Metal Box/Second Edition

Metal Box is an album as impenetrable as the case in which it comes... a fifty-minute swirling bombardment of Kraut-rock rhythms, dissonant keyboards, jagged guitars and Lydon's bitter lyrics and screaming vocals. It follows on nicely from their first album, which took the sound of the Sex Pistols and fused it with disco, Kraut-rock and the kind of guitar music that would later become known as "post-punk". As a listening experience there is little else to rival it, with Metal Box offering up twelve tracks filled with a pain and anguish that can seemingly only find true catharsis through the screaming angular music found within. This is the sound of a band falling out of love with each other... and with the world around them.

The opening song, the near-legendary Albatross (which is almost eleven minutes of Beckett-like lyrical ruminations, over screaming guitars, a heavy and monotonous bass-line and some trance-like percussion) picks up where Theme (the opening track of their first album) left off, giving us more of Lydon's existential anguish and torment, as he screams about death and all manner of other related-horrors that infuse the album with a bleak, gothic and claustrophobic sound. Unlike the first album, the emphasis here is more on sound rather than song, so there's no real standout singles like Annalisa or Public Image, instead, we get longer tracks with much reliance on layered instrumentation. This is very much a precursor to those Radiohead classics, Kid A and Amnesiac, with PiL creating a landscape of cold synthesisers, an aching violin and that great integrated sound of Keith Lavene's scratchy, distorted guitar and the dub pounding bass of Jah Wobble.

This is dark music, as bleak as albums like Tilt, OK Computer, Regeneration, Blood on the Tracks and The Final Cut... although it has a sound that is unlike any of those albums, or indeed, anything else you've ever heard. The album progresses on from the epic Albatross onto the dark Memories, which sets Lydon's grating vocals and doom-laden lyrics against a backdrop of distorted, echoed guitars and a funky monotonous bass-line, which is further complemented by an Eastern-tinged and somewhat alien violin (or possibly keyboard) refrain wailing away in the background. It leads us perfectly into my favourite song on the album, the mesmerising Swan Lake.

The production here is fantastic, with the band retaining a minimalism, which builds towards that feeling of suffocating claustrophobia, with the actual distance of the instruments from one another becoming completely apparent through the use of different recording techniques. This creates an even more alienated sound, which works wonderfully with something like Swan Lake... which begins with that unmistakable Keith Lavene guitar sound and Wobble's bobbing bass. Like much of the album, the song becomes a testament to Lydon's despair following the death of his mother (and possibly some of the lingering pain left over from the death of Sid Vicious also), with lines like "I see it in your eyes" and that piercing closing refrain "words cannot express" really encapsulating (along with Lydon's vocals) the true pain and numbness of grief. The song is a definite band highlight, with Levene's guitar playing (sometime layering three of four different styled guitar parts over one another to create a sound that is beautiful, yet dissonant at the same time) at an absolute peak... whilst Jeannette Lee's violin is purposely piercing to match those swirling synths.

The next two songs (Poptones and Careering) move further away from the more rock-like sound of something like Albatross and Swan Lake and more towards absolute noise. The former is a particularly abrasive parable about a young girl being driven out into the middle of nowhere, presumably by an older man with the intention of rape... the music becoming as ugly as the subject matter as the song intensifies ("hindsight does me no good, standing naked in the back of the woods... the cassette played, poptones!!"). It's one of the most abrasive pieces of music ever composed... something that becomes even more disturbing when coupled with the bleak lyrics and Lydon's cold, emotionless delivery. Careering is even darker still, with Wobble's bass taking a greater precedence alongside that mechanical, almost industrial percussion. The lyrics are even more like Beckett, seemingly cut up and repositioned at random to create a brutal portrait, which never entirely becomes clear.

After the lengthy and agitated No Birds the album moves into the most Can-sounding track on the album, the three-minute instrumental piece, Graveyard. The rest of the album's second half continues seamlessly, furthering the bleak and mocking tone of the first half with scalding tracks like The Suit, the bombastic Chant and the surprisingly haunting and very beautiful closing track, Radio 4 (...a heavenly wash of beautiful synths and a hint of real bass). This is the perfect way to end the album, offering a sense of hope after eleven tracks of bleak beauty... and it's all the proof we need to see that this incarnation of PiL were one of the most exciting, important and extraordinary bands of all time.

After Metal Box, the band would undergo a change of personnel and produce the even more abrasive percussion based album The Flowers of Romance (...a record I still don't fully appreciate) before another change in line-up would turn the band into a vehicle for Lydon's personal take on 80's indie-pop. However, Metal Box remains a testament to the band when they were at their utmost creative peak... and, in my opinion, is one of the most original and remarkable albums ever produced.

