Review Summary: Provocative And Almost Impenetrable, Throbbing Gristle's Classic Debut Waits For A Deeper Understanding
Throbbing Gristle debuted in 1977 with "The Second Annual Report", an album which created a nightmarish universe formed from factory sounds, distorted voices, and ambiguous keyboards. The album made a revolution in the context of underground music, being one of the very first accomplished works of industrial and a radical manifest on its own.
Searching in my collection for a record which fitted with the spooky season, I came across "The Second Annual Report", after a long time that I hadn’t played it. Although I knew that it wasn’t exactly the right choice for a Halloween special, I gave it a spin just to remember the sounds that fully contradicted me in the past. So, I came to the conclusion that spinning "The Second Annual Report" at a late-night listening session isn’t a spooky, nor creepy, but downright frightening experience. A combination between experiment and psychotic parades of disparate sounds, Throbbing Gristle’s first album felt like an incursion into a gloomy world, dominated by deserted car cemeteries and leftover factories. It had a sense of disturbance that struck me from the introduction. I perceived it as an exercise in fright and sound freedom, like a Francis Bacon's work executed in Jackson Pollock’s impenetrable style.
That’s the feeling emanated by the first two Throbbing Gristle albums, that of nervousness encoded in noises and veiled in disturbing sound. It suggests images of desperation; it evokes a musical nightmare; and it inspires fear. Also, the style can’t be catalogued as industrial rock, because the approach presents very few similarities with rock (maybe some interferences with krautrock, but that’s all). It basically feels like a free-form expression of a post-apocalyptic darkness, contoured with an array of sounds that have the character of an amorphic mass.
"The Second Annual Report" introduces as an abrupt incursion in the underground sonorities, a work with the power to incite and frighten. It is up to the listener to find a way to relate to the incomprehensible content composed from the cacophonic fusion of motor noises, dissonant clarinets and incoherent voices. I can just say that the record gains appreciation over multiple listens, despite it feels at the initial contact like a prophecy of the future career of Merzbow.
Firstly, the "music" has a certain expressive force that floats all over the album’s content. Without that force, this experiment would not have gained widespread recognition. The time proved that "Second Annual Report" became a favorite because of its innovative character, not its strangeness. Even if the music is, as I said before, imponderable, it has some creative pylons that differentiate it from an amateur act that only wants to shock. Above all, Throbbing Gristle’s members have musical knowledge and their music presents a hint of cerebral character, in spite of the convention’s ignorance. After repeated listens, you can discern in tracks like "Slug Bait" (the second moment of the album), a cosmic fundal that makes it reminiscent of the first incarnation of Amon Duul, being connected with the chaotic atmosphere of "Psychedelic Underground". There is a profound keyboard sound, juxtaposed over voices that seem taken from a musical collage a la Faust’s debut. It isn’t impossible to find a number of elements that anchor the album with the past of experimental music, this trait unveiling a sort of compositional foundation, motivating the future recognition and the record’s legacy. So, Throbbing Gristle designs the industrial and gives it a set of basic values that will result in further variations, drawing inspiration from krautrock and musique concrete.
Secondly, the album expresses something, constructing a musical tension that gives a unifying thread to the entire suite of soundscapes. It’s a song to get lost in the blackness of the night, to dive into the unknown, to discover a cryptic meaning that lies behind all this industrial rumor. The album may suggest a dystopic world, a land without sun, or a night in a cursed forest’s heart. The music draws an ingenue décor in which the listener can find a hypnotic universe. In this ability to sketch hypostases remains the power of expression, which cemented the record’s status as a genre’s precursor. Without this force, "The Second Annual Report" would have been just a strange novelty. Because of the lively portrayal of dread, the album remains in our memory.
I'll recognize that "The Second Annual Report" didn’t suit my search for a record fit for Halloween. As I said, it’s not as creepy as it should be, it’s disturbing. But, above this shallow opinion, it builds a climate that invites us into the dark center of a highly expressive music which suggests multiple landscapes. An album of experience, Throbbing Gristle’s debut will incite a part of listeners and will disgust the other, but nobody who resists listening to the complete work will remain indifferent.
