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If I was making a compilation to introduce a friend to the work of Killing Joke, it's track listing would overlap with that of For Beginners by only three tracks, "Fun & Games", "The Wait" and "Night Time". Never before have I encountered such a willfully obscure selection masquerading as a perfect entry point to a band's back catalog.Caroline
Although compilers were possibly trying to avoid including tracks that appeared on the 1992 compilation Laugh? I Nearly Bought One!, which collected the band's UK singles, they could have used a title that better reflected the material included. The classic debut album, 1980's Killing Joke is represented by "Primitive" and "The Wait". I have a suspicion that the latter opens this collection due to the fact that it was covered by Metallica. While it is certainly a track worthy of inclusion, and one of the best on the 16 track compilation, Killing Joke does not need to use the Metallica reference as a way to gain new fans. By including stronger material, such as "Requiem", "Wardance", or "Complication" this early period would have been better represented. Had they included the excellent "Change", a UK single from 1980 (which was also included on the US version of Killing Joke), they could have drawn parallels with the "dance/punk" revival that is a current trend. What's THIS For...!, the band's 1981 second LP, is represented by a live version of "The Fall of Because" and "Butcher", a second-rate album track as compared with "Unspeakable" and "Follow the Leaders", also from that LP. It is baffling why no tracks from 1982's amazing live 10" "Ha" Killing Joke Live were chosen. That set was my introduction to the band in the late 1980's, and from the opening blast of "Pssyche" through to the end of the driving "Wardance" those six tracks of Killing Joke at their most energetic are still some of my favorites. The middle period of 1983-1985 is given better treatment here, with the inclusion of "Fun and Games", one of the best tracks on 1983's Fire Dances and the title track from 1985's Night Time. The reason why the same album's "Eighties", "Love Like Blood" and "Kings and Queens" are nowhere to be found is a mystery. The latter two tracks were each originally issued in the UK on two different 12" singles. It is hard to understand why tracks on which so much importance was placed do not qualify as recommended listening "for beginners". The compilation ends with two tracks each from 1986's Brighter than a Thousand Suns and 1988's Outside the Gate. The former was a mediocre version of past glories, and the latter, intended as a Jaz Coleman solo album, was only released under the Killing Joke name to fulfill contractual obligations. Skipping the inclusion of tracks from these two albums would have made room for some of the singles to be included. While For Beginners does introduce listeners to the band's sound, it does not include many examples of their best songwriting. I can only imagine what they might include on a compilation for "advanced listeners" (excerpts from The Courtauld Talks anyone?)
samples:
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With or without the visual context, Heresie is probably the least essential disc in Mute's reissue series, but is not without its share of interesting moments. Part one consists of seven studio tracks, most brief sketches, only three which could be described as songs. The emphasis is very much on the aesthetics of insanity, the band utilizing strategies of French playwright/madman Antonin Artaud. It was Artaud who created the concept of the Theater of Cruelty, in which actors hurl words at the audience, deliberately altering and twisting their voices to ratchet up the visceral intensity of the confrontational dialogue. Throughout this too-brief recording, Gavin and Guggi regress into infancy, uttering childlike phrases like idiot man-children, suddenly lapsing into inarticulate mumbling, or raising their voices to bone-chilling shrieks and stomach-churning growls. The record is framed by a pair of spoken-work sketches about someone named "Deirdre," whom the lunatic Prunes very much want to play with, it seems. "Rhetoric" is the centerpiece of part one, a seven-minute noise-rock maelstrom that bears an unmistakable resemblance to Looney Runes-era Current 93. Lupine howls and eardrum-piercing shrieks are pulled through an echo chamber as metronomic industrial rhythms and crunching noise guitar chug relentlessly forward. Just to enforce the pure insanity of it all, "Down the Memory Lane" follows closely on its heels, a wickedly brutal satire of Irish pub sing-a-longs, with the whole band adopting nasally voices for an inebriated paean to the "good ole days." Seeing as this is the only time the Prunes explicitly acknowledged their Irish heritage, it seems pretty clear they had nothing but contempt for everything that lay outside their Lypton Village bubble. Part two of Heresie is a live recording from a 1982 performance in Paris, a set of Prunes songs drawn from A New Form of Beauty and ...If I Die, I Die. Classic tracks like "Pagan Lovesong" and "Walls of Jericho" are given appropriately maniacal live renditions, the band falling all over one another in gales of perverse glee. It's less essential than the others, perhaps, but no less entertaining.