You don't think -do you- that punk was only about reductionist riffs and complex trousers? If you do then doctors -none of them reputable, all of them struck off- recommend an immediate course of `Metal Box'

Jah Wobble's bass on the anti-hit that is `Pop Tones' owes nothing to anyone while Lydon-formerly-Rotten's stream-of-consciousness is of course put over in THAT VOICE (strip away the rest of his band before PiL and THAT VOICE still sounds downright unruly)

And of course there was an interface between punk and reggae that went way beyond The Clash covering `Police And Thieves' Look no further than `Albatross' to realise this, and also to catch the sound of perhaps angst-ridden young men making music as a means of getting rid of something, and indeed of `getting rid of the albatross' as Lydon / Rotten mentions a few times. As if that wasn't enough the gulf between Wobble's bass and Keith Levine's wired guitar is unbridgeable, so the drummer -Dave Crowe?- makes no attempt to do it.

When it comes down to it I'm one of those reviewers who's going to tell you that `Metal Box' is seminal. It's also essential for anyone who believes that `music' is a term which covers all known bases and those yet to be labelled. My advice to anyone who can't go for that is to avoid this set like the plague, but then dividing opinions is a good thing when it's an alternative to consensus, bland or otherwise.

Rating: 9/10

Best tracks: "Swan Lake", "Careering", "No Birds", "Poptones"

Never mind The Sex Pistols, here's Metal Box! The second Public Image Ltd (or PiL) album is at once a challenging, difficult yet mesmerising work; often seen as the absolute pinnacle of the post-punk movement, it's certainly not the most accessible example of what I personally think was the most exciting, creative, fluid era in all of 20th century's music. Yes, more than the 1960s! Metal Box is driven by the terrific bass lines of Jah Wobble and the coruscating, tortuous and sometimes hypnotic guitars of Keith Levene, while lead singer and lyricist John Lydon is just as effective a lead presence here as he was in his former band, but in a very different way; it's amazing to think that this is the same singer as Johnny Rotten was only a few years back.

Opening dirge "Albatross", of all the ten songs here, is definitely the most difficult to enjoy; over ten minutes Lydon laments and ghoulishly wails over an unrelentingly rhythmic bass and searing, painful-sounding guitar. Lydon was a big fan of the German group Can, and their at once repetitive yet subtly expanding rhythms are a clear influence on this album; some may find "Albatross" a drag and then some, and its certainly a wilfully tough choice to open the album on, but it has power and presence, and is a grower. On an additional note, Metal Box was originally released in a film canister-style box with the tracks spread across three 12 inch, 45RPM records, with the intention being that you could play the sides in any way you want; so in theory, some may prefer not to regard "Albatross" as an opening track after all.

Things get hardly lighter with "Memories", but it's got a gripping, great tune, the kind you could dance to even (it was also a single), but it's not going to be played in any 1970s nostalgia clubs, that's for sure! There are some spooky, vaguely Arabic guitars, and the kind of bass line that's really very simple in theory yet so directly captivating that it becomes something approaching genius. The even better "Swan Lake" (essentially pre-album single "Death Disco" in edited form and a song about Lydon`s dying mother) has one of the all-time best-ever bass lines, amazing vocals, amazing guitars...it's one of the most striking singles ever created, and probably the band's zenith. You can really dance to this one too! Dance to it, and be freaked out at the same time! The song also ends on the locked groove of the original vinyl, before switching out of the blue to the disturbing "Poptones", which is, in its own ugly way, beautiful, at least musically anyway. Lyrically (the song focuses on a rape victim) its as dark and bleak as anything Lydon has ever put to paper.

"Careering" is spooky, atmospheric and one of my favourite things here, with the eerie synthesisers a major highlight. "No Birds" is probably the most accessible thing here in that the rhythms and guitars are clicked onto one hell of a beat; of course, it's still a hellish, scary ride all the same! The creepy and catchy "Graveyard" is a spooky shuffle with an sinister synthesiser that casts a spooky moon-lit illumination over a suitably ghoulish beat. It's great stuff! "The Suit" and "Bad Baby" continue the creepy moods very effectively, while "Socialist" builds on a bubbling, relentless and edgy bass riff; "Chant" provides a punishing five-minute assault before the almost-soothing "Radio 4" appears out of nowhere and in its synthesiser drenched respite, feels almost like an act of generosity after what has almost been an hour of spooky, scary, disturbing, unforgettable music. This album is most certainly not for everyone, and to take it all in one listening might be too much, but it is a brilliant album which still sounds extraordinary and fresh nearly thirty years since it was first released...