Throbbing Gristle
20 Jazz Funk Greats

THE REVIEW

Throbbing Gristle were undoubtedly one of the most radical and influential bands of the new wave. No one can deny them the credit for creating a cacophonous, pounding, and "concrete" sound that would be known as "industrial." From the very beginning, the London quartet was attracted to the dehumanization of modern man, supplanted by the unstoppable rise of automatism. The theme is always the same, recurring more or less among all the "intellectual" artists of the period.

What set Throbbing Gristle apart was the way they expressed their disgust, striving to provoke the utmost disgust. Their multimedia performances were gruesome and sadistic, with projections bordering on horror. They recorded, like scattered notes, any kind of "found" sounds: conversations, jackhammers, phone rings, press machines, automobiles. All this to create a picture of total alienation, a black and white image that takes us straight back to the devastating nightmare of David Lynch's Eraserhead.
The same cover of this album in its apparent tranquility is unsettling. Those sadistic smiles portrayed in a bucolic scene have something dramatic, revealed immediately once you look at the back cover. The same image, but in black and white, and especially the naked body of a corpse at their feet. Now their expressions do seem fitting.

And to think this is considered the breakthrough album of Throbbing Gristle, the work that marks the opening towards a more malleable sound. This is partly true, but only if related to what Throbbing Gristle were two years earlier, upon the release of Second Annual Report, their first work and undoubtedly the most extreme. But don't expect "melodies" and catchy choruses. The underlying theme remains that of industrial curse, always traversed by the usual thread of perversion that characterizes them.
The aim is always to exhaust the listener, only this time they use less violent means. Indeed, in some ways, they try to induce a state of mental desolation not unlike hypnosis.
Listen to a track like "Persuasion" to realize this. A nerve-wracking ticking... then a steady bass tone, then background voices coming and going, and a tiresome filtered chant that intones a mechanical lullaby. An industrial lullaby. It's the black and white side of a love song. Stripped of all its emotional charge, of all its romantic passion, nothing remains but a mere robotic beat, a glacial inhuman tolling. It's man swallowed by the machine.
The same fate befalls dance music. "Hot On The Heels Of Love" is indeed a dance for humanoids, certainly not for men, a frenzied ballet for discos populated by cyber intelligences. Even reggae meets the same end, disfigured by the cruel desolation of the title track.
However, the essence of their mental state on the brink of collapse is undoubtedly in the 12 terrifying minutes of "Discipline," the industrial equivalent of Suicide's "Frankie Teardrop." Violent beats of frantic electronics, a tremendous pulse, practically an alien anthem, and over everything a distant desperate voice, the cries of a madman, a man surrendering to his fate, in the throes of cerebral convulsions, the final stage of the total alienation process.

Definitely not an album for everyone, frightening in its drawing of gloomy and ghostly landscapes, it nonetheless represents an excellent testimony of the atmosphere in the industrial England of the late '70s, but above all embodies the beginnings of a genre that will find great success and dissemination in the future, but could only be born in that place, at that moment.