Post-Punk

So the last great band of the 20th century came out of the box fully formed and only John Peel really noticed? Our Mark E. Smith is wandering around taking magic mushrooms and boiling cigar butts and making the jukebox fight back. This version had Karl Burns on drums, maybe a little less coherent than he would later be, but still plenty rumbustious. Martin Bramah didn’t last long in the band, which does not obviate his nutty and springy parts. Considering the range of approaches in the post-punk era, it helps to remember that this music isn’t particularly aggressive or weird. The Fall take little scraps of known rock and then just loop them while Smith tells us what he’s been thinking about. They sort of cycle on in the background, grinding away while he reads his latest notions out. It goes on like this until the end.

Is this the hardest punk album of all time, or the hardest post-punk album of all time? Three friends living in squats (at least some of the time), the Raincoats took the DIY part of punk and left the rest. Their cover of “Lola” is ostensibly the Kinks, but four women singing “I’m not the world’s most passionate guy” does a number on identity. Eliminating the violence and aggression of punk means these four self-taught people made an album that has aged beautifully. Kurt Cobain loved it so much he wrote the liner notes for the first of many reissues. (It’s worth Googling those for the story of Kurt meeting Ana da Silva and going full fanboy.)

With actual Don Cherry along for the ride, this is the band’s most open-ended and appealingly shambolic album. No idea if this would please them but this album loops nicely as a kind of oil paint background, all good vibes and messy, chanty improvisation. The music is indeterminate but benevolent, a sort of detente between a Belgian bar band and the dayroom of an outpatient clinic. A very important link in the chain of bands (including the Velvets and Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Black Dice) that want to improvise around one or two chords. There are almost no straight backbeats–it’s all a bit more like drunken Bow Wow Wow on the backline. Neneh Cherry sings words, sometimes. Mark Springer’s classical chops on piano come through in really delightful ways, perfectly out of place.

Context doesn’t always matter—albums have to live in the world they find themselves in. Today is today. That said, come back to 1984 with me. John Peel has been playing the first Smiths single, “This Charming Man,” and for all we know, there’s a new Afropop band from Manchester out there, and they’ve got this chatty, deep-voiced singer. Then the first album comes, and it’s both confusing and vacuum-sealed: the music tracks the words so closely. The band follows an invisible wire and the singer seems to be reciting dialogue from some unpublished play about children in peril. There is no excess—some of the songs only give you one or two bars before the singing starts. Hatful of Hollow collects all of the singles from that time, when there seemed to be a new Smiths track every week. You get all the best stuff from the debut, plus wondrous things like “How Soon Is Now?” which makes tremolo its own drum beat and constitutes a genre of one: dance anthems about shyness that make you want to dance with other people immediately. If you’re still on the fence about Morrissey, listen to this just for Johnny Marr’s guitar playing, an ecstatic tangle of highlife and lounge jazz and country that somehow still gets called rock. Hatful joins the tradition of albums like Singles Going Steady and Meaty, Beaty, Big and Bouncy, compilations of singles that make perfect albums, which in turn prove that you don’t really need albums.

Where it all began, fine, but what was it? What Newman, Gotobed, Lewis and Gilbert did was pick up the rough branches of punk and immediately refuse to do anything obvious with them. Simple chords, easily understood words, and yet none of it seemed like rock or was reassuring or fun in any known sense. It was like some sub rosa sect had busted open the jukebox and learned all the hits of the Sixties and substituted discarded short stories for the existing lyrics. Pink Flag hasn’t aged half a day. Is Wire the most awake band ever, or just the most unsentimental?

The dancefloor dub chaos is most intense on this album, the rare instance of a British group equalling an American style. Funk is the base stratum here, though it’s dissolved and set on fire repeatedly. Mark Stewart comes out of the era as one of the most actually frightening vocalists, about neck and neck with Nick Cave in his Birthday Party era. This is nine paintballs set on fire and thrown against the wall of Tower Records. “When you’re stealing from a nation of killers, do I trust myself?”

Well, this is it—post-punk’s chart moment. My absolutely favorite thing about popular music is that nobody has any idea what they are doing. In the late 70s, a bunch of British label guys raised in the 60s saw punk/new wave coming and, just as they would 15 years later with grunge, threw money at anything that looked the part (spandex pants or a safety pin attached for this version of the cake rush). So XTC ended up on Virgin, where the hits don’t ever really come and, then, against type, after years of spinning out anxious fishing reels of tin foil guitar and carousel organ, Partridge and Moulding turned out to be, of all things, an actual Lennon/McCartney-level songwriting team. The band was also at an insane pitch of musicianship for their third album, sort of untutored rock chamber music, able to sound like they were playing backwards on “That Is The Way,” even when they weren’t. The rub for bandleader Partridge is that the tall and handsome first mate Moulding wrote the big single, “Making Plans For Nigel,” but heads know that “Nigel” wouldn’t have been what it is without Partridge rearranging the drum parts and leaving it all in the walk-in freezer of his mind. Why, out of nowhere, did XTC become a chart band? While also being completely of no crew? Too suburban and nerdy for the punks and too white for the dance crowd, XTC simply never did anything right but they did it all perfectly. 12 out of 10, this one.

