Released
on December 4th, 1978, the second studio album from Throbbing Gristle,
D.O.A. - The Third and Final Report, is turning 45 years old today.
After the relative success of their debut album, Second Annual Report,
and it's follow up single, United b/w Zyklon B Zombie, TG were able to
finance their next album on the sold out sales of their first, which
they'd pressed in an initial run of less than a thousand copies. It
wasn't a lot, but it was enough of a fiscal foothold that they were able
to put a bit more into their recording process & production values
than had been possible with the first album, including some actual
multi-track recording and a colour LP sleeve.
By moving
beyond the mostly live recordings of the first album, it was an
opportunity to explore the band's sonic potential in a more controlled
environment. There were still live excerpts on D.O.A., but there was
more emphasis on crawling out of the murk and achieving some clarity
with their sound. They also decided to reveal themselves individually
within the context of the band, offering up solo tracks from each of the
four members. Peter Christopherson concocted a pastiche of
surveillance recordings and found sounds, Genesis plucked out a violin
based existential suicidal lament, Cosey invoked homey intimacy with the
sounds of children playing and a remarkably pastoral guitar, and Chris
put together an electronica tribute to ABBA's Dancing Queen.
Overall,
the album offered up a bizarre and rather disjointed collection of
musing and examples of their controversial nature. Death Threats made a
track out of their answering machine tape, capturing agitators leaving
their condemnations for the group. I.B.M. was a harbinger of
technological tyranny, E-Coli warned of a bacterial apocalypse and
Hamburger Lady, the album's crown jewel, told the tale of a burn
victim's unending torment. All in, the album may have been a bit of a
dishevelled assemblage of impressions, but it certainly held together as
an expression of the group's individual and collective obsessions.
The
cover photo and calendar poster, included with the first 1000 copies,
added to the controversy of the release by showing a young girl in a
potentially exploitative situation, deliberately left ambiguous by the
group in order to breed a sense of vague unease with the product.
Other packaging games included having the second 1000 copies of the
album pressed with false track markers (the "bands" visible on a vinyl
disc) to give it the appearance of having fifteen tracks of exactly
equal length and a short sixteenth track. The official TG discography
called this pressing the "Structuralist Spirals" edition.
Because
of the intensity of so many of its individual elements, the album may
be one of TG's most challenging releases, outside the overt rawness of
their purely live albums. It's not casual listening or background music
and, while it has moments of softness, they are shattered by
occasionally brutal assaults, or twisted by deeply unsettling dives into
bleak oblivion, so one must constantly adjust to each composition's
entirely distinct aesthetics. Ultimately, it's an album that manages to
touch on nearly every corner of the human emotional landscape.
