Brian Wilson and Avril Lavigne have made me cry. Albert Ayler has given me a panic attack. But only Throbbing Gristle have made me puke. A few years ago, while listening to their 1980 album Heathen Earth, I lost a full day's worth of food. I can't help but think the band's four members would giggle at that very organic response to the metal machine music that used scrap parts (cornets played like electric guitars, electric guitars played like electrified hamburger, electronics played like squirting blood and semen) to see just how far rock and pop could be distended.
Throbbing Gristle's muse was the pit that grows in your stomach when you're frightened, and since dread and unease were what they had to work with-- rather than hooks and melodies-- they learned to play with them as assuredly as Holland-Dozier-Holland. Now, 25 years after hanging up their Gristlizers, the curtain goes up on the band's excellent second act, The Endless Not, bringing TG into the post-industrial world of 2007 without sucking their sick-making psychodrama into the song-free vacuum of modern avant-garde electronica or extreme noise.
Lotta black water has flowed under the Death Factory since 1982-- too much to recount in a record review-- but while this older Gristle may have traded the analog animal groans of Chris Carter and Sleazy Christopherson's homemade electronic black boxes for "sampled sounds," the TG writ remains intact. On the The Endless Not, the grunts and cries of corrupted digital matter are made to sound animalistic, animistic, aleatory, and antagonistic. The heavy current of magical dread and performance art provocation that runs through all of those hundreds of hours of TG live tapes snakes here through the band's samplers as well. But you can hear the digital difference from the opening track, "Vow of Silence", where TG frontman Genesis Breyer P-Orridge's shivers and sobs are serrated by computer editing tools and sent stuttering and blurting against pixelated gasps and blasts and Carter's caveman rhythm programming, all ready for looping at your local sanitarium.
But P-Orridge's soiled singing is the record's most uncomfortable link to the human world, a rusty brown Rumours of lovesick depression and alienation, and the primary element separating the The Endless Not from a modern noise scene more interested in Dadaistic collisions than perverted Tin Pan Alley. On "Almost a Kiss", P-Orridge sounds like Robert Wyatt at the bottom of a bottle or the end of a rope, his creaking moans-- "you fit me like a shrunken glove"-- driven by a deeply uncomfortable neediness and desperation, the voice of someone who needs a restraining order.
The album's eeriest and most sonically improbable track is "Rabbit Snare", using their new digital tech to force together melancholy Bill Evans-style piano, sinister brushed drums from some demonic supperclub, dying seagull cries from Cosey Fanni Tutti's cornet, and watery organ and clavinet from 70s fusion, with P-Orridge's sinister crooning, as if he's lying on the forest floor with his own paw caught in the trap, taking this toxic ballad to places beyond electro-acoustic abstraction. Far from cartoon provocation or fascist transgression, The Endless Not features some of the subtlest songwriting of TG's career, playing that knot of tension for all it's worth and all the more disturbing for how pensive and restrained it feels. The Endless Not hasn't made me throw up yet, but I still probably won't play it in the dark.
