Metal Box (Re-booted)

Martin Atkins, who went on to become PiL's longest-enduring drummer, was recruited when the second album Metal Box was virtually finished. He received a summons to the studio in the form of an inconsiderate 3 a.m. phone call. 'When I got to Townhouse Studios (where the band was recording), someone says, "There's the drum kit, make something up"', Atkins recalls. 'Wobble and I wrote "Bad Baby" off the top of our heads - what you hear on Metal Box is literally that first five minutes of us playing together for the first time'. As you might imagine, this isn't the best way for a band to operate. Indeed, "Bad Baby" is the only real blemish on what otherwise stands as not only PiL's masterpiece but post-punk's pinnacle.

The album starts with "Albatross", ten minutes of pitiless bass pressure from Wobble, over which Levene scythes the air and Lydon sings like he's being crushed between two giant slabs of rock. "Albatross" is "Public Image" turned inside out: Lydon's confidence that he can outrun his past curdling into despair. "Memories" and "Death Disco" follow, the latter retitled "Swan Lake" and now ending in a locked groove, Lydon's grief and horror frozen for eternity, like Munch's Scream.

After the surging urgency of the two singles comes the slow suspension and numb trance of "Poptones". Gyrating around Wobble's deep, probing bassline, Levene's guitar scatters a wake of harmonic sparks that merge with the lustrous halo of cymbal spray. Talking about his 'circular, jangly', almost psychedelic playing on "Poptones", Levene once compared its repetitiveness to staring at a white wall: 'If you look at it for a second, you'll see a white wall...If you keep looking at it for five minutes, you'll see different colours, different patterns, in front of your eyes - especially if you don't blink. And your ears don't blink'. Rising to the occasion, Lydon matches the music's sinister grace with one of his most quietly unsettling lyrics: sketched in oblique, fractured images, it's an account of someone who's been abducted, driven into the woods, and raped. 'Hindsight does me no good/Standing naked in this back of the woods', intones the victim, bitterly recalling the reassuring 'poptones' playing on the car's cassette player. It's not clear if the song is being sung by a corpse, or if the person got away and is now cowering and shivering in the wet foliage. On "Poptones" and other Metal Box songs, Lydon's delivery meshes with Levene's guitar in a weird modal place somewhere between Celtic and Arabic. 'When someone can't sing you get these natural voice tones', explains Wobble. 'So PiL's music was based more around overtones and subharmonics, rather than harmony per se. The Beach Boys we were not! PiL actually had more in common with music from Lapland or China'. "Poptones" whooshes straight into the Northern Ireland-inspired terror ride of "Careering", during which Levene abandoned guitar for ominously hovering and swooping electronic sound-shapes created on the Prophet 5 - an early and expensive form of polyphonic synth. Then came "No Birds Do Sing" - PiL's zenith, as far as Levene is concerned. Wobble and drummer Richard Dudanski set up a foundation-shaking groove, over which Lydon intones another scalpel-sharp lyric, dissecting suburbia's 'layered mass of subtle props', the serene narcosis of its 'bland, planned idle luxury'. Levene's guitar emits a strange metallic foam that's simultaneously entrancing and insidious. The instrumental "Graveyard" is disco music for a skeletons' ball: it really sounds like dem bones doing the shake, rattle 'n' roll. After this, Metal Box loses its way with the underdeveloped "The Suit" and "Bad Baby", but then recovers dramatically with the last three songs: the psycho-disco of "Socialist", all dry, processed drums and synth blips; the thug-funk stampede of "Chant", with Lydon ranting about street violence and wet-liberal Guardian readers; and the unexpected Satie-like poignancy of "Radio 4", with its sighing synths and gently sobbing bass. In honour of reggae and disco's twelve-inch aesthetic and to ensure the highest possible sound quality, PiL insisted on releasing the album as three 45 r.p.m. records, rather than a single 33 r.p.m. disc. The idea of putting the three discs inside a matt-grey film canister came from Lydon's friend Dennis Morris, rock photographer and member of the all-black post-PiL band Basement 5.

 

This post is ripped from the 1990 CD “Metal Box” edition to FLAC

Public Image Limited; Metal Box

1.      Albatross

2.      Memories

3.      Swan Lake

4.      Poptones

5.      Careering

6.      No Birds

7.      Graveyard

8.      The Suit

9.      Bad Baby

10.   Socialist

11.   Chant

12.   Radio 4

More from the Public Image vaults here