Thirty-Second Annual Report

Who'd have thought that one of the highlights of 2008 would have been a low-key release of Throbbing Gristle's Paris performance last year to celebrate their fairly unlistenable 1977 opus, The Second Annual Report?

I always found the original album quite hard work, partly due to the poor recording quality and partly due to Genesis P-Orridge's (non) musicianship being rather close to one journalist's assertion that he sounded like a `gorilla with his hands cut off playing bass.' However since their 2004 reformation, TG have got better at what they do.

Their Camber Sands-performance generally focused on new material to the irritation of fans, but tapped back into TG of yore with revisits to `Hamburger Lady' and `What a Day,' both of which advanced on the original versions (the latter even dropping in lines from The Small Faces' `Lazy Sunday'!). Subsequent live shows have seen them revisit In the Shadow of the Sun for a performance at the Tate and this show - hopefully this will mean future performances centring on 20 Jazz Funk Greats or Heathen Earth?

Following the self-explanatory `Industrial Introduction,' TG move through three versions apiece of `Maggot Death' and `Slug Bait,' which at times sound like completely new material. `Maggot Death 3' wipes the floor with Warp-electronica types, while `Slug Bait 3' centres on a hypnotic guitar loop from Cosey Fanni-Tutti and an immensely disturbing interview with a child killer. Somehow this is enjoyable to listen to.

P-Orridge processed/screaming vocals help during `Slug Bait 1' - the tale of an intruder who castrates a man, then forces him to consume his detached genitals before cutting open a pregnant woman's belly and cannibalizing her baby. Some things you don't need to hear...

`Maggot Death 1' has a hook - "Play a little game/Put a record on/Midnight or day..."- that sounds like Syd Barrett singing Joy Division. For the most part The Thirty-Second Annual Report is located in alienating electronic soundscapes, nightmares from an industrialised future. The performance, complete with bizarrely excitable Parisians cheering every emission , veers off into space with a vast revision of `After Cease to Exist' which at 20-minutes wipes the floor with the version from Heathen Earth.

As a treat, TG encore with single `Zyklon Z Zombie' which nails the dirge from the Velvets' `I Heard Her Call My Name' to a lyric that takes the proverbial out of punk rock's so-called outrage via a Holocaust reference. P-Orridge even sounds like he's enjoying himself as he asks, "Are you ready, Cosey?" as she emits guitar hail over the machine drones. Strange, and potentially disturbing, that I enjoyed The Thirty-Second Annual Report also; can the world be as sad as it seems?