You are indeed crazy for this one, gang. Why was post-punk a useful moment? Because you could actually turn your band inside out and nobody would look at you funny. Guitarist John McGeoch busts out of McKay’s shadow here with a shower of acoustic guitars on “Christine,” which is their most melodic single at this point. But there isn’t some kind of pop-friendly program afoot. Much of the album is restrained, almost spindly. “Tenant”? Spooky dub rock! “Happy House”? A hit, for sure, and the beginning of something that gives the idea of goth some psychological heft. They began to be actually, viscerally terrifying when they needed to be.

A perfect and unexpected way into post-punk and The Fall because this is the album where Mark’s love of dance music comes into focus. And what was the real post-punk? Dance music, and New Order went there straight away. Ah, you think he’s a grouch, this Mark fella, and then there he is very sincerely getting into the Manchester sound on “Telephone Thing,” an absolutely top five Fall tune. Don’t @ me! “Bill Is Dead” is one of Mark’s softer moments, while “Arms Control Poseur’” (a B-side, technically) is one of the rare moments where Smith bothers to insult an American politician. Great Craig Leon sheen—could have had about five more like this, tbh.

The t-shirt, the starting point, the challenge, the goof. There is so much mythos around this album it feels a bit like the smoke monster on Lost—widely discussed, rarely seen. I can’t speak to the people who find this album sad or this music depressing, as I’ve been listening to this since the day it came out and it’s always sounded hyper-charged and infinitely clever, more than a bit touched by god. The way the band arranged the bass and guitar and drum parts like some kind of bit-mapped version of Delacroix. The basslines sound symphonic, and the guitar lines sound like vibraphone parts yanked out of a Blue Note album. Stephen Morris plays every drum part like his eyes are closed and he’s never actually heard rock music but he thinks he knows how it should feel. Ian is an Iggy fan, intoning all of his weird ideas about love and society and isolation, and getting religion half the time. This is a rave-up, x-rayed. A true formal gem, every one of these songs a roadmap for ways into and out of rock.

Gareth Sager and Bruce Smith popped out of the Pop Group like lil kernels and decided to make a group that flew so far away from that calling them even post-punk now feels off. Along with bassist Sean Oliver and pianist Mark Springer, and most famously, singer Neneh Cherry, Rip, Rig + Panic began somewhere near Defunkt and then sprawled out into something much less coherent than funk and not really as theme-based as jazz. It’s very rumbly and friendly and squeaky, not unlike Neneh’s dad, Don, working in Sweden with large collective ensembles. It has aged beautifully.

This is it for pleasure and power. Not sure how many debut albums have ever done as much as this one. In the course of forty minutes, these guys co-created LCD Soundsystem, Metallica, and a half-dozen genres nobody has ever expanded on. Dance music, dub, metal, noise, goth—literally everything good is in here. (If you really squint, you might see some jazz in the corners, possibly a blues change here or there.) It is genuinely shocking how much these guys had figured out in 1980. Jaz, Geordie, Youth, and Paul Ferguson: the Led Zeppelin of their moment, exactly ten years later. Synthesists of the highest order.

Four young men met in and around Leeds University in the late 1970s. They liked Wilko Johnson out of Dr. Feelgood and Jimi Hendrix and James Brown. They had thoughts about alienation and consumerism, and a working knowledge of the Situationists. It seems like the time to form a band, but what kind of band? Should a singer talk about feelings or theories? What are electric instruments for? Why is music amplified? Why do songs have so many notes? Why would four people go into a room and play together? Entertainment! answers those questions by turning a rock band into a collective of four with equal roles and no stars: voice, guitar, bass, and drums. Somehow the band that lived to demystify created a machine that erases time and defies analysis. These songs posit that living and thinking and wanting and dancing are all the same thing.

The energy here is unbridled, and the lack of control has aged pretty well. Jim Walker’s drumming only shows up on this one album, and it’s well powerful. Less known than the follow-up, Metal Box/Second Edition, this is where the ideas all run into each other. Jah Wobble puts his bass further into the mix than any other rock, and Keith Levene used all the same distortion and chorus as anyone hired to play in Banshees, with much less intention or stability. “Public Image” was more or less the template for U2, except with a singer who wanted to reject anyone who might love him.

It’s worth pointing out that, of the post-punk cohort, the Bunnymen may have been secretly the most traditional. Crocodiles is a Yardbirds album cranked up and stripped back, most songs under three minutes. Ian McCullough was the most baldly emotional of his gang, and the Bunnymen always charged straight ahead. The new Mods, and wickedly tight songwriters.