Celebrating Robbie Grey, born on this day in 1957. —Ed.
When people think about Modern English, the band that was formed in Colchester in the early eighties, it’s invariably their 1982 hit “I Melt With You” that comes to mind. It was dreamy, irresistible, and impossible to avoid. But before “I Melt With You,” to wit on their 1981 debut LP Mesh & Lace, Modern English showed a far more raw and dissonant face to the world. Mesh & Lace led to no comparisons with Duran Duran because it was an uncompromising slice of droning noise boarding at times on chaos, and had far more in common with Joy Division and PiL than, say, Simple Minds.
Not everybody liked it, that’s for sure. Yo La Tengo’s Ira Robbins, writing for Trouser Press, sneered at Mesh & Lace, calling it “a load of monotonous droning and shouting by a precious art band oppressively weighed down by its self-conscious 4AD pretensions.” Precious they may have been, and droning to boot, but Mesh & Lace is anything but monotonous. Rather it’s an adventurous foray into the heart of darkness by a band that would soon enough undergo a sea change that led to the synthpop of “I Melt With You.”
I’d have never known had it not been for a review comparing noise vandals Clockcleaner to Modern English. This struck me as being akin to comparing GG Allin to the Partridge Family, because like most sentient humans I knew nothing more about Modern English than “I Melt With You.” “Balderdash!” I cried. But I’ll be damned if Mesh & Lace wasn’t one fearless foray into the precincts of noise for noise’s sake. Manic drumming, long drones, chanted lyrics—these guys took Joy Division one step further, by sacrificing their melodies to the exigencies of total desperation. Mesh & Lace doesn’t sound like affectation to me; it sounds like a fatal bludgeoning by Ian Brady, the Moors Murderer.
“A Viable Commercial” is a propulsive number with great drums and a lyric that involves lots of repetitions of “Da, da, die, chop, chop” and “a calf in Paris sitting comfortably.” Dada indeed. “Black Houses” is a bleak house of a number, again big on the propulsion and the desperate vocals of Robbie Grey. Throw in some weird noise, a megaphone, and Grey’s repetition of “religion can’t help,” and you’ve got yourself a song that kinda reminds me of PiL, dark and foreboding but not so atonal you can’t dance to it, preferably during the End Times. “16 Days” opens with some extended noise (including what sounds like somebody on a radio broadcast) only to segue into complete menace, with the drums thumping and the band singing behind Grey. Strange noises predominate, along with those dissociated voices, until the song disintegrates into complete cymbal-smashing chaos.
“16 Days” segues into the excellent “Just a Thought,” which again opens on a dissonant note only to go tribal on your ass, with Richard Brown blowing down the house on drums. These guys definitely give Bauhaus a run for their money, as the fast-paced, bass-heavy, and noise-strewn “Move in Light” demonstrates. Gary McDowell and Mick Conroy kick ass on guitar and bass, respectively, and Stephen Walker’s keyboards provide a simple riff for McDowell to strew jagged feedback over. You want to dance to the Apocalypse? Well, this one’s your song.
“Grief” is a slow grind of a song, opening with a simple guitar riff punctuated by the bass, and the melody is lovely in a “think I’ll kill myself” kind of way. Finally the keyboards come sweeping in, mournful and majestic, and the song goes on and on, on and on, on and on. It’s beautiful, really, especially when Conroy starts varying his bass riff and the drums come in, followed by Grey, who asks, “Why do you do this to me?” Because love is cruel, my friend, it’s as simple as that. The foreboding “The Token Man” again opens with some strange noises (I hear hammers and crickets) and lots of cymbals, before Grey enters at stage left to ask lots of questions he doesn’t expect to get answers to. Then the song takes off, all pummeling drums and a guitar riff that is as lovely as it is ominous.
“Dance of Devotion (A Love Song)” opens with some spiny guitar, a heartbeat, and Grey going on like he just joined Devo. Then the song takes off and truly becomes a dance, complete with some fantastic bass by Conroy and more prickly guitar by McDowell, before breaking into a heavy instrumental section, with lots of dissonant guitar and synth whooshes, as Grey repeats, “You didn’t know” and Brown beats up on his defenseless drum kit. Big guitar riffs, just like I like ‘em, amidst the chaos, like statues left standing in Berlin after a WWII aerial bombing, before everything falls to pieces to the accompaniment of found voices and what sounds like breaking glass.
By 1982’s After the Snow Modern English had embraced New Wave, and they didn’t look back. Synths, that typical (and enraging) drum drum drum, and all the other pernicious signifiers of synthpop were there, and if you were smart you didn’t melt, you ran. Don’t get me wrong; After the Snow has its (rare) moments of beauty, but the beast was no more, slaughtered presumably in the band’s quest for the Top of the Pops. More’s the pity, that is if you, like me, would sooner be attacked by a swarm of rabid chipmunks than listen to your typical synthpop tune. Grey is completely intelligible, and he invites us to dance, but I don’t want to dance, unless it’s at the edge of the abyss. But after Mesh & Lace Modern English ran from the abyss as fast as their pudgy little English legs would carry them, and all I can say is, “Get back here, you fops!”
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A-
