Edgar Broughton Band - Edgar Broughton Band

Provenance: I'm reasonably conscious of the fact that to make points about music I often grab at comparisons. It's cheap and easy, but it relies on the reader knowing something of the artists I use as comparators. I've oft seen this technique used as a form of one-upmanship, a chance to preen with a display of obscurantism designed to dazzle the poor reader.

I realise I'm guilty of this, but in mitigation, I barely know anything. So when I hear wobbly, bubbly synth soundscapes I think "that sounds like the Alan Parsons Project", and when I hear dark, off-kilter psych I think "that sounds like the Edgar Broughton Band." Or more accurately, that sounds like Edgar Broughton Band, their third album, because it's the only album of theirs I own.

Anyway, I saw these guys raving it up in a BBC4 documentary on psychedelia so I bought what looked to be their most promising album. This is it, and I'm now going to review it, so next time I say "this sounds like the Edgar Broughton Band" you can scratch your chin and say "yes, of course" to yourself and feel a whole lot better.

(By the way, earlier in the week I was in a record store with a friend when a vaguely familiar song came on. "That", I started to chirp like the unthinking automaton I am rapidly turning into, "sounds like the Alan Parsons Project". It was Pink Floyd. Again, to defend myself, I'm pretty sure Alan Parsons was the engineer on the track in question.)

Review: I am always up for a good psych band, and the best I've witnessed in a long time was Kikagaku Moyo. What made them stand out from the other acts on the bill was their discipline. Whilst their support were content to meander pleasantly in the realms of sub-Hawkwind space rock, Kikagaku Moyo took a mentality of the cold-blooded killer to their music. That's not to say it couldn't be gentle or affecting, but there was no flab, no excess and they could turn on a sixpence when required. This aspect to their performance was almost as impressive as the music itself.

Likewise, there is little that's too loose on Edgar Broughton Band, and certainly compared to their lysergic-powered contemporaries there is precious little dicking about. Live, apparently, it was a different story, but by and large the temptation to wig out is reigned in. As an individual who finds the Grateful Dead and those interminable fucking 'Mountain Jam' tracks on the Allman Brothers' Eat A Peach albums the very antithesis of good music, this is most welcome indeed. (NB - I like it when good musicians stretch out; there's plenty in jazz, a good few electric blues artists who understand the push 'n' pull dynamics of tension, and I will defend Hawkwind to the hilt; but the prospect of Led Zeppelin 'jamming' a track for half an hour gives me happy thoughts about cyanide pills.)

It's probably a major dysfunction of mine that I'm mildly surprised every time at how much of a country influence is evident on what would have been side one of Edgar Broughton Band. There's a fair amount of acoustic instrumentation scattered throughout, and even some rather cornpone harmonica (though it is very enjoyable, I confess, I confess!). To undercut the rootsiness, there's also a sense of darkness seething throughout; 'Poppy' sounds like a druggy, pin-eyed 'Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?' and 'The Birth' is an unnerving slice of goggly hysteria.

The standout, however, is the majestic 'Evening Over Rooftops', which begins in a quietly unsettling way and builds and builds to a wild, swirling crescendo. The best aspect of 'Evening Over Rooftops' are the lyrics, which manage to be surreal and terrifying at the same time. I think what seizes me each time I hear 'Evening Over Rooftops' is that I can't recall another rock song with such an unsteadying lyric; it's like the most deathly of Anna Akhmatova's poems set to a kind of symphonic armageddon. Intriguingly, the backing singers on 'Evening...' are the Ladybirds, most notable for their frequent appearances on The Benny Hill Show.

Side two drops off a little bit, and although there's nothing here I actively dislike, 'Madhatter' grates a little with its rinky-dink Syd Barrett affectations. Still, there's more than enough to hold the attention - 'House of Turnabout' ducks and weaves nicely, 'Getting Hard/What Is a Woman For?' is another fantastic slowburn track with suitably bonkers vocal (points off for the horrible, horrible title though) and 'Thinking Of You' is a chilling, spiky cut of Brit folk (featuring Mike Oldfield on mandolin!), coming across like a dead-eyed Incredible String Band, or a twisted Planxty (minus the Irish brogue). Edgar Broughton's singing merits a mention, because it's hard and tough most of the time, and at times he genuinely evokes Till Lindemann of Rammstein fame.

