JAH WOBBLE - METAL BOX - REBUILT IN DUB

 

Released today! Jah Wobble's newest is a walloping great rethink of his magnum opus, Metal Box (plus a couple of First Issue bonus tracks thrown in for good measure). For anyone wondering what the point of this set is, why he'd tackle a reboot of such a classic monolithic slab of post-punk angular alienation, it feels like a perfect time to assess a journey of some 40+ years as an artist by taking his most iconic work and reinterpreting it through the lens of four decades of personal exploration and artistic growth.

At the time it was originally produced, Wobble was barely beyond being a novice as a musician. Yet his latent talents came to fruition with remarkable rapidity and his presence on the original Metal Box is essential to defining its distinctions. The album belongs to him just as much as to Levene and Lydon, but his bass is, unquestionably, the rock solid foundation upon which everything else rests. So he's perfectly justified in wanting to use those songs as a way to examine his past and juxtapose it against his present by "rebuilding" the songs that made it possible for "The Legend" to live on!

To be clear, it's not an attempt to replace or supersede the original in anyway. That's simply an impossible task and it's clear that's not what's happening here. What IS happening is Wobble taking the liberties he's well earned to present these songs in a fresh, updated context that fully integrates all he has to offer as an artist today. There are times when it stick fairly close to the bone, but then it'll freely fly off the handle in some unexpected way that makes you hear the songs with virgin ears. It's both familiar and alien, which is kinda what made the original special in the first place. It's a bit more "rock" than I was expecting, but not in a bad way. It has a toughness that cuts appropriately for the times where it finds itself manifesting.

I'm sure there will be some purists who will not see the point, but Wobble doesn't need anyone's permission to mess with his own legacy. His brazenness is part of why this ultimately succeeds as an exercise in using the past to remake the future.

NEW ORDER - MOVEMENT @ 40

 

November 19th marks the 40th anniversary of the release of the debut album by New Order, Movement, which hit the shelves this day in 1981. After the tragedy of Ian Curtis’ suicide, which put an end to the meteoric rise of Joy Division as one of the UK’s most respected post-punk bands, Movement faced the impossible task of overcoming the infamy of that sorrow while attempting to convince fans that there was still a reason for this band to continue under it’s new banner.

In a sense, it was always a no-win proposition to have to go up against the mythology of Joy Division and, in many regards, Movement wasn’t up to the task, at least for some minds of the time. It’s not that the band didn’t have it in them, as was decisively proven with their next album, Power Corruption & Lies and the mammoth companion single, Blue Monday. They most definitely had the ability to crawl out from under that shadow, but there had to be an inevitable transitional period to make that rebirth fully possible. And while the impossible expectations for New Order coming out of the gate doomed their debut to unfair comparisons, retrospectively, people have been able to go back and give the album a fairer shake and reassess its attributes without the weight of what had gone before.

The fact is that it’s a troubled album as it tries to come to grips with recent history, but it’s also true that it does so with a sense of steely determination. While there’s a lot of gloom to cope with, there’s light peeking out all over the place as the desire to move forward and survive burns determinedly from the very first song to the last. There’s sadness here, but it’s not hopelessness. That feeling died with Ian Curtis. This is an exercise in coming to terms with grief and finding out how to move past it and forge an optimistic future.

Even with that determination, there’s still a bit of hesitation going on here. The vocals are often buried in the mix and they weren’t sure who should take the lead, so the guys all take their turn giving it a go. It’s the only place where the album feels hesitant. It’s the first thing I noticed about it when I first played it when it was originally released. When you’ve got shoes like Ian’s to fill, it’s gonna be imposing for anyone to try them on. In the end, by the time the second album came along, they’d wisely set those shoes aside. But the vocal duties were not the only thing that needed sorting out.

The production chair was, by the this album, still held by Martin Hannett, but his relationship with the band was on the outs with Movement and it would turn out to be the last album he’d do with them. By this time, Hannett was embroiled in legal disputes with Factory and was crumbling in the grips of substance abuse. It’s been noted by the band that he was mostly uncooperative when working with them and the production may have suffered somewhat because of this. It’s not terrible or noticeable, for me anyway, but the band members have commented on being less than fully satisfied with the end product. There was even talk of re-recording the whole album at one point, but scheduling left that option in the dust.

Though it has a somewhat troubled genesis, it was essentially an unavoidable stepping stone the group had to take in order to find their footing again. I still find it a good listen and, these days, I can easily overlook any hesitancy in its execution. I tend to hear more of its positive attributes and the sense of survival that radiates from it. You can’t say they weren’t trying their best to deal with a shit situation and it still stacks up better than most other albums of the era.