Mass
Labour of Love

THE REVIEW

The Wolfgang Press never really reached fame, despite coloring their music and making it increasingly funky during their journey, helped by early De La Soul and the general escape from the gloomy eighties. Today, everything is dry, and Allen, Cox, and Grey have practically vanished. However, this album stayed in the UK Indie Charts for five weeks, which, in hindsight, must mean something. But what am I talking about?

On hypothetical x and y axes, this album is located near the zero point, along with other albums by pre-Wolfgang Press groups that I'll leave to Wikipedia. Near the zero point, the pressure is high, the decade has just begun, Allen and Cox love Metal Box, the Birthday Party, and the Fall; however, the album starts and they resemble Suicide: three organ notes and puffs of horns and other sound snippets suddenly welcome muffled screams. The track suddenly kicks off with a bass slide that could only have been written in those years. There's already a pop vein. Let me be clearer: the track overwhelms and isn't afraid to show its side, unlike PIL, for example. They could at times seem like Marc & The Mambas' little brothers, and here I'm being heavy with compliments.

Worthy of mention are the album's sound inserts: simple and repetitive riffs gain new abilities with the fantasies that the rest of the band unleashes upon them (Isn't Life Nice). The album sometimes exaggerates and overly inflates certain tracks, like Elephant Talk, which become too dense, very true, but let's remember this is white music and sometimes you pay this price to have things like F.A.H.T.C.F. and its diversely groovy drums in your ears, or choruses typical of the genre set on a sort of lobotomized Pop Group of Cross Purposes. And excuse me, but sax zigzags on rusty basses, guitar flares, foreign keyboards, à la Jarre, placed there like samples of pure sadism... to hell with black influences today. I'm not your dinner, I'm disgusting, I have bones and spines, I'm incurable, but then I throw in two notes, almost at random, and this coldness that doesn't know the offbeat suddenly becomes a twitch of glassy nerves, grown in the smog.