FILTER ALBUMS

A spirited valedictory offering from the late Wayne Kramer. Just don’t expect the jams to be kicked out like it’s 1969, warns Andrew Perry.

by Kim Walvisch.

MC5 ★★★

Heavy Lifting EARMUSIC. CD/DL/LP

WHEN THE MC5’s irrepressible guitarist, Wayne Kramer, departed this earth on February 2 this year, aged 75, he did so knowing that he’d completed the first LP to be issued under the incendiary Motor City combo’s name in 53 years.

Three months later, the passing of drummer Dennis ‘Machine Gun’ Thompson, who played on two tracks, meant that these Detroit “action rock’n’roll” legends’ fire had finally been extinguished – but for the combustible energies ever crackling within their three landmark records from 1969-71, and the incalculable torch-carrying that continues across all subsequent music of a heavy and/or revolutionary stripe.

It was Canadian producer Bob Ezrin, best known for his half-century association with Alice Cooper, as well as helming ’70s classics ranging from Pink Floyd’s The Wall through to Destroyer by Kiss, who urged Kramer to brand Heavy Lifting as an MC5 record.

The pair first properly met during the making of Cooper’s Detroit Stories, 2019-20, where the so-called Godfather of Shock Rock examined his roots in the US automobile industry’s gritty home city, and on most of which Kramer played guitar (he also co-wrote three numbers). As Ezrin tells MOJO (see page 84), Kramer reached out to him in autumn 2020 toting material co-written with an Oakland journeyman named Brad Brooks, some of which channelled the inescapable fury of ‘Trump times’, prompting the storied producer to coin the persuasive slogan, “Right now, we are all MC5!” Kramer slept on it, and the fol-are all MC5!” Kramer slept on it, and th lowing morning green-lit the project.

The original quintet’s drug-crazed yet fiercely ethical struggle as the counter-culture’s radical hardline was never invalidated by compromise, careerism or cop-out. With politics having mostly drained out of pop/rock in the last four decades, it’s mind-blowing to ponder their mentor/manager John Sinclair launching a white adjunct to the revolutionary Black Panther Party, and issuing a 10-point programme including advocacy of “rock & roll, dope, sex in the streets and the abolishing of capitalism.”

The MC5 crashed and burned with a ferocity that outstripped even their “little-brother band”, The Stooges. They fought the law and the law really did win, as both Sinclair and Kramer were imprisoned on narcotics charges, and the band itself blew apart with an acrimony which ensured that Kramer had seldom spoken to either singer Rob Tyner or guitarist Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith in the intervening decades before they died in 1991 and 1994 respectively.

In his 2018 autobiography, The Hard Stuff, Kramer not only detailed his own addiction and subsequent activism/philanthropy, but also called into question the perceived perfection of the original ’5 catalogue: he revealed that he’d tried to halt Kick Out The Jams’ release, because, incredibly, he felt that the band’s tumultuous performance that night was below par. Its studio follow-up, 1970’s Back In The USA, mean-while, was “too tight, too clean, too controlled”, causing internal ructions as bassist Michael Davis couldn’t hack it technically, and the next year’s finale High Time for him only documented their disintegration.

“This is a full-blooded, riotous and deliciously funky record.”

Post-millennial activity has been a catalogue of self-defeat and questionable moves: 2002’s inspirational documentary, MC5: A True Testimonial, never got beyond advance screenings due to a dispute with Kramer over music royalties. Then, 2003’s Wayne-brokered partial reunion as DKT (Davis-Kramer-Thompson, plus guest vocalists) brought an overdue payday, but was already sinking amid old resentments before Davis’s death in 2012.

