Before it was a recording studio, Cold Storage was a meat locker, its floors slicked with blood. But under This Heat's occupancy, between 1977 and 1981, the South London space became a laboratory for a strange and volatile new strain of avant-garde rock—by turns thundering and ephemeral, hopeful and wry, surgically precise and caveman-crude—that didn't quite square with anything else that was happening at the time. Their motto was simple: "All possible processes. All channels open. Twenty-four hour alert."
Two members of the band, drummer Charles Hayward and multi-instrumentalist Charles Bullen, had been playing in various progressive rock bands for more than a dozen years; Gareth Williams, the group's third member, had no musical training at all. That tension guided them as they established an exploratory practice based on extended collective improvisation that incorporated not just guitar and drums, but also viola, melodica, organ, household objects, and broken toys. They used tape machines to stretch the fabric of time and creative mic placement to warp space. They were fueled not just by formal restlessness but also by rage at consumer society—"Sleep," the opening song on 1981's Deceit, juxtaposes advertising copy with references to Pavlovian experiments in conditioning—and their certainty that humanity was on a nuclear collision course with itself. "That's why our music wasn't psychedelic and drifty, why it was so hard-edged and angular," Hayward told Simon Reynolds in Rip It Up and Start Again. "We had no interest in making people stoned with our sounds."
This Heat released only two albums and one EP during their brief run, and those barely registered amid the competing din of the period. But you can hear in their slim catalog, which returns to wax thanks to these reissues from Light in the Attic, the seeds of vast fields of music that would follow: post-rock, math rock, homemade musique concrète, and experimental electronica. This Heat did not yield a single signature sound so much as a zone of possibilities.
And that very range is part of what makes their music so bracing. Listening to their self-titled 1979 debut album, one moment you are lulled into a meditative state by the incidental bells and airy sax skronk of "Not Waving"; the next you're given whiplash by churning dissonance and muscular rhythms that anticipate early Swans, along with Shellac, Black Dice, and Lightning Bolt. "Music Like Escaping Gas," with its trembling organ, dissonant acoustic guitar, and chanted sing-speaking, could be mistaken for a rough Gastr del Sol demo, while "The Fall of Saigon" reroutes Brian Eno's wispy art rock through the Velvet Underground's funereal drones. The narcotic texture of that song, gloopy and atonal, stands in stark contrast to the lyrics' sly sense of humor: It begins by making a meal of a cat, and, by the end, the narrator has eaten everything that's not bolted to the floor, right down to the TV and the armchair. The fall of an empire has never been rendered in bleaker, more bitterly humorous terms.
The whole sweep of This Heat's project can be heard on the uncharacteristically optimistic "Health and Efficiency," the A-side of a 1980 12". "Here's a song about the sunshine," they sing over a major-key melody that prefigures Stereolab songs like "Nihilist Assault Group"; soon, they spiral into a locked groove of violently yanked guitar strings and hypnotically looped drums. The clatter of woodblocks and milk bottles adds to the din; they even mix in the sounds of a nearby playground before the eight-minute side dissolves into a detuned and deconstructed reprise of the main theme. On the flip, the tape composition "Graphic / Varispeed" is 11 and a half minutes of held organ tones that rise and fall like the sound of a single-engine propeller plane circling the neighborhood. Stylistically, its musical minimalism is at odds with This Heat's twitchy muscularity, but the intensity of its focus is absolutely in keeping with the group's unflinching approach.
Their second and final album, 1981's Deceit, doesn't entirely do away with the extreme sonic abstraction. "Radio Prague" is an experiment in mechanical pulses and cut-up radio broadcasts, and "Hi Baku Shyo (Suffer Bomb Disease)" is a kind of expressionist sound painting of a post-nuclear landscape: wails, church bells, buzzing flies. For the most part, though, the album marks a significant leap forward in songwriting. (Mixed by the reggae engineer Martin Frederick, it also marks a significant improvement in fidelity.) Deceit's lyrics encompass both acid critique and post-structuralist philosophy while finding poetry in the everyday, and its grooves are both catchy and strangely inscrutable. This band could also flat-out jam: "S.P.Q.R.," with its chiming guitars and close-harmonized chants, goes head to head with Mission of Burma's "Academy Fight Song" as one of the most triumphant-sounding protest songs of the era. The album's anthemic scale helps explain how This Heat ended up opening for U2 at London's Hammersmith Palais that year.
Thirty-five years later, the depth and breadth of their creativity remain both astonishing and incredibly prescient. On the tribal cut-and-paste piece "Shrinkwrap," their vocal multi-tracking sounds like the Beastie Boys via Monty Python. And on "A New Kind of Water," Deceit's climactic penultimate song, their sturm and clang presents a model for the haunted cabling of Sonic Youth's Bad Moon Rising. The song's title is a sendup of marketing, but it ultimately concerns nothing less than the survival of the species: "Fly away Peter, hide away Paul/ Who can watch as the Earth burns, shatters, and dies?"
For many years, This Heat records were hard to come by, though sporadic reissues and compilation features helped keep their legacy alive. Thanks to the new vinyl reissues and streaming, their catalog is now more widely available than ever. And yet, This Heat also feel further from the zeitgeist than ever. The sort of noisy, difficult rock that they helped pioneer has gone out of favor, and their electronic experiments have become second nature. But that resistance to faddishess helps make their music an exhilarating experience to this day, whether it's a first encounter or the continuation of a years-long relationship. What you hear in a song like "A New Kind of Water" isn't just intelligence; it's urgency. We've become far too accustomed to the 24-hour alert; today, This Heat's work is a reminder that we could use more possible processes, more open channels.
