Throbbing Gristle — 20 Jazz Funk Greats

In late 2011, the one and only Throbbing Gristle re-issued all of their classic albums in remastered and expanded editions, including the original albums as they were on LP (minus the CD bonus tracks) and an extra disk of related material from the era of the album.  Their 4th real album, "20 Jazz Funk Greats", was always among their most recognized work, likely as much due to masquerading as a pop record as to its actual content.

Revisiting the album, it remains wonderful, more for its attitude and atmosphere than any memorable compositions.  I've always held it that this was the most accessible TG record, in that all the experiments found here maintain some degree of structure and listenability.  Gen-P's lazily thrown together lyrics can be inane, of course, but in a way his apathetic, meandering deadpan perfectly expresses the aimless discontent industrial society has bred.

Several tracks engage in the formula the band often used live: loop a simplistic drum machine beat with a few delay and phaser effects on it, and engage in noodly, atonal improvisation with various noise making devices as Gen-P repeats and rearranges a sing-songy slogan like "There's never a way, and there's never a day, to convince people, to convince people".   The characteristic sluggish, eerie wails of Cosey's cornet and guitar and processed noise ooze lazily out of the speakers as if diseased.  The sound of decay has been captured well, and I can hear the roots of both the Coil sound and the Psychic TV sound here. 

This sort of track would get tiresome quick with nothing to contrast it.  Thankfully, we have tracks like "Beachy Head", "Tanith" and "Exotica", unique gems drawing from styles otherwise unknown to the TG catalogue.  The latter two numbers I just mentioned are hazy and spacious instrumental pieces which owe more to free jazz than any kind of industrial music ideology.  Both employ vibraphones and muffled electric bass, which work in beautiful counterpoint to the grimey, distorted sounds of analog electronics found on the rest of the disk.  "Beachy Head" is an indescribably ominous ambient sort of piece that feels very urgent and reminds me of various atrocities all without any explicit references or samples.  This group often had a very powerful emotion behind their seemingly random and haphazard methodology.

Onto the specifics of the re-issue, the remastered sound quality is not too noticeably improved for me (I have a degree in Audio Engineering).  Part of TG's appeal was always the murky, lo-fi sound of their homemade gear, so I don't know how much sense a 'remastered' Throbbing Gristle really makes anyway.  Luckily, they didn't tamper with anything in a bad way, and this CD sounds as good as the album ever has.  Perhaps the analog synths are a tad more 'crisp', and that's nice.

So what's on the second disk?  When I read that it was mostly live recordings, I was excited.  As a proud owner of the TG+ box, I know that TG did a lot of massively creative and ferocious noisy improvisation in their live shows, but listening to their shows in entirety is a daunting prospect at times, as in many cases, songs drone on for many many minutes, and the band leaves us the listener in eerie near-silence more often than not.  A collection of bite-sized magickal moments from TG shows is a great idea.

Unfortunately, they opt to include a lot that will already sound familiar.  The Berlin and Manchester live renditions of "Discipline" are here, which most know had already been tacked onto the end of all previous CD issues of this album.  For the reissue, they're both extended to their original concert length of 8+ minutes ("Discipline" had a tendency to run up to 15 minutes live, as anyone who has the live boxsets knows), and while the result is not quite as listenable as the 5 minute excerpts from the previous CD issues were, this has a more natural flow to it, and provides something new for longtime fans (who don't have the expensive live boxsets).

There are slightly protracted versions of "Convincing People" and "What A Day" quite similar to the ones on the album, which can be uninteresting to someone who just finished listening to the album.  Also, this is not particularly representative of the TG live experience, since they very rarely replicated the album versions of songs so closely in a live setting.

Also on the disk is a track that was previously used (in the same version) as one of the CD bonus tracks of "D.O.A.", "Five Knuckle Shuffle", an intense caffeinated fit from Gen-P over a clanking metallic ostinato.  "Isaiditi'mFEDUP", he mumbles in a fierce slur for upwards of 6 minutes.  It's a great track and possibly more at home here than with the D.O.A. material.

The remaining four tracks are just what I was hoping to hear - pure freeform creativity.  It's a dense sheet of constantly shifting textures in varying states of distortion, and there's a lot of great sounds.  The titles of these songs were clearly taken from Gen-P's improvised lyrics after the fact.  I enjoy trying to pick out Gen-P's phrases, and truthfully I like the stream of consciousness style he adopts here better than when he sings a repetitive song like "Convincing People" or "Persuasion".

 

So, "20 Jazz Funk Greats" is an inspirational album to this day, and if you've never heard it, you need to pick up this re-issue immediately!  However, for long time fans, it's not quite a necessity.  The bonus disk fails to provide anything a rabid fan would not have, and thus would only really appeal to casual fans not willing to invest the time sorting through the numerous other live releases.  The original album has not been improved enough to justify a purchase.  I can't it knock it too much though, because in the end, all of this material is great to listen to, whether I've heard it before or not.