THE JAMS - WHO KILLED THE JAMS? @ 35

Released 35 years ago today, on February 8th, 1988, it’s The JAMs (Justified Ancients of Mu Mu) and their sophomore and final LP, Who Killed the JAMs?. Not that Jimmy Cauty and Bill Drummond stopped recording, but they’d go forward predominantly as The KLF after a short stint as The Timelords for their Doctorin' The Tardis hit single.

After forming The JAMs to kick off 1987, their debut LP, 1987 (What the Fuck Is Going On?) literally went up in flames, with all unsold copies roasted in a bonfire after losing a copyright complaint from ABBA and the Mechanical-Copyright Protection Society, who ordered all remaining copies of the album destroyed. After toying with the media by musing about their second album being a heavy metal cover of Deep Purple songs, in the end, the real album followed many of the same paths as the first one, taking samples from popular hits and reworking them into new pieces with drum machines, synths and vocal choruses added. This time around, however, the samples were a bit more stealthily handled in order to avoid legal issues. The cover of the LP shows photos of the burning of the first album with the front long shot showing Jimmy & Bill with the car that would become known as Ford Timelord, who would be credited with composing Doctrorin’ the Tardis. The back cover image is a closeup of the pile of burning LPs.

Though it was not formally announced at the time, the music press, based on the album title and some cryptic comments from the group, assumed this was the swansong for the JAMs and, in a sense, they were correct, though the group would issue the album Shag Times to collect together a number of singles from the era. Upon its release, Who Killed the JAMs? was met with generally favorable critical responses. Melody Maker declared it to be "divine nihilism", "an outward show of self-deception, irrationality and bankruptcy that worries and rejoices itself to death". Sounds thought the album "a masterpiece of pathos", referring to its "hopeless bravado in the face of massed corporate opposition", and awarded the maximum five stars. While the duo were still refining their methodologies and mythologies, the album definitely contains seeds of what they were trying to grow, with themes and hooks that would continue to resurface throughout the KLF's career in the early 1990s. Since its initial release, however, it has never been reissued except in a very limited CDr unofficial edition of a couple of hundred copies.

 

INFLUENTIAL ALBUM - LUSTMORD, HERESY

On February 18, 1980, about 20 people tucked into a compact basement studio in the the Hackney borough of London to spend an hour watching Throbbing Gristle invent an album.  One of those lucky few was a fellow by the name of Brian Williams.  After this event, he went on to work with SPK for a bit and then created Lustmord.  The first LP he did under this moniker in 1981 was decent enough industrial noise, but Brian had something more insidious brewing in the depths.  It wasn't until his appearance on The Fight Is On compilation in 1985 that this new direction would start to reveal itself, followed up and more fully fleshed out on his 1986 sophomore release, Paradise Disowned.  But it was his third album in 1990, Heresy, which would put into practice the potential he'd been building towards.

The fundamentals of ambient music had been lingering in the alternative music scene for nearly two decades with the likes of Eno and some of the German bands of the 1970s.  The KLF brought it into the "rave" scene's emerging "chill rooms" with their 1990 Chill Out album.  Lustmord took this moody, spacious aesthetic someplace else, however.  He took it into the netherworld, someplace dark and deep and resonating with subsonic looming and dooming frequencies that could conjure the most ancient Mephistophelian deities. 

Heresy wasn't so much released as it emerged from the darkness and the deep.  It barely contains anything even identifiable as "musical".  It's mostly a sensation of moving air and vibrations so low and deep, they're almost imperceptible while making you feel like the ground is swelling beneath you.  You can feel the hot, slow breath of Satan himself exhaling from these depths.  This is a soundtrack for lost souls, forever doomed to wander the catacombs of eternity.  In other words, it's fucking HEAVY shit, but it doesn't need distortion or thundering drums to pull you down into itself.  You can just let go and fall into the infinite abyss. 

Heresy set the pace for pretty much every Lustmord album that came after it.  Brian would go on to refine his approach to give it even greater breadth and scope in releases like my personal favorite, The Place Where the Black Stars Hang.  But it was Heresy that staked out that territory first and deserves the credit for inspiring so many of us to grab a torch and go spelunking into these caverns of sounds for ourselves.