The Flaws of Historians
History's picked the wrong band. Over the past three decades, as the nostalgia industry has turned the '77 UK punk explosion into some watershed, culture-defining moment, the legend of the Sex Pistols —the ornery attitudes, the swearing on TV, the getting ripped off by their management, the drug-induced death— has been told time and again. Yet, if you actually listen to Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols now, it, truth be told, sounds a bit silly; a fun record and all, but nothing truly to define a generation.
Yet, listen to the album that John Lydon worked on merely two years later, Public Image Ltd.'s magnificent Metal Box, and prepare yourself for adventure. Where the Pistols have become the establishment, their songs as familiar as any other classic-rock standbys, PiL still exist deep in the shadowy, secret realms of the underground.
Metal Box is a mind-altering listen even for those who're happily drawn to the lunatic fringe. Where punk bands bashed out Bo Diddley chords for two short minutes, here, the second PIL LP announces its intentions with opener "Albatross": nearly 11 minutes of wandering, stumbling, menacing post-punk; sustaining a sense of agitation that keeps its entire running-time feeling perpetually uneasy.
As Keith Levene's bent fragments of guitar sound both atonal and harmonic, Lydon's voice attempts the same kind of discordance; a strung-out, slowed-down moan pulled from deep in his guts. After finding fame playing punk-rock's prized clown, here Lydon undergoes quite a reinvention; no longer the jester, but the soothsayer.
Boxing Hellacious
Metal Box is the sound of young men widening their horizons. Taking influence from German krautrock minimalism, from Jamaican dub production, and, less obviously, from the synthesizer oscillations and guitar arpeggios of prog-rock, Public Image Ltd. were a group wriggling free from the stylistic straight-jacket of punk; a genuine rebellion rebelling against pantomimed rebellion.
With "Careering," they put down the guitars and severed themselves from their pasts. Levene, who was there at the birth of The Clash, ekes out a series of ruptured synthesizer squeaks; Lydon, punk's great adolescent provocateur, incants unconscious poetry loaded with military-industrial complex nightmares (the couplet "there must be meaning behind the moaning/spreading tales like coffin nails" loaded with a subconscious double-meaning). But the song belongs to Jah Wobble, whose circular, dub-influenced bass marches on whilst the ad-hoc percussion he himself bashed out sounds literally industrial; harsh smashes of metal on metal.
Wobble's bassplaying is the rock on which this anti-rock music is built. With the dubbed-out insistence of his four-strings forever there at the bottom end, PIL are free to keep things frighteningly skeletal; free to sprawl out and fall out, growing less 'together' with every bar. In some ways, Metal Box is like an album in which each of its performers is in their own individual trance-state; there often a sense of incongruous tension —like in the angular, unending, nasty-sounding "Poptones"— in the way the bass, guitar, drums, and vocals clash.
Misremembrance of Things Past
Oh, and, then there's the packaging. No mention of Metal Box can fail to recount the way it was first released: on three untitled 12-inch records housed in a metal film cannister. An iconic piece of graphic design up there with the most mischievous work of Factory Records, it was audacious artwork for an audacious band.
But, just as the annals of history have somehow remembered the Sex Pistols as musically shocking and infallibly classic, whilst consigning Public Image Ltd. to the margins, so, too, is remembering Metal Box as the album that came in the metal box a grave mistake. The packaging was a minor detail; what was truly important was the music.
Record Label: Virgin
Release Date: November 23, 1979
