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| Photo by David Altweger. |
More socialist art collective than conventional band Test Dept originally took shape in south east London releasing History-The Strength of Metal in Motion in 1982, the next fifteen years saw Test Dept keep up a ferocious work rate releasing, on average, an album a year until 1997 when the band decided to call it a day with the release of Tactics For Evolution. One of the early industrial bands, Test Dept utilised discarded industrial detritus in the creation of their music and alongside their writing and recording curated several large art events. Throughout the 2000s Test Dept members stayed active in the arts and in 2014 core members of the group reconvened producing DS30 to commemorate the Miner’s Strike of 1984-5.
In 2016 Test Dept:Redux played a series of concerts including Raw Power, these concerts continued into 2017 when material for a new album started to be played. Also in 2017 Test Dept’s name appeared as co-curators with Aaron James of the ‘Assembly of Disturbance’ in partnership with Ernesto Leal of The Red Gallery. As part of the festival Test Dept presented an exhibition, talks, DJed, performed a live soundtrack to film, performed as Test Dept and also, in collaboration with other artists, as Prolekult.
Last year saw more news coming through that long term Test Dept members Graham Cunnington and Paul Jamrozy were working on a new album Disturbance set for release in March this year on One Little Indian Records! In November the first new Test Dept track for 20 years, ‘Landlord’, was released followed by the album which lived up to any expectation as a superb piece of work, combining visceral, riveting, finely honed industrial music with coherent, well informed, incisive political polemic.
On Friday 26 April Test Dept played Studio 9294 in Hackney Wick for an ‘album launch’, the area around Hackney Wick station is interesting, seems like a post industrial zone that has been colonised by the arts, with the venue tucked round the back of the station. We get there at 8ish, cool smallish space, nice staff, the stage is intriguing, with metal frames, an old tyre hanging, something that looks like an old ship steering wheel but made out of metal. Sometimes you feel you’re at something significant.
At some point the sound of a bell chiming rings out, it’s the start of Shelley Parker’s set. Now I don’t know anything about the kind of music she creates but apparently she had an EP out on Hessle Audio called Red Cotton which ‘sees Parker combining her abstract sound sources with dance music-adjacent rhythms and club-ready doses of sub-bass’(1). To me it sounded exciting, mesmerising, engaging, nuanced and intelligent dance music. May well see if I can get hold of her EP. Excellent.
At just gone 10 Test Dept start, Paul Jamrozy is blowing on some horn/bugle thing, it seems like a wake up call and simultaneously reminds me of the Elves appearing at Helm’s Deep to stand with the people of Rohan against the forces of Moria. (Except in The Lord of the Rings the elves join up with a community aware of what’s going on and planning their next move whereas in Britain it feels like most people would be down in some cellar getting pissed and talking about football.) From the first track the music is controlled intensity, constructed to achieve an objective, form follows function. The crowd at Studio 9294 must be predisposed towards the message Test Dept are sending to be here, understand its importance, or they couldn’t endure this bombardment of the senses, most people here must share the same politics as Test Dept or they couldn’t withstand this assault. The four figures on stage move from instrument to instrument, Paul who had the bugle thing is now hammering on a huge drum, on a heavy duty tyre, now some scrap metal, Graham Cunnington is at the mic again, his vocals injecting even more tension into the mix, the percussionist moves to her left and starts hammering on somethings metallic, a fourth person is doing something DJish with a box of tricks at the back, and this intense, superbly constructed maelstrom of anger, horror and conviction keeps moving, forensically dissecting late capitalism, exposing it for the (hidden) Horror Show it is. ‘The dirt behind the daydream’ to quote Gang of Four.
We are looking over another bombed out Middle Eastern city, which one? Iraq, Syria, Libya? Have ‘the west’ and/or its allies attacked it directly or through proxies? Neoliberal capitalism in the form of a hyena pads relentlessly on looking for the weak, the vulnerable to isolate, rip apart, devour. A CAD style representation of a drone reappears emphasising their roles in modern warfare, modern surveillance. Refugees or migrants (does it matter? People) are packed into a dinghy that looks in imminent danger of going down, Can we imagine how appalling their lives must have been to have risked people smugglers, Libya, the Mediterranean in the slim hope of a crap life in Europe, are they from the bombed out city we saw earlier? Grenfell Tower, the word JUSTICE, protesters, and then a smirking Theresa May dancing on stage to Abba, Boris Johnson grinning down at us from his position of invulnerability.
