Somesay Again

Beginning his many varied Wah! career in 1979 as Wah! Heat with the outstanding single Better Scream, Pete Wylie was setting the bar high. The subsequent follow up in the spring of 1980 of Seven Minutes To Midnight (becoming single of the week in NME, Sounds and Melody Maker) didn’t let the bar drop, it raised it higher. So suggesting that Pete Wylie's first album as Wah! is his finest work, could be asking for trouble. Filled to the brim with passionate post-punk and blitzkrieg funk that holds an impressive level of focused intensity from front to back, Nah = Poo – The Art Of Bluff is no doubt the result of having listened to Clash records over and over and over and over again. There's little of the Clash's melodic sensibility to be found here though, memorable guitar riffs might not be evident either, but there's an infectiously blistered pace to the proceedings, if a bit overbearingly shouty and mushy mixing-wise. Wylie sing-shouts every track on the album with a ferocious vigour, which in turn gives the album a rare sense of immediacy. Wah! literally sounds like they're playing with the knowledge that there will be no tomorrow. Off to an iffy start, tribal drums and from the depths vocals on "The Wind Up" do exactly that. One gets wound up because they want the record to actually start. Maybe that was the point. After that, it refuses to let up, kicked off by the "Do It Clean"-meets-"Break on Through" of "Other Boys." An album sequenced for maximum impact, instrumental "The Seven Thousand Names of Wah!" (no kidding) sets the table for "Seven Minutes to Midnight," Wah!'s signature song. The instrumental serves the same purpose as Mission of Burma barnburners like "Secrets" and "All World Cowboy Romance," holding together the rest of the album's songs while upping the intensity to yet another level (as if it needed upping). 

Ripped from the original vinyl releases by a bunch of different, but beautiful blogs and collated here for your listening pleasure in one mega MP3 @ 320kbps download

Wah! Heat – Better Scream 7” [Inevitable Records INEV001]

               A1 Better Scream

               B1 Hey! (Disco) Joe

Wah! Heat – Seven Minutes To Midnight 7” [Inevitable Records INEV004]

               A1 Seven Minutes To Midnight…(To Be Continued)

               B1 Don’t Step On The Cracks

Wah! – Forget The Down! 7” [Eternal Records SLATE 1]

               A1 Forget The Down!

               B1 The Checkmate Syndrome

Wah! – Nah = Poo – The Art Of Bluff LP [Eternal Records CLASSIC 1]

               A1 The Wind-Up

               A2 Otherboys

               A3 Why D’ You Imitate The Cutout?

               A4 Mission Impossible

               A5 Somesay

               B1 The Seven Thousand Names Of Wah!

               B2 Sleeppp

               B3 Seven Minutes To Midnight

               B4 The Death Of Wah!

Wah! – Somesay 7” & 12” [Eternal Records SLIMEY1]

               A1 Somesay

               B1 Forget The Down (This Time)