This Heat were many things, but popular was never one of them. It's almost funny to see this record getting so much deserved attention recently due to its reissue, because before now, I only knew a few people who had even heard of the thing. It's especially strange to see all the praise in light of Gareth Williams' death on Christmas Eve last year. He wasn't a person who ever really wanted to be famous or even known as a musician, and yet will doubtlessly be better known henceforth than he'd ever been during This Heat's existence.
English drummer/vocalist Charles Hayward (fresh from working with Brian Eno and Phil Manzanera in the avant-prog/fusion outfit Quiet Sun) formed This Heat with Charles Bullen (guitar, clarinet, viola, etc.) and Williams (bass, keyboards, tape manipulation, etc.) around 1975. Hayward had worked with a fairly broad array of jazz and prog bands (and post-This Heat, would continue to do so), though Bullen and Williams were much less traveled, even as they were accomplished musicians. Hayward and Bullen had been playing together as a duo for a few years prior to This Heat, and began playing with Williams only after Hayward completed his duties with Quiet Sun. Williams would actually leave the band before this album, Deceit, was released, and maintain a very busy career as an engineer for John Barry and various symphonic recordings. His interest in recording techniques may have provided the impetus for This Heat to experiment with tape loops and editing, which would play very large roles in their studio output.
This Heat's sound was something like a confrontation of prog, free-jazz and contemporary electronic music (think early Stockhausen, not Kraftwerk). They often get lumped into the post-punk (or even just "punk") camp, for no better reason other than they started at the same time. They certainly sounded as if they were angry about something, and taking a glance at the lyric sheet for this album (and you'd better, as often the vocals seem more musical element than communicative force), they had fairly intense political/social statements to make-- though pinning down their position is often as hard as pinning down their sound. In any case, they were "progressive" in the literal sense of the word, and though they came up with the first wave of punk, they didn't really sound like anyone else of the time (save a few other English radicals like Henry Cow or Art Bears, occasionally).
Deceit was the band's second and final album (not counting posthumous releases, including the excellent BBC session release Made Available). As odd as it sounds on the surface, it's actually the more immediately appealing of their two albums, at least partially because of a greater emphasis on drive and something like song structure (though the music here is quite a ways from typical "songs"). The vocals-- mostly handled by Hayward-- were probably the weakest link for This Heat, though they don't really take away from the music so much as push it into yet a stranger realm.
"Sleep," the first track, is actually an atypically calm song, almost like a fractured lullaby. Layers of what sound like African percussion, and a simple piano line support a very low-key melody, wherein lines like, "Softness is a thing called comfort/ Doesn't cost much to keep in touch/ We never forget you have a choice," make me wonder if there isn't some kind of subversive commentary about consumer ethics and advertising at work. This shortly leads to the rave-up "Paper Hats" with its brawny, pouncing rhythms and subtly acrobatic guitar lines. This is a piece with several sections, none of them having too much to do with each other. Some, like the lengthy outro, sound like archetypical math-rock, with repetitive, complicated rhythmic patterns, while the brief middle section is more viscerally dynamic, or perhaps even "noisy." Lyrically, the band was as eclectic: "Well, what do we expect?/ Paper hats?/ Or maybe even roses?/ The sound of explosions?/ Oh no." I'd like to know what they expected, but I'm not sure what they got instead, and am certainly in the dark about to whom they protested.
"Triumph" is a Dadaist collage of various noises, musical and otherwise. There's a brief accordion intro, leading to what sounds like a kazoo lament accompanied by someone scraping a few pieces of metal and wood together. Then, Hayward mentions something about the angles being reversed, and the garbage symphony makes its grand conclusion-- all in less than three minutes. Perhaps this was a prologue for "S.P.Q.R.," which throws out any ideas of abstract noodling in favor of pure rock expression. The high-speed beat threatens to overpower a droning duo vocal line ("We organize via property as power/ Slavehood and freedom imperial purple/ Pax Romana!"). This track doesn't run through a myriad of stylistic changes; it makes its case via sheer persistence.
Hayward's interest in all manner of world rhythms and percussion manifested itself in tracks like "Shrink Wrap" and "Independence" (words provided by one Thomas Jefferson), where kinetic drum orchestras and ancient rain forest flutes and strings lent the music an otherworldly quality which further removed it from recordings by This Heat's angry peers. "Radio Prague" features more electronic trickery, and what sounds like someone actually tuning in and out of a Czech radio broadcast. There's a steady pitter-patter underneath, and some rather dark drones in the background (along with a haunting cello), and though I'm tempted to say this could have influenced Godspeed You Black Emperor!, it's more likely an isolated vignette. In a way, the entire album seems removed from typical musical happenings-- even the underground. Maybe that's why it's taken so long for This Heat to start receiving their due.
The band got its digs in once more for "A New Kind of Water," expressing the rage that seems to have been implied throughout the record, though rarely shown directly. Phrases like, "We were told to expect more/ And now that we've got more/ We want more, we want more," offer some of the only clear ideas about the feelings behind Deceit, and the music is appropriately insistent (crashing drums, wailing group vocals, very precise, discordant guitar lines). Over the years, there have been bands to play as aggressively, or even as strangely, but very few have been able to rise from their collective influences and histories to create music so singularly distinctive and inspiring. I don't know that Hayward, Bullen and Williams were trying to inspire (and that they debated over whether to release their music at all could be evidence to support that they weren't), but the overall feeling I take away from this album is that of revolution and a very creative form of protest. That's what I call punk.