Okay, so the album ends on a bit of a crawl with the surprisingly schmaltzy sounding 'For Doctor Spock', but its saved by its elliptical lyric featuring babies going on strike (the Dr Spock of the title being Benjamin Spock, the famous parenting guru), resonating with the environmental concerns that flit in and out of Edgar Broughton Band's music. Overall, it's a weird, disconcerting and varied journey through a bingo hall of early 1970s Brit psych, but rewarding for the sojourner. Rewarding? Bloody brilliant. Also, the bonus tracks on my CD are cool, which is never a given on these reissues, standout number 'Call Me A Liar' hitting a real groove.

The Silent Majority - Life Sex & Death

Provenance: A recommendation from the good people who, like myself, spend far too much time picking arguments with each other over the dumbest shit imaginable; music message board posters.

Review: Prior to reading the forum thread about 'great lost records' or similar, I'd never heard of Life Sex & Death. Yet the few posters who spoke up for The Silent Majority were so convincing, bordering almost on reverence, that I simply couldn't resist taking the plunge. I snapped up a copy without listening to a single second of music.

Why? Well, one member of the forum recalled them delivering one of the most scintillating live performances he'd been privileged to witness - and had begun the evening watching frontman Stanley jerking off in the gutter outside the venue. Another testified that he saw Stanley emerging from a dumpster and eating a discarded, half-eaten burrito. And we're not talking about a band on their uppers - this was at the height of the hype.

LSD were and remain a strange proposition - three hair-metal dudes fronted by a homeless guy who smelled like shit and affected psychotic breakdowns in the midst of live shows and interviews. Even if Stanley, aka Chris Stann, wasn't a street guy to begin with (rumours abound that he came from a wealthy background), he took method acting to its furthest reaches. Contemporary accounts suggest he really did wear dirty, ripped clothes, ate food from bins and slept rough.

What a tragedy, then, if this turned out to be some collection of fin-de-siecle butt-rock, or a gloomy alternative metal album about doing heroin and feeling a bit upset. The reality is that The Silent Majority is both of these things, neither of these things, and a whole lot more. It's a daring move to open your album with a live rendition of a torch song called 'Blue Velvet Moon' played on an out-of-tune ukulele; positively stupid, maybe. This rather inauspicious start is brought to a sudden conclusion, a thunderous drum fill kicking off the second part of the track - 'We're Here Now' - a real heads-down, diesel-powered statement of intent.

This approach rather sets the mood for the rest of the album; every time you think you've got a hang of LSD, they undermine what has come before; sometimes with black humour, often with horror, but always with interesting ideas. Track two is the jackboot-stomp of 'Jawohl Asshole'; track three is single 'School's For Fools', with a pop-punk sensibility that apes Twisted Sister's bubblegum anti-authority capers. Then we have 'Telephone Call', probably the best song that Soundgarden never recorded. It's an uncanny, elliptical number that, once it stutters into life, could be about a few topics, child abuse being chief amongst the candidates in this writer's humble opinion - and it rocks hard. The first time I heard the peculiar way that Stanley enunciates the line "you've got - a gun - I can't - outrun - I'm still that little boy, haunted by thoughts in the middle of the night" made me skip back to the start of the song the instant it finished. Bewildering, but brilliant.

Over the course of the album LSD touch upon a huge range of genres - including psychedelic blues, heavy metal, country ('Farm Song' is yet another unexpected twist), glam metal, grunge - and don't really make a misstep. As an hour-long survey of a transitional time for rock music at the dawning of the 1990s it's pretty comprehensive and superbly well-executed. A chorus can be so sweet, and hooky, complete with soaring harmonies, that one could be forgiven for thinking they were listening to Bon Jovi were the song not called 'Fucking Shit Ass'. LSD had the chops to pull of the extraordinarily heavy ('Train', 'Tank'), rousing ('Raise a Little Hell') and stomach-churning ('Guatemala') within the span of about twenty minutes without sounding disjointed. Stanley's voice plays a big part; beseeching, growling, yelping, lascivious, bleating and ever so slightly lisping, always embodying whatever emotion or thought he's trying to convey.

So, you're into the home straight, you've just got through the pummelling 'Big Black Bush', which sounds like Slave to the Grind era Skid Row and features a fun gimmick where the studio recording gives way to live sound midway through, Stanley leading the crowd in chanting the title of the song back to him. Damn me, then, if the last song on The Silent Majority isn't one of the most beautiful and tender piano ballads ever written. 'Rise Above', a delicate discourse on heartbreak, could and would sound like unbearable schmaltz in the hands of another. Here, in context, it sounds like the becalmed centre of the storm raging in its creator's brain. In its own way its utterly shocking. What a neat way to wrap it all up, eh?

Do whatever you need to get hold of a copy - The Silent Majority is the real deal.