Disc of the day
Bo Diddley - Bo Diddley
Magnificent late-'50s singles round-up that keeps on giving.
Features Disc of the day
The Aloof
Sinking
(Eastwest, 1996)
Not raving but drowning.
1996 was UK dance music's year of decadence. Away from the clubs, in the flickering half-light of British front rooms, the aftershock of the genre's hedonism had begun to manifest itself in an unwelcome dawn chorus of sickness, self-loathing, and withdrawal. This was not lost on The Aloof. Begun in 1990 as a studio-based operation with Sabres Of Paradise's Jagz Kooner and London club DJ Dean Thatcher, by 1995 they had - with the addition of Red Snapper drummer Richard Thair and Sabres programmer/multi-instrumentalist Gary Burns - developed into a fully operational live band, blending house, techno, dub and rock with the stygian trudge-beat of the 1994 Bristol sound. But it was with the addition of Ricky Barrow - a friend of Thatcher's with a self-lacerating lyrical style - that heralded the band's new direction. Recording in a converted Hounslow council flat, and fuelled by Guinness, marijuana, and acid the band set about turning Barrow's dystopic song fragments into an album. Visitors to the studio encountered a near-feral, sleep-deprived group, talking about how the world was crumbling inwards from the edges. "We felt we had to push back the barriers," Kooner told me in 2006, "mutate the formulas, live on the dark side, hit rock bottom."
Recorded for £18,000, Sinking stands as one of the few albums of the '90s that truly captures the epic drift of the dance scene's biblical highs and lows, songs of euphoria, oppression and claustrophobia, driven by the hypnotic melancholy PiL riffs of multi-instrumentalist and fellow Weatherall collaborator, Gary Burns. Listened to again in 2009, the roots of artists like The Bug and Kode 9 can be heard in the album's suffocating ghost-dub production and Barrow's visions of urban and mental collapse. "I will never be the same again," he sings on the album's tormented postcard home to self-sanity, Wish You Were Here, and those words contained a horrible truth. In the wake of positive reviews, the band embarked upon an album tour and set about obliterating themselves. "People were breaking down, crying, losing their minds," says Kooner. "We weren't going to make it as a pop band, and because we couldn't cope with the situation, we just got pissed out of our minds and took loads of drugs." The last ruined outpost on the thin borders between weekend excess and life-long psychosis, the worrying thing is, that in June 2009, Sinking also sounds like a retrofit soundtrack for modern, beggared Britain.
Andrew Male
Posted by Ross_Bennett at 6:00 AM GMT 11/06/2009
Further Listening
Sabres Of Paradise – Haunted Dancehall (Warp, 1994)
PiL – Metal Box (Virgin, 1979)
Kode 9 – Memories Of The Future (Hyperdub, 2006)
Previous Disc of the day
-
Bo Diddley - Bo Diddley
Magnificent late-'50s singles round-up that keeps on giving.
6:00 AM GMT 20/11/2009
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-
Isley Brothers - The Brothers: Isley
The Cincinnati siblings bed into their heavy period.
6:00 AM GMT 18/11/2009
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Lee Morgan - Search For The New Land
The trumpeter's most soulful excursion entrances MOJO messageboarder.
6:00 AM GMT 16/11/2009
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