VINYL OF THE MONTH

Pere Ubu Trouble on Big Beat Street (Cherry Red)

TUESDAY 27^TH JUNE 2023

I wake up around 11.00, get outta bed around 12.00.

Some rock bands base their career around being musically fluid, an ever-changing what-will-they-do-next? conundrum. Others, such as, famously, Motörhead and The Ramones, simply go on doing their thing, honing it, repeating ad infinitum, with an almost zen devotion. The results, at their best, are vigorously on-point.

Just before the encore, the crowd is finally warmed up and dancing. It took a while, but hands are now in the air, middle-aged bodies are shifting about, muscle memory of MDMA nights in the last century.

Orbital, one of the great electronic dance acts, had a run of albums during the 1990s that encapsulate that decade in the UK (at least, for those willing to ignore the historical revisionism around tired, retro-tastic Britpop by the same media "arbiters of taste" who invented it).

Welcome to the final theartsdesk on Vinyl of 2022 which is topped off by two Vinyl of the Months, one there for seasonal jollies and the other for musical adventurousness. As ever, the rest runs the gamut from reissues of albums from decades ago to the most contemporary, cutting edge music around. Dive in!

CHRISTMAS VINYL OF THE MONTH

Various The Muppet Christmas Carol (Walt Disney)

Want an antidote so forced seasonal cheer and the catchiness of Christmas pop? How about some almost entirely atonal drone, clatter and throb with titles like “Fish Death”, “Tales for Violent Days” and “Dissonance Émancipee”?

The chorus to Working Men’s Club’s song “Money is Mine” usually runs, “Endless depression, it’s time/Suicide is yours when the money is mine.” Presented as the penultimate song of their set, frontman Syd Minksy-Sargeant distils this. Grim-faced, his hand twisting about under his tee-shirt as if suffering from an untenable itch, he spits “endless depression” and “suicide” into the mic on a jarring loop, backed up every inch by harsh, dark, techno-adjacent battering. It’s a moment that sums the night up.

Carl Cox is one of the key DJs of his generation, the generation that propagated the club culture which blossomed from the European acid house/rave scene (and originally, of course, from black American house and techno).

The Oslo World organisers are at pains to point out that, despite the name, they are not a “world music” festival. And with good reason, really. There may have been a few familiar WOMAD veterans headlining over the week-long event – Senegal’s Youssou N’Dour, Malie's Fatoumata Diawara, the queen of Cuba Omara Portuondo – but the emphasis was emphatically not on any kind of beads-and-bongoes authenticity.