"...Like an iron foundry at full volume", promised bemused NME writer Dave Haslam of Descension by never-even-remembered UK band Slab! (their enthusiastic punctuation a presumably tongue-in-cheek tribute to the similarly exclamatory Wham!). I remember peering out at those words from behind a curtain of teenage hair, and wondering why any band would want to sound like that. I was beginning to recognise - somewhere in the painful unfolding of a sixteen-year old heart - that these musicians and their often literal deconstruction of the electric guitar were necessary in order to reclaim it from those incapable of playing a note with one leg situated anywhere near the other, and if that meant attacking that most totemic rock'n'roll artefact with power tools, then so be it.
It wasn’t the breathless buzz of rebellion generating these thoughts, or a lofty sense of superiority (that was to come) - if anything I found it all rather confusing. The impact of Floyd, Rush and Zeppelin had been important, but those bands never really felt like mine, and the music was far beyond my own clumsy attempts at musicianship. Those albums were really just the ones made available to me via my elders: parents of friends; regular babysitting clients, and - in one notable instance - my geography teacher, Mr Coltman, who made me a cassette of two Wishbone Ash albums which he deposited on my desk with the fatherly smile of Odin passing on some arcane Asgardian rite-of-passage (it wasn’t) to Thor (I wasn’t).
Like Mr Coltman, these adults were really keen to tape their records for me and I gratefully immersed myself in whatever came my way. Grown-ups made decisions ! Grown-ups understood the world ! Who better to ask about what constituted good music, when certainty about anything seemed like a super-power ?
Looking back, as someone now teaching a new generation of musicians, I completely understand the temptation to ‘educate’ through the filter of my own preoccupations and preferences, but I’m always a little bit wary of that ghost whispering into my ear; the one that points an incorporeal finger backwards to where memory, fantasy and fact all intersect: nostalgia.
The music to which we start aligning ourselves when we’re in our mid-teens binds itself to our DNA and triggers that next vital wave of mutations, the one that gives us those (mostly) temporary super-powers: the bullet-proof self-obsession; the ability to vanish into wistful longing; human torch levels of scorching self-consciousness and a libidinal electro-magnetic pulse that makes city blocks flicker on and off. Sometimes, the music that we gravitate towards as we get older is an attempt to re-run these experiments, but it mostly fails because the context is different: the test conditions have gotten way more complicated.
Yet, we find ourselves sneaking back into that laboratory anyway, now long-unused, sinks dotted with dead insects, test-tubes green with lichen, and we remember what was. Gently increasing in volume and disrupting the motes of dust caught in the sunlight is a sound: a violin; a snatch of banjo; a yelping vocal. Is it Come On Eileen by Dexy’s ? Before we know it, our heads are full of clumsy-drunk kisses blossoming endlessly from sore lips; terrible fashion choices preparing for gentle ridicule; summers seeming ever longer, soaked in sunshine and cheap cider; past relationships mourned as purer and deeper. But is it all true ?
It doesn’t really matter. The impulse is all. Life gets more complicated, and it makes sense that we would wish ourselves back to simpler times when the lived moment is too hard. This is possibly just me (no judgements here), but I want music to be more than the kite that keeps a colourful ribbon dancing in front of my eyes on a bad day, making me grateful for the shape - rather than the truth - of the memories it evokes. I’m suspicious of nostalgia now. Making things great again. Mis-remembering confectionary, haircuts, children’s TV presenters, decades, places and whole empires, while the present slips away, unacknowledged.
Nostalgia - as someone must have once said - ain’t what it used to be.
It’s part of the reason that, on hearing that ‘there’s no good music anymore’ I fly into Wagnerian expressions of rage, because those five words speak of surrender. They reduce music to so much mental litter, only valid when caught on the updrafts of memory and that time you bunked off in sixth form and drove to Alton Towers in a battered Fiesta with nothing but a Woodentops cassette and a bag of pick ‘n’ mix. I want to listen to music that stands up without the prop of nostalgia, but - don’t get me wrong - I also remember how delicious those fizzy cola cubes were. I’m just not sure how good that Woodentops album is.
