So this is what happens when you combine Marxism, art school, and post-punk London, 1979: A rickety, alien pulse, as made by a band that insisted on printing the production costs of every single on the sleeve. Scritti Politti may have spent the height of their career as the 80s' wooziest, most dubbed-out synth-soul act\xD1but they started miles and miles away from that, and this Rough Trade compilation of their early work can nearly break your brain. Singer Green Gartside even goes as far as adding an over-apologetic note to the package, calling its contents "structurally unsound" and "a bit winceworthy" and hoping you'll at least find it "interesting." And geez, Green: How could anyone not?
Because while Scritti appear here as a classic bass/drums/guitar trio, the music they're making is relentlessly mindbending. The early cuts aren't so much "songs" as they are tipsy Frankensteins that lurch slowly along for a few yards before falling down again. The bizarro scratching patterns of Gartside's guitar aren't so out-of-bounds for post-punk, but the way they mesh with Nial Jinks's lazy, dubby bass might be-- and the shifting tick-tock rhythms of the drums serve the exact opposite purpose of an anchor. As far as post-punk goes, it's as disorientingly "difficult" as anything the Pop Group ever did, and those guys were trying to be difficult. Scritti, on the other hand, start off sounding like they've only every heard three records-- by the Heartbreakers, King Tubby, and Aretha Franklin-- and they're just making everything else up.
Weirdest of all is the recognition that this is a pop band waiting to happen: All around the alien, seemingly random patterns they stumble through, Gartside keeps lapsing into sweet soul crooning, or steering the whole thing into the brief, sudden semblance of order. (They do know some chords!) The beauty of this collection is hearing how the off-balance clatter draws itself up into something so singular. By "Bibbly-O-Tek" they're scratching their way through a beautiful babble, and by "Doubt Beat" they've firmed up into something that could reasonably claim to have a "chord sequence." And yet in both cases, it feels just as uniquely off-kilter as it did before.
At the end of this set, you get the biggest transition of all: An absolutely incredible single called "The Sweetest Girl". The impossible drumming is gone, replaced with the slow high-hat tick of a drum machine; the trebly guitar scratch is gone, replaced with Robert Wyatt on keyboards and a dub-appropriate synth-piano part. And suddenly this band is anything but skittery-- suddenly you're floating in a zero-graving soul number, a creamy make-out piece emerging from the post-punk basement. Gartside writes in his note that this music is "evocative of extraordinary times," and it's in that transition that you feel it: A moment where rickety avant-dub could proceed without blinking into upscale soul and English funk. You can compare the first part to the Pop Group, or the Slits at their most outré; you can point out how often groups like XTC tried to tread on the second part (see Oranges and Lemons). But they're both big, big stretches: Most bands couldn't sound like this no matter how hard they tried.