So: what chance, Heavy Lifting, itself delayed since full-blooded, completion in October 2022? On paper, it resembles a travesty of clusterbomb collabs, with Kramer, riotous and Brooks and Ezrin calling in 20-plus superstar favours deliciously from the likes of Tom Morello, for the co-written funky record.” title track’s inevitably Rage Against The Machine-like rap-rock crunch; Slash, on a trademark shred on the Ballad Of The MC5-style Edge Of The Switchblade, where latterday Alice In Chains yelper William Duvall also guests; and, on bass for most tunes, sometime Dylan and Stones producer Don Was. Thompson’s two appearances notwithstanding, everything you know tells you that one member alone can’t uphold a band’s inherently collective vision. To wit: the tale from The Stooges’ first reactivation record, 2007’s The Weirdness, where Iggy Pop floated a highfalutin self-penned opus called O Solo Mio, only for guitarist Ron Asheton to shoot it down with a withering, “Oh, solo record!”

No such checks and balances here, and needless to say, anyone craving Smith/Kramer’s piledriving interlocked guitars, or Tyner’s ramalama stoner poetry, will not find them on Heavy Lifting.

Get past the branding issue, however, and there’s a great deal to love about this full-blooded, riotous and often deliciously funky record. Largely rooted in alt-rock LA, where ‘Brother Wayne’ resided for his last quarter-century, it majors in melody-rich punk detonations like Barbarians At The Gate, where MC5 ’24 respond fiercely to the Trump-orchestrated assault on Capitol Hill on January 6, 2021, during the first weeks of production. After the two-year delay in the album release, it now serves as an urgent reminder for US listeners in the run-up to November’s presidential election.

On these, Brooks yowls commensurately without ever aping Tyner and also carries side two’s pair of Springsteenian, Thompson-featuring grenades (Can’t Be Found; Blind Eye) with gravelly gusto.

In reactivations as well as solo outings like 1997’s Citizen Wayne, Kramer has strenuously referenced the MC5’s ground-breaking free-jazz leanings. Not this time. Perhaps surprisingly, Heavy Lifting instead frequently keys into the groove of primetime P-Funk, as well as his time spent in that low-slung proclivity alongside Detroit-raised Don Was on Was (Not Was)’s self-titled 1981 debut.

I Am The Fun (The Phoney) slow-grinds scathingly on contemporary car-crash politics, while Change, No Change seethes over never-ending racism with a Curtis Mayfield falsetto and a miniature Maggot Brain solo. Finally, Hit It Hard’s “fight the power” incitement to the disenfranchised masses is, obviously, in message if not in actual music, 100 per cent true to the turn-of-the-’70s purpose, with Nixon, Vietnam and Kent State University swapped out for big bad Donald and escalating bloodshed in Gaza and Ukraine.

The same goes for Heavy Lifting overall: if taken entirely on its own terms, it’s profoundly agitational, a whole lot of fun, and a fittingly vigorous farewell from one of the classic rock era’s wildest legends.

Illustration by Kim Walvisch.

BOB SPEAKS! PRODUCER BOB EZRIN ON HIS LOVE OF WAYNE AND DETROIT’S REVOLUTION…

Geordie Greep ★★★

The New Sound

ROUGH TRADE. CD/DL/LP

Former Black Midi frontman continues maverick, occasionally maddening arc.

There were too many contradictions humming within Black Midi for their centre to hold for long. But their singer/guitarist’s solo debut scarcely tempers his former group’s genre-juggling tumult, its fevered zigzag between beatific jazz-fusion, thrashy post-punk, proggy needling and parodic pop delivering an hour of impressively uneasy listening. By turns theatrical, virtuosic and archly unctuous, Greep’s voice is, depending on the listener, either acquired taste or instant deal-breaker, chronicling a litany of villains and their curious perversions with prurient relish. It’s a mess of ambition and avant overload, and often too much, but you can’t help but admire The New Sound’s Stevie Chick wild abandon. And while the whirlwind of concepts and sonic right-turns ultimately fails to cohere, its thrills are many: the utopian fusion visions of the title track; As If Waltz’s yacht-funk excursion into obsession; The Magician’s cacophonic 12-minute horror story.

Public Service Broadcasting ★★★★

The Last Flight

SO RECORDINGS. CD/DL/LP/MC

Moving evocation of aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart’s fatal final flight.

