(33 1/3)

www.33third.blogspot.com

Just about any aging hipster or backwards-gazing youngster with an interest in '70s-era underground culture is familiar with the British band Throbbing Gristle, but few of 'em have actually ever really heard the band. Part of the reason for this is that TG were, well, somewhat loud and noisy in the pursuit of their particular artistic vision. The progenitors of what would later become known as "industrial music," the four muckrakers that made up Throbbing Gristle – Genesis P-Orridge, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Chris Carter and Peter "Sleazy" Christopherson – spun the fledgling genre out of their genuine anger at English society, tempered with a sound that was pure aural terrorism.

Throbbing Gristle's third album, 1979's 20 Jazz Funk Greats, eschewed the band's previous alchemical brew of clanky metallic factory noise, found vocals, tape loops, and aggressively distorted sound to go in an almost completely different creative direction. As explained by writer Drew Daniel in his 33 1/3 series book on the album, 20 Jazz Funk Greats was both a departure from the band's standard modus operandi, as well as a grand artistic statement. Lyrically, the album strays … albeit not far … from TG's poetic obsessions with death, mayhem, and the perverse, dancing coyly into the battleground of interpersonal relationships (including their own), adding their unsubtle social commentary on the era to the mix.

Daniel points out that 20 Jazz Funk Greats actually includes none, and plenty of both, the album representing TG's unique tongue-in-cheek perspective on jazz music and funk, in addition to their normal industrial-strength Sturm und Drang. From the off-putting album cover, where the four members look like anything but the "wreckers of civilization" that they'd been referred to by the British tabloids, to the relatively accessible sounds created by the band for the album, 20 Jazz Funk Greats is admittedly the creative high point of Throbbing Gristle's brief, but notorious career.

Unlike those aforementioned listeners, Daniel has delved deep into the album, and dissects it here, song-by-song, with acute insight, and with some thought in providing the context and meaning of each track. Daniel had access to all four band members for the book, garnering valuable information in his conversations with each, also drawing upon the band's historical record as documented in print (much of it in the British press, some through the excellent RE/Search Industrial Culture book).

Although Daniel comes across as a fanboy one moment, and a dry academic the next, overall his commentary on the album fits well within the 33 1/3 series' purview. Although Daniel readily admits that 20 Jazz Funk Greats is not widely considered a classic album, he treats it as such in his exploration of both the album, and the band's lasting importance and influence. In the end, he convinces the reader that, perhaps, this little-heard work by an obscure band is nevertheless deserving of another spin on the turntable. REV. KEITH A. GORDON