BLOWIN' INDIE WIND

Author: RICHARD LAWLESS

Like any music nerd, I love record shopping in New York. What I don't like are annoying trendy poseur music store clerks in Brooklyn who don't know anything about music. Recently I found myself in a fashionable Brooklyn corner record store, akin to Burlington's Pure Pop Records in the sense that they only carried indie or alternative albums (or mainstream music canonized by critics like Price or R.E.M.). The store clerk was British, so I figured he'd probably have heard of the seminal post-punk, proto-industrial group This Heat, whose out-of-print album "Deceit" I had been trying to track down for months. He hadn't. Instead, he proceeded to tell me about this amazing new band he just heard of called Idlewild. Idlewild?

"This Heat" is an incredibly difficult album to track down, even though it was released twice on CD after its original LP release in 1981 - once in the early '90s, and again in 2001 by British label These. Even though the vast, vast majority of people have never heard of this album, let alone this group, the ones who have want "Deceit." Badly. Average prices on Ebay for the album are about $90 or higher, and I'm not even exaggerating. By some beautiful twist of fate, WRMC received (or bought) a copy when it was re-pressed in 2001, so I've had the great fortune of hearing it. So why is there such a massive demand for this album amongst music geeks?

While revered by many post-punk/avant-garde fans for years, "Deceit" was put into the upper echelons of must-have albums when those smug Pitchfork journalists ranked it #20 in their Top Albums of the '80s list. Unfortunately, way too many people treat Pitchfork like a Bible, and now every indie hipster feels the need to own this album. Hence, the asking price has been jacked up considerably. I first came across "Deceit" as a vigorous young go-getter at WRMC in my freshman year. It was filed away in the station's small avant-garde section. The intriguing cover - of a colorfully bandaged head against a black background - piqued my interest, not because I'm into bandaged heads, but because it was gripping and not cheesy in the least. I listened to the album, and it literally was unlike anything I had heard before. It's loosely grouped as post-punk because of its release date, and its aversion to mainstream musical elements, but the deceiving thing about "Deceit" is that it's still a pop album, even if the musicians eschew traditional song structures and often embrace abrasive sounds.

"S.P.Q.R." is one of the most gripping tracks on the album, beginning with a rhythmic clamoring of drums and cymbals and hyperactive atonal guitar strumming. Vocals come in, singing a beautiful, menacing and melancholic harmony about Romans. Thunderous drum fills punctuate the track before the energy and tension reach a breaking point and the song fades away. The album is full of some of the most original drum beats you'll ever hear on a rock album, taking their cue from improvisational jazz, but wedded to a repetitive groove in such a way that the compositions on "Deceit" still sound vaguely like rock songs. "Cenotaph" begins with such a drum groove, followed by the addition of an atonal guitar solo that precedes the intriguingly harmonized vocals. This Heat is obsessed with history and apocalyptic notions on "Deceit," and the most notorious and repeated lyric in "Cenotaph" is the refrain "History repeats itself." A common tendency for tracks on "Deceit" is to repeat the intricate groove of drums and guitar established while being drowned out by abrasive noise until the song is over.

But I'm afraid that these descriptions don't do "Deceit" justice. It's an album that can't be explained except to say that it's a cacophony of free-jazz drumming, atonal guitar riffs, tense Eastern-meets-Western grooves and tape manipulation. It will sound like nothing you've heard before or since. Hey, maybe you'll even shell out $90 for your own copy.