with it on generic dan?

That said, due to sound issues among other things, I had been hunting around on ebay off and on for the last year or so to pick this album up in the original format. Well, that and I think the film cannister packaging would look really nice next to my other records and it succeeds as a conversation piece. So I started this thread back up hoping that someone had seen or listened to the reissue. Then I promptedly bought it anyway, because I'm dumb like that.

Admittedly, once someone asks to actually hear the album, there's no way in hell I'm going to toss on something like Albatross or Chant first since Lydon's caterwauling is grating and they're pretty tedious. Other points on the album really benefit from the looseness, though, and the stretch from Swan Lake to Graveyard at the core of the album (or as a couple sides on the vinyl, I don't have the breakdown of what's on each side handy) make for a compelling reason to not throw out the record.

Mostly, I think the instrumental arrangements are much, much stronger and support the stuff Lydon's doing vocally. Also I really, really, really like the guitar work on that album.