So, inevitably, all those records from the late 60s / early 70s were sold to me with the evangelical fervour of the teen-convert, and - initially at least - the bombast was distracting; the skill was undeniable; Floyd’s lyrics even seemed to be saying something, but it felt increasingly like the message wasn’t for me. And then my cousin played me Low by David Bowie. It sounded woozy, unfinished and a bit clumsy, a bit like a sixteen year old trying to affect a sure gait in his first pair of Doctor Martens.
Further bolstered by the righteous detonations of words and opinions in the Smash Hits, Face, NME and Melody Maker back issues I was borrowing from older cousins, and the alien world of scowling, androgyne boys and girls unwilling to tolerate any level of nostalgic navel-gazing, I was starting feel restless. The previous generation wouldn’t shut up about how Sgt Pepper and Dark Side of the Moon had made them feel, and the ripples produced by Punk had stopped at the air-cushioned soles of those impossibly glamorous young men and women from around the village who were now starting to wear suits, give up smoking, drive estate cars and have babies together. What was there for me, and would I ever find it in the Home Counties ?
That night, as I carefully removed my cherished copy of 2112 by Rush from the turntable, I dwelt for a little longer than usual on the three satin-clad men with the Farrah Fawcett haircuts on the sleeve, and shivered minutely. I understood that music was all about self-expression, but I was soon to wonder if a drummer in a kimono might make more sense in a Morrissey lyric than on the back of an album cover.
One Saturday morning, I found myself in a record shop in a provincial town with a record token and nothing to lose but fifteen pounds, the respect of my parents and their friends, and perhaps a little innocence. Skinny chest pushed out, I bought two records that would transform two sides of a TDK D90 cassette into something resembling a holy relic that I’d carry around in a battered army surplus bag for months to come, marking the transformation of my record collection into something noisier, darker and featuring considerably less Roger Dean artwork.
My ageing Walkman took several AA batteries, casually discharging them all in just over 90 minutes, but this would be enough time to listen to both sides of a cassette. I dropped the needle four times, carefully navigating the pause button on the tape player, and the ferric oxide rearranged itself into the jagged shapes of Sister by Sonic Youth on one side, and on the other, Descension.
My parents looked in on me; shaking their heads. To them, it must have seemed like a practical demonstration of how home taping was literally killing music. As I listened to Slab!’s Tunnel of Love, the first song on side one of Descension, my horror grew in tandem with theirs. What had I done ? I could have bought that Asia album with the sea serpent on the cover, or the Rush live double with the twelve minute By-Tor & the Snow Dog on side three, and instead I’d walked out of that shop with a record that starts with a man whispering over a cement mixer. I was spiralling outwards, downwards, sideways and there was nothing to hold onto. Where were the chords ? Why was there no guitar solo ?
I had to like it. I’d paid for it. My parents were witnessing my transformation into a decision-making adult; there were now expectations. Undriven Snow opened with a crimson laser-scope beam of feedback and seemed to fade out over a machine gun solo. Dr Bombay was a drunken jazz ensemble battling what Level 42 might sound like if they all played through the same fuzz pedal with every knob set to ten. Still the spinning and the chaos. I needed a foothold. I needed hope.
Finally, four tracks in, it arrived. The gateway song - that musical invitation to the party that every album needs. When you shuffle your way into that front room wearing jeans and a t-shirt and everyone else is dressed up as a clown, speaking in gutteral Slavic accents and drinking something that looks like bloody milk, you need that girl with the twinkly eyes in the worn out 501s, who appears beside you with a cold beer, a hot dog and a smile that says she’s done this before; that it’ll all be OK. Two hours later you’re sandwiched between two drunk clowns, singing Latvian folk songs next to a burning car and wearing a red nose.
My gateway to Descension was Dolores.
"On the edge of a plateau at the top of the world. The trees as green as emerald. The waterfalls so clear", whispered the singer through the song's steam powered pulse, as fragments of piano ricocheted across the speakers. A thuggish bass guitar elbowed its way into a chorus delivered with sleazy glee: "Wickedly mysterious she looks", he deadpanned as lights in my head flickered with something like excitement. Then woozy horns wound their way out of the fug, the mood darkening with talk of "a great sickness in the water supply", until the narrator finally implored, "Dolores take my hand and laugh", as the world ended. I was mesmerised.