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It's rare that a group of musicians can start crafting a score for a movie about a famed clay animator, braving new territory musically in the process, and end up with an album that transcends every move they've made in the past. That it comes from Shark Quest is no real surprise, as they've been wowing audiences in/outside of their native North Carolina towns for almost a decade. The resulting music is an amalgamation of styles and features the band's first use with piano, synthesizers, and various types of unique percussion.
 
It's a particularly interesting ride as the album progresses, and the new choices bolster their typically schizophrenic shifts with new languages to draw from. This near-Faustian music experience started as songs for a documentary about Bruce Bickford by some other Carolina natives, and the band re-worked their sketches to fit into timed segments in the film. The songs stand on their own just fine, but listening to them it is easy to envision the master hard at work on his clay creations, and then see the lifeforms themselves come to life off the table and go to play in a whole new universe created just for them. Guitars frolic and roll over playful melodies, the percussion breathes a rhythm that summons all to follow like a monarch, and suddenly it's a world music festival better than any ever imagined. The seven-minute opener "The Rosetta Barrage" is perfect: showing a taste of the licks and chops while shifting style and rhythm internally for a mandolin break, then re-coagulating for the climactic conclusion. "Sin the Moon" heads into surf guitar territory with a gentle progression, and retreats for the same kind of reprieve with dueling guitars. Before long the mix is full of so many sounds you could almost go for a swim in the air. There's somber moments, livelier moments, and a touch of bombast, but for the most part these songs are just right, with variety in spades and a high listen again quotient. As much an adventure as it was to make comes through in the speakers, and takes anyone who listens along for the ride.
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EHC started, essentially, as a casual outlet for an undefined number of active, Boston-area musicians. Boasting current and former members of the Thalia Zedek band, Willard Grant Conspiracy, The New Year, Molasses, and even Godspeed You Black Emperor, EHC enjoyed a humble genesis, organizing around brunch dates at the home of central member David Michael Curry. Since 1997, the group has attracted over 30 contributors in the creation of moody, improvisational music that bridges the gap between the potent emotional directness of its parent groups and the recklessness and vulnerability of the live setting.Sedimental
This session, selected from the many hours of EHC tape archives, is a particularly melancholic trio performance from 2000 featuring Boston guitar-champion Chris Brokaw, cellist Jonah Sacks, and Curry, who plays primarily viola, but contributes splashes of horn, guitar and live sampling to round out what is still a rather sparse affair. Curry's viola owns each of these six extended pieces, and his style will be familiar to fans of The Dirty Three or Godspeed, with enough of a studied, melodic base to cover for his frequent drifts into trance oblivion. He sets himself apart by rarely locking into a repeating structure or calling on too "easy" or explicitly emotive phrases. Brokaw's and Sacks' strings make up a grounding layer of droning interplay, a seamless shuffle between quietly plucked harmonics, tempered feedback, and swooning runs that rise to match Curry's more exultant moments.
The songs borrow from the drifting, autumnal chamber style of Willard Grant, and from Godspeed's anthemic surging, but any references are never more than suggestions in the music, its intimate character leading always back to an unpredictable present. EHC's improvised doctrine places them in a territory as complex and difficult-to-reduce as anything I've heard from their closest comparisons. The feeling, throughout this disc, is an ultimate trust in the players' intuition, and when a track ends, miles away from where it began, never does a certain section feel neglected or the song led through aimless motions. This is a record for the new winter mornings, a treasure of golden amplification, rich string resonance, and playing that is powerful without wearing out its welcome; my hope is only that this debut signals more to come from what is surely an impressive stockpile of recordings.
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