BUZZCOCKS: A DIFFERENT KIND OF TENSION (1979)
1) Paradise; 2) Sitting Round
At Home; 3) You Say You Don't Love Me; 4) You Know You Can't Help It; 5) Mad
Mad Judy; 6) Raison D'Etre; 7) I Don't Know What To Do With My Life; 8) Money;
9) Hollow Inside; 10) A Different Kind Of Tension; 11) I Believe; 12) Radio
Nine.
Not too
different, though — same band, same label, same producer, and it's not as if
the Seventies were past us, anyway. On both of their previous LPs, the
Buzzcocks tried to be a little more than just a «punk» or a «pop» band, and
here they continue in the same vein, alternating between short, catchy, flashy
statements and extended workouts that thrive on glorious monotonousness. Not
everything is equally effective, but, hell, nothing can be on a record like this.
Indeed, the opening track, ʽParadiseʼ, despite
its declarative anthemic nature, is their least remarkable lead-in number so
far — no serious vocal hook, recycled riffage, and a minimalistic instrumental
break that just consists of moving the same riff up and down the scale a bit,
exactly the kind of stuff that used to seriously turn me off of classic era
punk rock. You might think they're beginning to run out of ideas, but no, this
is not the case: already the second song, ʽSitting Round At Homeʼ, runs a few
small, but nice experiments with rapid tempo changes, where the slow parts are
correlated with the grumbly nagging mantra "sitting round at home, sitting
round at home, watching the pictures go" and the fast breaks probably
correspond to the fast'n'furious brain activity of the title character. Nothing
great, but fun.
The band's experiments with minimalism continue
with ʽMad Mad Judyʼ, shot off at a breakneck tempo and, once the barking
lyrics are over, left with nothing but its fast, simple bass riff for a couple
minutes; they become somewhat excessive with ʽHollow Insideʼ, which is arguably
their most «Goth» sounding number so far, but completely tongue-in-cheek — slow
it down and get Robert Smith to sing it, and you got yourself a suicidal
mantra, but at this tempo it is clearly parodic, more like a mocking test of
how much time you can stand Shelley repeating "hollow inside, I was hollow
inside". I must say that my own patience got exhausted by the second
listen.
But honestly, the record really hits gold only
with the last two tracks. The title song, with its quasi-martial use of power
chords and endless list of robotically delivered nouns and imperatives, has a
certain prophetic je ne sais quoi —
it sounds neither too humorous nor too serious, but is easily the most insistent track in the band's catalog,
knocking on your door like a merciless police raid; they also put electronic effects
on some of the vocals, acknowledging the arrival of New Wave and the robotic
nature of The System at the same time. And then there's ʽI Believeʼ, whose
seven-minute length is justified by several different sections and an inherent
contradiction — on one hand, "I believe in the workers' revolution / And I believe in the final solution",
sung in a cheerful and optimistic manner, on the other, "There is no love
in this world any more", screamed out over and over like a slogan to a
solitary aching chord.
In between all these mini- and
maxi-experiments, there are some good old-timey pop-punk ditties about good
love and bad love, but we're not going to talk about them because they're on
the level of the «just okay» segment of Singles
Going Steady, not the «really frickin' great» segment. Instead, I'll just conclude,
with a modest thumbs
up for accompaniment, that the album fairly strictly follows the
Buzzcocks formula — and it's already getting a wee bit tiresome on the whole
and a wee bit irksome in particular places, but they still have fun ideas and
have not had time to descend into self-parody. Which, of course, implies that breaking
up instead of finalizing their fourth album was the perfectly reasonable thing
to do at the time. Ever heard Pete Shelley's Sky Yen? Had that been
released as a Buzzcocks album, that'd be one hell of a change, like an entire Beatles
record with nothing but ʽRevolution No. 9ʼ clones on it. But it wouldn't get a
thumbs up from me, nosiree, uh-uh.
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