"Citizen Zombie", the first single in nearly thirty-five years by the Bristol post-punk band the Pop Group, opens with a blast of abrasive industrial static, which grows louder and wirier as it surges into the martial stomp of the song’s chorus. Bruce Smith’s guitar traces sharp, barbed pendulum arcs as synths blaze like welding torches, and Dan Catsis’s bass scours the low end, as though attempting to dig its way out. Over the assembly-line clangor, the familiar atonal caterwaul of Pop Group mainstay Mark Stewart rings out. The whole thing sounds like a factory that churns out other factories.
I wish I meant that to be a compliment; these are sounds they’ve been toying with ever since the quartet blazed out of Bristol in '77, after all. But "Citizen Zombie", like much of the album that follows, is overcrowded, overserious, oversold. Less dissent than just din and distraction, it’s closer to mid-2000s dance-punk or to early-1990s post-NIN industrial than late-1970s post-punk. Perhaps because they were more a singles band than an album band—although what a single "She Is Beyond Good and Evil" is!—the band never enjoyed the sizable cult following of the Fall, Wire, or Gang of Four. Yet they remain influential for their ingenious combination of various genres: As Simon Reynolds wrote in Rip It Up and Start Again, "The genius of the Pop Group lay in the way they were pulled every which way by their passion for black music. They couldn’t settle on just reggae, or just funk, or just jazz, so they went full throttle for all three simultaneously."
A band that relies on friction to define itself cannot survive long, and by the time they released their third album, We Are Time, in 1980, the Pop Group had exploded in a mushroom cloud of internal conflicts and legal wrangling, to be replaced by splinter groups like Maximum Joy, Pigbag, and Rip Rig + Panic. In 2010, the band rose from the dead, with the original members performing a string of reunion shows that lead, sadly but inevitably, right up to Citizen Zombie.
Both musically and lyrically, the album is a mess. They were never the most politically nuanced band of their era, but the bluntness of the message often worked in sharp contrast to the antagonism of their music. So many years later, both the music and the message have lost their impact, and the Pop Group have become the ultimate zombie band: They’re back from the dead with no real purpose or direction, and they’re just stumbling around dumbly.
Lyrically, Stewart has taken to repetitive sloganeering, shouting "citizen zombie" or "deny everything" like he’s clobbering us over the head. He sounds reasonably believable rattling off an anti-consumerist monologue on "Nations", but elsewhere he seems to have regressed. The title track grates, not only because the undead have long been deployed as metaphors for everything from the Moral Majority to the military industrial complex, but because Stewart doesn't even stay on message. Soon he’s telling us "you’ve got the brainwashed look of an alien abductee" and comparing the hordes to "a bad, bad robot spinning out of control." Just pick a sci-fi trope and stick with it. On "The Immaculate Deception" he bellows about the "age of anxiety" and "wolves in the throne room," but he sounds less like a post-punk eminence than a shouting guy you’d avoid on the subway. Whether he’s railing against game shows on "Box 9" or religion on "St. Outrageous", the message sounds stale and the targets too easy.
But the most glaring shortcomings of this disinterred Pop Group have to do with space and spontaneity. As teenagers in Bristol, the band members were heavily informed by dub and free jazz, citing King Tubby and Ornette Coleman as influences. The former relies on the space between the notes as much as on the notes themselves, using reverb and delay to convey the shape of a room; the latter is more concerned with shedding the constraints of music, its scales and its structures, in order to arrive at something jarring and new. During their original run, the Pop Group put these ideas to good use: They built a room with deep corners, sharp angles, sloping floors, and no doors or windows, then they razed it.
By contrast, there is almost no space anywhere on Citizen Zombie, beyond the pauses between tracks. Every moment is crammed with stray sound and errant fury: blooms of guitar distortion or thuds of industrial beats or some of the most incongruent backing vocals imaginable. Even closer "Echelon", which is the closest this album gets to a quiet moment, eventually piles on the synths and guitars and even a pipe organ. Featuring production by the eclectic Paul Epworth (Adele, U2, Cee-Lo Green, and Crystal Castles, among many others), the album sounds scripted and overdetermined, its noise and commotion sculpted to assault your ears. Superficially, it’s successful, in that it’s not easy to listen to these songs. Yet, it feels like a cheap tactic, as if the band don’t trust themselves to get their point across and, worse, don’t trust their listeners to comprehend anything but the most blatant lyric and the most thudding attack. The result of so much suspicion is an album that’s somehow both loud and timid—all clamor and no soul.
