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

-- 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.

After the Sex Pistols, Lydon could've done anything he wanted, including hiring the best session musicians he could find (as he did later on Album Generic PiL). He didn't, and that was a clear and conscious decision as much as hiring trained musicians was. Lydon wasn't just some idiot on the loose in the studio. He's a smart guy, and he had some definite ideas about what he wanted to get done and how he was going to go about doing it. They all involved purposefully violating most of the common practices of musical decency and good taste, however.

I'm not a tonedeaf nincompoop; matter of fact it irritates when Nelly Furtado or Ashelee Simpson or whoever is singing out of tune on national television. But that's because of the context, as you point out w/ Carol Channing. The point of those PiL albums was to explore chance, purposeful incompetence, experimentation, abrasiveness, and dissonance.

They had to be on to something - people are still listening to and analyzing these records today, and that's based on more than just Lydon's cult of personality (at least, it is for me).

Even at the time the records had quite an impact, and not just among the scuzzy punk rabble, because of Lydon's decisions. Example: He kicked out the engineer assigned to Flowers of Romance because he could tell the tape op was an able, competent, knowledgeable, thinking person who was willing to take chances and work unconventionally. Result? Phil Collins later hired as an engineer the tape op that Lydon had personally raised the profile of; he wanted that same exquisitely massive drum sound (sidenote: Dan, don't ever listen to Flowers of Romance - it makes Metal Box sound like Gaucho). Jah Wobble had never played bass before Lydon tapped him for PiL. Result? Kate Bush purchased Wobble's bass rig because she wanted that huge sound he became famous for.

Even saying "I can't sing for shit but I've got something interesting to say so I'm just gonna do it" is a clear and conscious decision (as opposed to saying "I don't know how to sing, I'm going to take lessons until I'm good enough" or "I don't know how to sing I'm just going to stay off the stage") - though it seems to be one you don't approve of. If you disagree with the underlying conceptual framework of those PiL albums, then yeah, of course you're going to hate them. That doesn't mean there weren't concepts behind them.

From a percussive standpoint, I think Dan would like Flowers far more than Metal Box/Second Edition

"Metal Box" is a colossal record for me personally, as is "Flowers of Romance". Won't hear a word against them -- would that more people made records this audacious. I remember there being a little cottage industry of offshoot bands -- the Basement 5 and the Bollock Brothers, for instance -- but somehow rock never picked up on this strand, this sound. People might say My Bloody Valentine came close, or PRML SCRM. But those bands are dreamy-romantic or adolescent-commercial in comparison. Nobody matches the utter don't-give-a-fuck nihilism of "Metal Box", and I think that attitude also becomes a sound that nobody matches.