I have to go or I’ll miss my last train, I gabble something to the merch people about how amazing the gig has been, I’m agitated, angry that the media has generally justified late capitalism's morph into something that feels alot like sophisticated fascism, agitated that I am complicit, frustrated that in all probability many of those who vote will again support a party whose policies have contributed to 120,000 excess deaths over 8 years.
I get on the train, sit on the train, still disturbed by what I’ve heard/seen. Two hours later I go to bed.
Bibliography.
Smith, M. (2018) Shelley Parker debuts on Hessle Audio with new EP, Red Cotton’ https://www.residentadvisor.net/news/42812
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| Photo by Bea Dewhurst. |
To accompany the release of Pre/Post: A Collection 2016-2018, a documenting of their first four releases (Louder Than War Records), Girls in Synthesis set off on a short tour between 6-13 April taking in Nottingham, Hull, Manchester, Northampton, Leeds and London (with a Brighton gig still to come). In an interview last summer John from the band discussed their approach to playing live with E&D commenting that ‘...We started performing in the audience at the end of last year, and the shows became a million times more memorable. If you were going to be critical, I guess some could level a “attention seeking/spectacle” charge at it. However, the results speak for themselves. People come away from our shows having felt something. That’s the whole point. Hate it or love it, we’d rather have a reaction. And that’s what we get. People have much better ways of spending a Tuesday night in East London, why not give them something to react to and, essentially, remember?...Relational Aesthetics was the idea that a piece of art was completed by the involvement/contribution of others-a ‘participatory other’ rather than a passive consumer. Is that what you are doing live? Transforming the ‘audience’ into part of the creative process? Absolutely. There wouldn’t be a great deal of point performing this music without an audience present… our music isn’t technically interesting, it’s pretty unforgiving and belligerent. I guess it doesn’t care whether you like it or not. But, as I’ve said, audiences do react if you give them an opportunity to. We’ve had shows where people will just grab the mic and start doing there own thing. We’ve given people our guitars and let them get on with it… we’ve only really just started touching this aspect, really. We often wonder what we’ll do when we play bigger venues or support acts in such places… but we’ll get round it. Playing on-stage for a whole show isn’t an option for us’ (1).
Their four releases have been ferocious, superbly organised bursts of sonic light, searing and invigorating commentaries on contemporary Britain, musically and lyrically capturing the intensity of late capitalism and its felt effects. Marrying this to a utilitarian visual aesthetic of army surplus shirts, boiler suits and DMs and with the approach to playing live outlined above made them a must see band for me this year.
The Waiting Room is a small, literally underground, venue in Stoke Newington, imagine a big living room with a stage at one end and a bar at the other, perfect venue really! Really nice guy behind the bar, knows his local music scene, the place has a good vibe. First up were Human Pet, I hadn’t heard of them before but from the off they were on it; tight, intense, intelligent danceable neo-punk, nimble cleverly structured songs. Clash Magazine described them as having a ‘scratchy indie sound...layered in grunge effects...The off kilter riffing burrows its way into your cranium (2). When you’re on at 20.15 and get people moving you’re good, and these are. Hopefully more on Human Pet at a later date.
Glimpses of the various members of Girls In Synthesis before their set confirmed that they are a real band and not a perfection myth perpetuated by some super sophisticated algorithm that had analysed my preferences and constructed an idealised match! On the back wall are a GIS banner plus the repeated phrase ‘We Might Not Make Tomorrow’, after a quick last sound check two mic stands are positioned off stage, the lights drop..and this is where it all turns into an adrenalised blur of white light and shadow, of band members careering off into the crowd, of Jim and John’s vocal interplay, of them using the stage as a physical launch pad, of Nicole’s thunderous drumming seeming to hold the whole searing, explosive thing together as she is both a continuity of, and simultaneously looks on at, bodies working hard to adequately express the immediacy and ferocity of the music. Somehow I find myself dancing about at the front which means about a metre from the band, two old punks appear to my left drawn in by the energy of something hard to pigeon hole but completely invigorating and euphoric. Tight, tense, creating a liminal space between what is and what could be, Girls In Synthesis were superb, a reminder of why music helps you to both cope with, and make sense of, life. How long were they on for? I don’t know...half an hour? Forty minutes? Long enough and not long enough, of course you want more, you always do.
