alex maiolo wrote:S.E.
I'm surprised you haven't put in a plug for your namesake.
Metal Box is a psychedelic record in many ways:
It's disorienting
It mimics a drug induced haze
It breaks some essential pop music rules
That's why I love it. It's hard to listen to Poptones and walk in a straight line.
-A
I thought I already had...not sure though. I do know I mentioned Tricky's
Pre-Millennium Tension and compared that to
Metal Box (and there are similarities in tone). I've drooled over
Metal Box enough times by now to feel slightly embarrassed about doing so, but...
All right. This record is pure misanthropic hatred coming together and separating like light through a spectrum in these ways:
1) Jah Wobble's bass sound is oceanic. It takes over your mind. No one sounded like this before or after. It is huge, subsonic, possibly downtuned; dub bass, except subtly demonic in its delusional repetition and persistence - which is the scariest evil of all. Wobble uses Ampeg basses and bass amps. I saw a cheap Series 10 Ampeg copy bass and seriously deliberated buying the damn thing for a long time before someone else did. Eastwood's reissue of the Ampeg AEB-1 bass is on my instrument wish list simply because of the Wobble connection; I want that sound.
2) Keith Levene's guitar and synth stylings expose and extend the pulsing hatred inherent in Wobble's basslines; the Wobble sound is kind of like evil being held in check, while the Levene sound on guitar is that of someone completely losing their shit, expressed musically, and the Levene synth is the sound of an anxiety attack.
3) John Lydon verbalizes the hatred the music embodies, and vocalizes accordingly; his most lyrically harrowing performances are to be found here without question.
4) The drums drum along. They're solid and low-pitched. Many drummers were used for the sessions. I particularly like the oh-so-disco drumming from Dave Humphrey on "Albatross" and "Swan Lake" and dig all of Richard Dudanski's contributions (about half of the record). Levene drummed on "Poptones" despite never having really played drums before; you can hear it, but he keeps time - really abuses the ride and crash cymbals. Martin Atkins changed the beat when he played it live, for the better - way more fluid and groovy - but the studio version kind of
wavers in and out...the mix on that track is nuts, there are at least seven or eight guitar overdubs on that track all playing variations of the same thing, and not like Bruce Springsteen overdubbing a dozen guitar tracks on "Born To Run". It sounds like each guitar track was recorded or played in a slightly different way each time and then mixed down accordingly. The song fucks with your head.
5) Pretty much every song on here is brilliant; there is only one song I'm not absolutely nuts about and that's Bad Baby, which is great but meanders. It feels much more like a directionless jam that just happens to be great than the other tracks do, even though they all pretty much came about under drug-induced, directionless jamming.