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Rating: Certain works are not immediate. They need to be patiently contemplated. These works are difficult, both for the creator and the viewer; they are born from endless love and thus demand just as much love.
One of these works is the debut album by This Heat, a seminal English trio composed of multi-instrumentalists Hayward and Bullen and the non-musician Gareth Williams. Often included in the new wave movement for chronological reasons more than anything else, This Heat represented an infernal conjunction between the psychedelic magic of progressive and the most extreme Dada or punk spirit.
This Heat, or how to achieve perfection through the union of opposites.
The album in question required no less than three years of work and was not released until Hayward was fully satisfied with the result. A result that, thirty years later, is still unattainable: it begins with Testcard, which is merely a timid drone to open the dark and frenetic dances of Horizontal Hold, the first masterpiece of the album, between noise free-jazz and pure experimentation on the sound of the guitar. Not Waving is pure non-electrified psychedelia, as if just birthed from the mind of a newborn: an ancestral hymn of rare beauty, showcasing a claustrophobic and deeply personal sense of melody that sends countless chills down the spine. And then 24 Track Loop, which by fusing jazz and dub, invents out of nowhere a techno-like sound, almost like Warp.
Finally, it deserves a mention (it would deserve immense studies and to be listed among the great masterpieces of the West), The Fall of Saigon, a raw musical depiction of the Vietnam War: a sort of Guernica between industrial and acoustic lyricism...
When the final guitar solo flows into the reprise of Testcard the heart has a sudden jolt and almost tears well up at the ducts: nothing more can be expressed after this experience, challenging as it may be, but at the true limits of perfection.
Tracklist Lyrics and Videos
05 Twilight Furniture (05:06)
Surveying the twilight furniture
Telescope pressed to patched eye
Love is blind, so we are told
Don't pull the wool over our eyes
Shuttered eye, metal eye
Eye and brain, I and brain
Shapes policed and disinfected
Searchlights stop towers and dead sky
[Tommy guns] typewriters aimed and loaded
Fountain pen and a .35
Careless [....] costs lives
Careless love costs lives
Cease-fire ends at midnight
Curfew starts at ten
Unclear vision [as soon]
Nuclear vision [our friend]
We must shake him by the hands
10 The Fall of Saigon (05:10)
We ate Soda, the embassy cat, poor Soda's coda,
no more da Capo – she's decapitated –
running 'round the room, half-baked,
the other half is bacon and sizzling in the frying pan,
we ate the TV,
we ate the armchair,
we ate the telephone,
we ate the cellophane,
My God how we got so far, only to reach so low...
the Russians saved the janitor...
Soda was a little tough to eat, no wonder she was hard meat
out on the roof with the feline goose...
But Soda had a heart of gold, the ambassador's wife had the liver,
"Please deliver us from evil," she cried,
"I know all about cats and their heavy vibes..."
She was very hip ambassador's wife...
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Other reviews
By Breus
This Heat: what a magnificent work! A calibrated and never banal triumph of electro-acoustic contaminations.
"This Heat" remains a high-impact album even in 2010, capable of arousing emotions and visions...
By Battlegods
This Heat corresponds to pure pictorial Dadaism.
"'Horizontal Hold' is the manifesto that earns the gold medal: everything is in here."
