Review Summary: Obverse variation..
Coming forth from the burgeoning post-punk movement brewing in the UK at the start of the 80’s, Dif Juz traded in the genre’s usual tendencies of indeterminate gloom, but sought to reach further and wider, making something that was heady with deviation and sub-type. Released in 1983,
Time Clock Turn Back is soaked in multi-romantic tilts, and plays out like transmissions from some faraway, otherworldly pier. Pliable and deft, it’s a rare document of its time, music that’s as concerned with beauty as it is with sonic emulation.
Though the band’s base musical skeleton does have its feet firmly planted in post-punk, they mash all sorts of offshoots of 80’s sub-genres into the mix – atmospheric dub, dream pop, no-wave funk, early post-rock, as well as slight twee and jangle affectations all come together in this set of comely instrumentals that sound like balmy sequences sifted through gauze, a pretty picture gleamed through a grainy filter. It’s easy to see how on later albums, their style would attract collaborations from Cocteau Twins and Lee “Scratch” Perry, both eager to play around with and propel sound engineering in their heyday. Even in the face of its lo-fi mixing,
Time Clock Turn Back sounds untethered, bent on broadening itself to fill every open crack in a room. That act of angling for artful vastness also brought them to 4AD, a label then just being started by Ivo Watts-Russell, who himself was also beginning to dabble in ethereal experimentalism with his This Mortal Coil.
All of that propensity and distinct ambition crests over itself on the LP, the band’s first. Richard Thomas’ drum-work, a stop-start show, trades between short frenetic combinations and passive backing, sometimes swapping between the two mid-bar. He becomes the main driving force behind unsettled numbers like the nervy “Red Tackle” and the ominous “Bad Tooth,” then restricts himself to quiescent melioration on more sedate, beautifying cuts like “Sea Shanti.” His atonal sax-work adds more tiers still to Dif Juz’ already-stacked aggregate. On anxious “Spy Plane,” his horn slips into melodic asymmetry that slinks in and out of Eastern melds, and on the punch-drunk, roaming “Introducing Mrs. McCarthy,” he dives headfirst into hard bop modalities.
The lack of vocals can make a purposeful listen through all of
Time Clock Turn Back a detached affair. But even there lies particular intent. Despite its frequent mood-swings, the album as a whole adopts a trance-like state that lulls in, stirs and soothes, and then finally unceremoniously tosses the listener into the prolonged four-act closer of “Good Bad the Ugly,” shapeshifting out of post-rock into a brief dub interlude that veers into a prog fusion breakdown and finally closes off on an ambient reggae tick. For all its genre flirtations, Dif Juz seem to be working within a defined concept here –
Time Clock Turn Back is an album of immersion, made to envelop wholly, like so many concentric dreams.