My imagination had set the bar pretty high for Girls In Synthesis live, they cleared it with no trouble.
Bibliography.
(1)https://www.echoesanddust.com/2018/06/girls-in-synthesis-an-interview/
(2)https://www.facebook.com/pg/humanpet/about/?ref=page_internal
OK, I’ve never really experienced album review as journey before! But US punks The Briefs and their new release Platinum Rats managed to move me from initial response of ‘Heard it all before’ to ‘This is excellent’ in about three listens! I hadn’t heard of The Briefs before this album and we didn’t get off to a great start when I checked out their Facebook page and was confronted with a picture of a crucified figure’s feet-presumably Jesus’- with the accompanying text ‘We’ve nailed it’. Hostility towards organised religion in punk is about as old as, err, well, punk really but whatever you think of the person of Jesus (one of thousands of people who’ve experienced state torture and death through crucifiction historically and contemporarily) taking the piss out someone’s suffering in these days when cultural/political struggles over torture are still being fought seems, I don’t know, unwise? Maybe I’m overthinking...(and in all fairness it may have been a gig poster), but anyway it didn't endear The Briefs to me initially.
One of the hallmarks of postmodernism is ‘an eclectic mixing of styles. These styles can be from different historical periods and cultures, manifest in architecture, fashion and the arts...’ (1) another related aspect is the self conscious homage, the plundering of the past and the cobbling together of pastiche, on a first listen these were the kind of thoughts that were going through my head as an album that seemed rooted in ‘77 came blasting out the speakers, it seemed in danger of being a reproduction of a mythical musical origins story, punk as time travel, The Adverts meet The Rezillos!
BUT, you know what, after a couple of more listens and a bit more internetting I realised that ‘Yes’ it is retro, ‘Yes’ it sounds initially like a pastiche of early punk/New Wave but The Briefs are completely aware of that and wear their influences and admirations proudly! On their website their bio comments ‘The Briefs take the stage like commandos of the New Wave, retro zombies from the Disco Inferno’! (2). They know who they are, they know what they do-and they do it very well indeed, these aren’t just punk retreads/recycled riffs, this is a lesson in the art/craft of New Wave/pop punk (and that’s not pejorative)!
Platinum Rats is 12 examples of great songwriting, musically fresh and exhilarating and lyrically intriguing, the whole album sounds like one beautifully crafted melodic punk gem after another!
As the tracks keep coming you catch half heard glimpses of a whole raft of New Wave bands, (and even a bit of Robert Calvert vocals in ‘Out of Touch’) but it never sounds tired or derivative. The only gripe I’ve got is the lack of a lyric sheet because The Briefs sound like under that playful, not taking things too seriously, image they have some important stuff to say, track 1 ‘Bad Vibration’ ends with a sampled voice proclaiming bizarrely ‘Revolution, overthrowing the government, free sex, free dope, y’know, free TV’, on track 3 ‘Nazi Disco’ they take a swipe at fascism and white supremacy but all I could make out really clearly was the last few lines ‘I don’t need your Nazi Disco, We don’t want your Nazi Disco’...and track 5 ‘GMO Mosquito’, well I guess the title points to what it’s about but I would like to be able to read more closely what they’re saying.
OK we got off to a bad start but despite my initial reservations The Briefs won me over through the sheer quality of their songwriting and musicianship-in short Platinum Rats is a great album!
Platinum Rats is out on April 12th on Damaged Goods Records and The Briefs are over in Europe this summer playing Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands, if you live anywhere near one of their gigs try and get there, judging by this album you’ll have a great night!
Bibliography.
(1)Bowman, M. Herbert, D. Mumm,S.(2001) ‘Religion Today: Tradition, Modernity and Change. Course Introduction’. Open University, Milton Keynes. p.92.
(2)http://www.thebriefsofficial.com/about/
