Throbbing Gristle ‎/ THE SECOND ANNUAL REPORT

Reissue of the original 1977 lp

Their first proper album, The Second Annual Report is essentially an edited collection of live and studio takes, and still sounds fresh and uncategorisable. ‘Slug Bait’ has lost none of its transgressive power: the ICA recording foregrounds Genesis P.Orridge’s gleefully macabre lyrics (inhabiting the mind of a particularly nasty murderer), while the shorter Southampton and Brighton versions emphasise the minimal synth drones and sampled voices. ‘Maggot Brain’ sounds like 60s psychedelia that’s taken a wrong turn and ended up in hell, while ‘Live At Rat Club London’ is probably the closest thing on here to the common conception of industrial, all disorientingly looped spoken vocals, brutally mechanized percussion and needling synthesizer jabs, while ‘After Cease To Exist”s oppressive atmospherics – taking up an entire side of the original LP – pretty much gave birth to the entire dark ambient genre. The comparatively bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, Kraftwerk-influenced single ‘United’ – the tune that ushered in a million inferior cold wave pop bands – is included along with its gloriously compressed and distorted B-side ‘Zyklon B Zombie’.

It’s insane to think The Second Annual Report came out in ’77, the same year as Never Mind The Bollocks. Pause for a moment and reflect on that, then press the buy button.