Listening: Gang of Four

Gang of Four, Solid Gold (Infinite Zero Archive) It's hilarious that, given the number of lame-to-passable bands making big bank off watered-down derivatives of their (and Joy Division's) sound, these guys decided to reform. 'Course, as with the Sex Pistonls, why not? These guys were part of an amazing wave of musicians that followed punk down various paths suggested punk, dub, disco, all at once: PiL, Gang of Four, the Slits, the Raincoats, Essential Logic, eventually the whole bunch of downer Mancusians starting with Joy Division. Their sound matched heavy funk drums with even heavier dubwise bass (and mixing) and noise guitar, with Jon King intoning capitalist mantras in the kind of panicked tone (think David Byrne off his meds) that let you know he was trying to keep the psychic wolf from the door through repetition. So usually people point to their first album, Entertainment, and this one as their best. (Both have been pretty hard to find on CD until recently.) And where Entertainment had a more spacious, Beefheart-influenced mix (with the usual dub trickery), this one is where the metal funk really came together in cavernous, clautrophobic mixes. (And live--these guys killed Perkins Palace in Pasadena the night I saw them.)