Amelia Earhart’s attempt in 1937 to become the first woman to fly around the world has inspired novels, an episode of Star Trek and the Joni Mitchell song Amelia. It’s maybe not too surprising this PSB tribute coincides with Laurie Anderson’s Amelia Roy Wilkinson LP, another portrayal of Earhart’s disappearance over the Pacific Ocean. This haunting celestial legend fits well with PSB’s love of mission and atmospherics, but their template of new music plus archival spoken word is revitalised here, with Earhart’s writing voiced anew by actor Kate Graham. Towards The Dream is guitar-twanging exhilaration. The widescreen folk of The South Atlantic has a bittersweet vocal from Kate Stables of This Is The Kit. The closing near-nine minutes of strings-led evanescence on Howland is heartrending – almost as much as Earhart’s Lockheed Electra heading unseen toward eternity.

The Smile ★★★★

Cutouts

SELF HELP TAPES/XL. CD/DL/LP/MC

Swiftly delivered third album and The Smile’s second of 2024.

Coming nine months after Wall Of Eyes, Cutouts Tom Doyle is firm proof that The Smile are on a roll. While their polyrhythmic character remains on Eyes & Mouth and Zero Sum (with its dizzyingly knotty Jonny Greenwood guitar line), elsewhere envelopes are being pushed. Two tracks – the hypnotic Don’t Get Me Started and the floaty, Vangelis-styled Foreign Spies – are built from dreamy layers of vintage synths. Even better are Instant Psalm, with its disorientating orchestral fog and lyrics that sound like they were written by Yoko Ono (“A wind blows its emptiness/Yes is not a real yes”), and Tiptoe, involving a field recording of a piano played in a bar being eclipsed by a gorgeous slo-mo string arrangement as Thom Yorke sings an oblique lament for the abandoned (“We are just baggage with no label/You will find us in the rubble”). An unexpected beauty.

Sid Griff in ★★★★

The Journey From Grape To Raisin

LABEL 51. CD/DL/LP Long Ryder rides solo again.

It’s 10 years since Sid Griffin’s last solo album, The Trick Is To Breathe, but he’s hardly been slacking. Reactivating Americana pioneers The Long Ryders, calling time on his bluegrass band The Coal Porters, and various writing projects have filled his time, but then the England-based American found a window to return to Nashville and record his fifth solo album. Considering his involvement in Ryders reissues and reunion tours,

it’s no surprise that much of … Grape To Raisin Andy Fyfe concerns itself with taking stock of his past. Mortality looms large as he recounts a car accident on The Last Ten Seconds Of Life, the bluegrass-flavoured Not A Lot Of Sand Left In The Glass and again for prairie trail eulogy I Want To Be The Man (My Dog Thinks I Am). Mostly, however, Griffin is thankful for a varied, eventful life with his family, something we can all relate to.

Porridge Radio ★★★★

Clouds In The Sky They Will Always Be There For Me

SECRETLY CANADIAN. CD/DL/LP

Dana Margolin’s South Coast crew reach for the light.

Launching out of Brighton’s DIY scene in 2015, PR initially cut a new wavey dash, what with their goofily oppositional name, angular punk-pop tunes, Cure-esque chord changes, and zany fruit-wielding videos.

Close-cropped singer Margolin quickly matured into a more angsty songsmith, charting the troubled emotions that came with sudden attention, and knotty issues of identity and self-worth. For this fourth album, her songs mostly started as poems, so their unflinching documentation of band pressure, heartbreak and a baggage-laden new relationship would be set in stone before compositional necessity could distort them. Further, Clouds… was captured live in a one-room Frome facility with producer Dom Monks (Laura Marling), and opener Anybody’s declaration of fresh love duly builds with electrifying presence. There follow bare-wire examinations of audience dependency (Lavender, Raspberries) and resurgent desire (In A Dream I’m A Painting), before Sick Of The Blues provides a heartburstingly triumphant ‘choose life’ finale. It’s been gruelling, but unstoppably uplifting.