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Features Disc of the day
Contortions
Buy
(Ze, 1979)
Spazz out with the white savage of the New York No Wave and his evil accomplices.
Do you “do” angular? If you’re a British band of a certain age – let’s say mid-20s – chances are you do. In fact it’s hard to imagine you garnering a small profile and contrived, soon-to-embarrass photograph in the Radar section of NME without a hint of herk or jerk to your quirk. Perhaps you stencilled it off the first or second XTC album; or if you’re super-super-cool you own this, the most explosive, punky-funky spazz-out to crawl mangled from New York’s No Wave apocalypse. Granted, you’ll never grow the clanging steel balls of Contortions majordomo James Siegfried, aka Chance, a pouting, bequiffed crazy who channelled his rejection by the black funk and jazz artists he lionised by reincarnating as a Brundlefly amalgam of James Brown, Johnny Rotten and assault-saxman John Zorn, turning R&B on its head and eyeballing his audience until they punched him to the floor. But who could?
Buy remains Chance’s manifesto in wax, and from the stitched-together art-bikini of its cover star, it’s a record that revels in the joins, with Jody Harris’s sci-fi Jimmy Nolen guitar slashed by Pat Place’s randomized bottleneck blasts, and Chance’s uncontrolled saxfart offering another destabilising influence. Meanwhile, Don Christensen’s cudgelled drums ooze menace and stand-in bassist David Hofstra’s dead-eyed dub probing maintains its sang-froid in the face of Chance’s yelped exhortations to engage in gymnastic congress or admit you DESERVE TO DIE!! Because The Contortions are all geniuses of sorts, it’s brilliantly focused chaos, shunning the locked-in unisons of trad rock, punk or R&B but unerringly arrayed around an all-but-invisible funk source, building through nine tracks like an itch you can’t scratch until they climax (we use the word advisedly) with the mind-boggling india rubber lurch of Bedroom Athlete, the ne plus ultra of punkfunk, whereupon it’s time for a post-coital fag (as they almost certainly never said in CBGB). Soon, the Contortions would become James White & The Blacks in an effort to cash in on Siegfried’s kinda-charismatic avant-lounge lizard persona, but the Buy line-up would not survive to see the record’s release. Maybe you can’t stretch a band as taut as Chance did without it breaking.
Danny Eccleston
Posted by Ross_Bennett at 6:00 AM GMT 04/12/2008
Further Listening
Various – No New York (Antilles, 1978)
The Pop Group – Y (Radar, 1979)
Stump – Peel Sessions (Strange Fruit, 1987)
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