It was ugly, sure - but ugly-beautiful. It explained their intentions in terms that a sixteen year old Rush fan could understand: Paradise to Purgatory in about four and a half minutes. Only Doctor Who could match their ambition.
And, with that, the album began to reveal itself to me. There are chords and myriad mysterious, ringing overtones in Tunnel of Love, along with a subway rumble to illuminate those dark lyrics.
…and it turns out that a drunk jazz band vs. the whole of Level 42 all playing through the same fuzz pedal is a great idea.
Big Sleeper is a hymn to the horror of war with mostly just drums, multiple bass guitars and some eerie tape effects. “This fog came up to cover us. Passover has begun”.
Where other industrial bands (Einstürzende Neubauten, Test Department) simply laid waste to the musical landscape with their relentless clangings, Slab! took traditional rock instruments and the emergent sampling technology (it’s no coincidence that one of my next big discoveries was Public Enemy) and carved out a new one. Snare drums showered rhythmic shrapnel over bass drum detonations while detuned guitar strings flapped and squirmed; mutant horns played all the wrong notes in all the right places, equal parts Ornette Coleman and Tower of Power.
At this point, I should ask the question that’s now hanging over this album like a mushroom cloud: is it good, or have I fallen into my own nostalgia trap ? All I can say is that it’s Slab! that I’m listening to right now and not the unpredictable octave-vaulting inner voice of the sixteen year old me. Slab! pushed against, and eventually through the past for no recompense and little recognition (although it turns out Steven Wilson and Stephen O’ Malley are massive fans), so really, the very least I can do is listen to them on their terms, rather than as an aide-memoir for revisiting my awful dreadlocks decision and a pair of burgundy denim dungarees.
That said, through Descension I learned that often the more ‘challenging’ art involves an ongoing exchange; a surrender I suppose - along with a bit of perseverance - to earn the greater reward. In relinquishing some control, we might actually change shape a little ourselves to get closer to the heart of something that feels important. I think that defines great art for me: you feel different after engaging with it. I suspect that great art grows with us, too, so that there’s something there for the sixteen year old and the fifty-one year old me.
If there is a memorial element, it might be this: I played Descension over and over, intrigued, occasionally intimidated or confused; irritated even, but curious and ultimately moved, and in doing so I came to my own understanding that music could ‘fit’ me like that bespoke Kevlar suit fits John Wick. It could be emotional armour, a declaration of independence, a statement of intent, a noisy manifesto, an expression of rage and of terrible beauty, but sometimes it was just an annihilating bullet of pure joy to the head.
Actually, looking back at that list - in a tiny moment of micro-nostalgia - it still is.
Oddly enough Slab! was my gateway to SBP which may seem weirdly post-modern but probably just reveals the weird internet wormholes we can all go down when the mood takes us.
I've just finished reading a history of Some Bizzare by Wayne Doyle, and there's a quote in there by Karl O'Connor that kind of sums up Descension for me: "It’s an intensity that doesn’t exist any more, and that’s hard to generate unless it’s coming from a genuine place." Is this true? I don't know. Perhaps my music taste atrophied at the age of 19 (am I nostalgic for that time? Maybe). But I do know that this record is utterly and seriously intense, both musically and lyrically. I've always regarded it as a high benchmark that I'm not certain has ever been surpassed.
Would I feel the same had it come out in 2017 rather than 1987? An interesting point. Who knows!
I should have another go at TMR - I’ve also failed to get it despite several tries. For me the artist that comes closest to this is Peter Hammill. I’d heard a couple of VDGG albums and thought they were interesting but nothing special. Then I saw him live (supporting Marillion in 83). As a live prospect he’s very full-on, overwhelming. I couldn’t say I enjoyed it (most of the audience definitely didn’t!) but there was something raw and visceral there unlike anything I’d experienced previously, and I just knew there was something worthwhile here. Six months later I’d started uni and found one of his albums in the record library. Shortly after that I was on a mission collecting his back catalog on 2nd hand vinyl from the Record & Tape Exchange in Notting Hill