A 2nd Shape, The Wolfgang Press (Downwards Records)
Songs of a Lost World, The Cure (Fiction)
The Cleansing, Peter Perrett (Domino)
The Wolfgang Press – apparently now also known as TWP – emerged from the euphoric tribal punk of Rema Rema and then, via an awkward and difficult post-punk Mass album, went on to make rhythmically convoluted and sonically layered music that as the band progressed became both more militant (the album Queer) and funky (their ‘final’ 1994 album Funky Little Demons). Since then there has been silence from the band apart from a release of some mid 1990s demos, recorded as a duo, and now the surprising news and release of a brand new album by the band, back to a trio again with a new keyboard player.
A sinuous, wavering, sustained note and mumbled vocals kicks off A 2nd Shape, the new album. ‘Look at those eyes’ chants the singer, possibly seduced by the snake in ‘This Garden of Eden’. The keyboard slides from note to note, percussion clatters and a slow bass and drum machine keep time. It’s seductive as hell but, like the rest of the album, it sounds thin and weedy compared to their masterpiece album Bird Wood Cage.
The band have always had a laconic feel about them but even ‘Take It Backwards’, with its insistent drumbeat and fizzing guitar parts, plods. I so wanted this to be a return to form but it isn’t, it sounds more like demos than 2020’s Unremembered Remembered did and despite repeated plays on various sound systems it remains mostly dull and uninteresting. I’d like to hear someone like Adrian Sherwood take it apart and reconstruct it again as a dubbed-out version: it desperately needs an injection of attitude and energy.
The Cure have also been quiet for a long time, although their career was a more meandering one than The Wolfgang Press’s, including pop songs, Robert Smith’s temporary defection to the Banshees, drug problems and side project The Glove, as well as the glorious misery-fest of their best albums: Faith, Pornography and Disintegration.
I was hoping for more of this kind of doom-laden, goth-tinged mood music but rather like TWP’s album Songs of a Lost World is a disappointment. The first track is muddy sounding and over-prolonged, totally lacking focus, and then on track 2 we get a maudlin piano soon overtaken by an orchestra. It’s also overblown and cluttered, and just as muddy sounding. Most of the album sounds like a karaoke version of later Queen to me, which isn’t good: hamfisted piano and histrionic vocals to the fore over plodding beats and a stew of sound. It even had me kind of wishing for the live antics of long-term bass player Simon Gallup, whose rock-god poses from a Cure live concert on TV the other night were both hilarious and embarrassing. As it stands Songs of a Lost World is Cure-by-numbers and a total disappointment.
It’s left to Peter Perrett, one-time singer and front man of very wonderful The Only Ones to create the perfect return. The Cleansing is a gently miserable masterpiece that embraces life’s darkness with clarity and precision. From the off, the declamatory ‘I Wanna Go With Dignity’, it’s clear that Perrett has his eyes on death; no surprise really, he often does. The music remains in sub Velvet Underground territory with elusive poetic utterances intoned over hypnotic and beguiling guitar.
With most songs around the 3-4 minute mark, Dark Lord Perrett is a master of brief, minimal songs. This time round it’s old age and not heroin that is killing him, but the now snappily dressed singer in big shades is ready for anything, and following the guitar wigout on ‘Mixed Up Confucius’, roughly halfway through the album, issues a last order: ‘Do Not Resuscitate’.
‘I don’t exist,’ he intones, ‘it won’t end well. If you get the chance don’t delay, send me on my way’. Certainly not if he can still write songs like this, songs about depression, shadows, despair and broken love. ‘Art is a Disease’ is the tongue-in-cheek title of a later song, telling us that art is an addiction for the rich, for others, certainly not bohemian Perrett who tells us he is still looking for a way out and that he ‘wants to make things crystal clear… you got to own the choices you made.’
When it comes to Perrett however, nothing is crystal clear except the fact that he is a musical genius and that, like many others, I wish he would make more records rather than drip feeding us solo albums, although I’m grateful for even those. The Cleansing is a dirty, secretive, dark jewel of a record, a mature and accomplished missive about the state of the world as seen by Perrett.
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Rupert Loydell