THIS HEAT – Deceit

This Heat’s post-punk classic Deceit completes an official trilogy of vinyl reissues from their seminal and hugely influential run of late ‘70s/early ‘80s recordings which set the template for so, so much avant-rock, noise and experimental music ever since.

Rooted in improvisations from the same period which birthed This Heat, and realised against a paranoid backdrop of looming nuclear war and Mutually Assured Destruction, Deceit finds Charles Bullen (guitar, clarinet, viola, vocals, tapes), Charles Hayward (drums, keyboards, vocals, tapes) and Gareth Currie coalescing around firmer, if still wholly experimental, song structures that perhaps better dealt with and reflected the world around them.
In a lineage stretching back thru The Beatles, The Soft Machine, Can, Neu!, and the Velvet Underground before them, there’s little doubt that This Heat are responsible for affecting the course of popular and experimental music in the late 20th century, and we can still hear the freedom of Deceit writ large on everyone from Micachu and The Shapes to Animal Collective, Caribou, or even the Blackest Ever Black catalogue nowadays.

Essential.