This Heat
This Heat

One of the most original and captivating albums - despite being little known - of the contemporary British scene came to light in 1979, a year in which the dazzling and ephemeral spark of punk had already shot its most significant sparks, giving rise to the many fires of the post-punk empire. And indeed this album, so original and captivating, seemed to brush off the coordinates of the empire, neglecting the motivations and goals (still uncertain, for that matter) of the various synth-pop, new wave, gothic-punk aesthetics, and so on, aiming instead to canonize even in the Land of Albion the intriguing inventions that the Teutons had already widely demonstrated in the early '70s. In fact, listening to this self-titled album by This Heat, one cannot help but think of Faust and Can, who a few years earlier had traced a new path to musical experimentation without indulging in simple noise masturbation for its own sake (and creating with the so-called Krautrock a manifesto in fact, to which we are still indebted today).

This Heat: what a magnificent work! A calibrated and never banal triumph of electro-acoustic contaminations, a sarabande, sometimes disturbing, sometimes ironic, of techno-dadaist mixtures that place no limits on instrumentation and carry on a discourse which - precisely in those years - seemed dispensable. That is, when punk brought rock'n'roll back to its ground zero, loudly conceiving and farting on art-rock and the grandiloquencies of prog, Charles Hayward and company engaged with an entire arsenal of ideas and inventions that anticipated by far whole strands of electronic and industrial music, which reached their peak after the mid-1980s.

A track like "24 track loop" is perhaps the most synthetic and incisive example of what the boys knew how to do: a faux loop with an acid-jazz flavor that strikes and makes alien strings vibrate, rising wave upon wave with the reassuring presence of an organ sound, yet always keeping the tension alive as if some bizarre biomechanical creature were about to appear from around the corner. A shining example of how - having well learned the lesson of Faust - it was still possible to say something interesting without risking plagiarism.

It goes without saying that other tracks like "Diet of worms", "Water", "The fall of Saigon" do the rest; and they perfectly exemplify the direction in which the group managed to work. Between atmospheres heavy with anguish, ominous forebodings, but also musical sarcasm and percussive divertissements, This Heat engaged a creative will free from the fashions of the moment (especially of that moment), reshuffling the cards of what had just been (including certain prog-rock) and seasoning it with new mysterious flavors, suitable for satisfying the palates of all those who were already fed up with the Sex Pistols and still did not quite understand what to do with Joy Division.

"This Heat" remains a high-impact album even in 2010, capable of arousing emotions and visions that - perhaps - even more illustrious standard-bearers of the alternative scene have only sketched. An album that in the end never sounds dated and, although a child of an era and a well-identifiable root, carves its name in stone and withstands the elements.

Highly recommended for those who found certain Radiohead albums innovative :)