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Walls’ Alessio Natalizia presents the best instalment of woozy post-industrial music yet under his Not Waving moniker. Proceeding a handful of excellent and low-key cassette releases, he channels a wealth of analogue machine sounds into a dusty, swirling space shimmering with cosmic pads and urged on by throbbing arpeggios and classic drum machine patter. Most importantly, there’s a real soulful, emotive essence to his arrangements, scanning out from the misty-eyed stargazer ‘Power Source Above Beam Line’ and the luscious vision of ‘Mathematical Mind’ to Goblin-esque synth runs in ‘Future Rain’, and bittersweet AFXian chords on ‘mental Means Alone’, whilst exposing his darker side with the tormented atmospheres of ‘Defensive Function’ and a yearning dancefloor spirit in the EBM/Industrial rocket ‘Double Blind’.

Blackest Ever Black presents to you Dead Unique, an album by Officer! recorded in 1995 but — outrageously, inexplicably — never before released into the public domain. This then is not a reissue or a revival; it’s a new record that just happens to have been maturing in the cask for, oh, a little shy of 20 years. It also happens to be a lost classic of English art-rock, and the crowning achievement in the career of its mercurial creator, Mick Hobbs. Londoner Hobbs’ roots are in the fecund RIO scene of the late ’70s and early 1980s, initially as guitarist in The Work (alongside Bill Gilonis, Rick Wilson and Henry Cow’s Tim Hodgkinson), and subsequent related groupings The Lowest Note, The Lo Yo Yo, and The Momes. Over the course of the decade he became closely associated with This Heat and their Cold Storage studio in Brixton. Officer! — the project that this incorrigible collaborator and connector calls his own — surfaced in 1982 with a cassette tape entitled Eight New Songs By Mick Hobbs. It marked the blossoming of a singular writer and improviser, with a gift for plangent melody, ingenious arrangement and lyrics at once caustic and courtly, playful and profound (two songs from this tape, “Life at the Water’s Edge” and “Dogface,” have been remastered for a forthcoming limited edition 7″ release on Blackest Ever Black). The Cold Storage-recorded Ossification LP arrived a year later, followed by Cough (1985) and Yes Yes No No Yes No Yes (1988). Megaphone Records, responsible for Ossification’s recent 30th anniversary reissue, rightly describe it as “one of the most unusual, pleasurable and character-filled ‘pop’ records anyone has heard — a timeless anomaly in the history of recorded music.” By the start of the 1990s Hobbs had joined Jad Fair’s Half Japanese. In the early months of ’95, Half Japanese were in Baltimore to record their Hot LP; Hobbs stayed on to cut the bulk of the songs that comprise Officer!’s Dead Unique — songs drawn from a rich store of material written and refined in the seven years since the band’s last outing — with a talented assemblage of local and visiting musicians. Returning to the UK, Hobbs brought the tracks to producer Julia Brightly to mix at her 16-track home studio in Bethnal Green; by the end of the summer, Dead Unique had taken shape. And then? Nothing. For reasons that no one, least of all Hobbs, can remember, Dead Unique was shelved, all but forgotten about until 2012, when Blackest Ever Black chanced upon it while trawling the Officer! archive maintained for Hobbs by Andrew Jacques. Finally, rightfully, this album is available to all for the very first time. A complex but thrillingly immediate avant-pop song cycle that charms and confounds at every turn, Dead Unique will give immense pleasure not only to Officer!’s existing cult following, but to anyone with an appreciation of piquant, idiosyncratic songcraft — fans of Kevin Ayers, Flaming Tunes, Art Bears, Woo, Dislocation Dance, R. Stevie Moore, Robert Wyatt, Cleaners From Venus, Lol Coxhill or The Monochrome Set should especially pay attention. It touches upon ragged-raw rock ‘n roll, sumptuous chamber music, pastoral folk, blowsy prog-jazz and paranoid dub-space, effortlessly shifting from skronking abstraction to rousing harmonic refrain and back again. The tension between composition and improvisation is key to the LP’s power, with Hobbs abetted by an extraordinary supporting cast that includes Tim Hodgkinson (bass clarinet), Pleasant Livers’ Fred Collins (vocals), Legendary Pink Dots’ Patrick Q (violin), filmmaker/animator Martha Colburn (vocal), Gilles Rieder (drums), Jad Fair (vocals) and Jason Willett (bass, keyboards, trumpet). Special mention must go to John Dierker, whose superbly expressive clarinet and saxophone parts are a fixture throughout, and to Joey Stack, who takes lead vocals on “Good” and the show-stopping “Elephant Flowers.” Nonetheless, it is the voice of Hobbs — as principal writer, performer and protagonist of these songs — that resonates most powerfully. Blurring the roles of storyteller, poet and prankster, he turns memorable line after memorable line, booby-trapping them with mischievous puns, fleet-footed literary allusions, sudden digressions and shifts of register, nonsense rhymes and other wordplay. But his acute wit and flair for the absurd is moored by a deep romantic sensibility, and though it delights in the minutiae of the human comedy, Dead Unique ultimately addresses its biggest themes: love, loss, commitment, independence, the mutability and inconstancy of all things.

Repressed, originally released for Record Store Day 2014. Munster Records presents, in a co-release with Discos Alehop!, the first vinyl reissue of the two official singles of British band ‘O’ Level: “East Sheen” (recorded in November 1977 and released on Psycho) and The Malcolm EP (recorded in December 1978 and released by the Kings Road label). This compilation also includes three tracks from February 1979 never released on vinyl before, plus a rawer alternative version of “East Sheen” dating from March 1978. ‘O’ Level was created in 1976 by London guitarist Ed Ball along with two friends from school, the Bennett brothers (John on drums and Gerard on bass), who would leave the band in March 1978. That same line-up plus Dan Treacy (another school friend of Ball’s) recorded the first Television Personalities single in 1977, titled 14th Floor. ‘O’ Level self-released that same year a first single which included three tracks strongly influenced by punk’s energy (Buzzcocks and Undertones guitars and melody on “East Sheen”) and attitude (with ironic comments about fake punks on “Pseudo Punk”), but all of it as if seen from a distance, outside a decadent scene which had already been absorbed by the establishment. The single also features a sort of homonymous anthem called ”O’ Levels.” As a record collector anecdote, there are two versions of the single with different covers, which go for very high prices. Ed Ball, DIY superhero, returned in late 1978 with four more hits, displaying a sound more oriented towards ’60s pop but with the new wave spirit of the time. On this occasion, he was accompanied on bass, drums, and backing vocals by… himself, Ball played everything! The single, titled The Malcolm EP, contains a new hit in “homage” to Malcolm McLaren, “We Love Malcolm”; a portrait of the scene, “Everybody’s on Revolver Tonight” (where the pseudo punks and part-time punks make another appearance); and two tracks with ’60s melodies: “Leave Me Alone” (with a very Love-esque chorus) and “Stairway to Boredom” (pure new wave sound). But Ed Ball’s music career didn’t end with this second single. After recording three more tracks in February 1979, which have never been released on vinyl until now, he continued developing the same strand of wonderful pop through the ’80s and ’90s with bands such as Teenage Filmstars, Television Personalities, The Times, and many more, ending with four records as a solo artist. ‘O’ Level was Ed Ball, a passionate pop artisan who deserves to be rediscovered.

File Under: Punk
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