My Review: Wall of Voodoo - Dark Continent

 My Review:

Wall of Voodoo - Dark Continent

Moods, noises, smells, endless trips, stars gliding over planet earth, roots of electronic horns, perversions with a mask, electrified and suggested madness, western with a gun on frenetic and panting keyboards, tepid dangerous scenarios, darkness and danger.

We could start from here to understand the content of an absolutely seminal album, a cuisine of known and unknown ingredients served in the rich dish of art with a capital letter.

Not a band, not a set of songs, but the vitamin of madness synthesised and rocket launched towards our dazzled minds. Everything that had been created over at least two decades of experimental, electronic music mixed with various genres, here finds an evolution, an improvement, a shedding of class and absolutely new insights that cannot be questioned.

Apotheosis without doubt: to stand by it even today, after 41 years and thousands of listens, does not take away the conviction of a record that still teaches and amazes us, sows suggestions and reflections that can only lead to the definitive affirmation that it was, is and will always be a masterpiece. 

With a stylised, visionary, cinematographic, hypnotic, obsessive manner, capable of gravitating with agility in post-punk as in electronic music (always of American matrix), its structures and sonic invocations are impulses, beats, rhythmic and sensorial deflagrations towards its stripping away and futurist projection coming from a past that was beginning to be antiquated. They took care of it: Stan Ridgway, Joe Nanini, Bruce Moreland, Chas Gray, Marc Moreland.

The band from Los Angeles sowed, developed and partially harvested: they didn't get the sounding board they deserved, but they managed to be relevant and decisive, rightfully entering the Olympus of music.

I speak of this exercise in style and acrobatic sound circumnavigations that have made Dark Continent the father of a different attitude to creative processes and their forms, the river that divides the earth and nourishes the sky. Thirty-five minutes of artificial fertilisation, magic wands disguised as transistors and modern effects that certainly do not erase the past. Years later, the terms Crossover and Miscellany were coined, but long before that, all this had already been planned and created, and WOV are surely to be counted among them. A pioneering, swaggering, absurd and, in its own way, exasperating record: the courage of indifference connected to reasoned delirium. The Acme Soundtracks studio was the daddy of this rational earthquake, the base from which to start and which put in Stan's suitcase magnetic pills with thermal and emotional expansion. Slowly, after four years, he and the other messengers of the Moon and the Sun have procreated a life that does not die, a peculiarity that only the Deities possess.

The songs have complex lyrics, with their eyes on the enormous natural dangers, the advancement of issues related to the tension of industrial processes. In all this there is also room for a large share of interest in relationships, social rather than sentimental, poised between courage and battling appearances in the upheaval of safe balances, as a form of contrast to a modern society that was beginning to build up a sense of speed and of rejection towards the past. 

Many things turn out to be incredible in this imaginative journey: take for example the drumming part. You think it is often a drum machine the one you listen to and then you discover that there is a real drummer to make that essential part ghostly and robotic, turning the whole thing into a product created in a laboratory when in fact there is human sweat descending over the skins of a spectacular drum kit.

And then what sounded like synth pads and patterns give back something ancient and related to our nature. The post-punk attitude of the guitar, often shuddering and resembling the running of a sprinter, finds itself working with synthesisers that seem to come out of the late 1950s in miraculous conspiracies of Time. Take the bass: a grey meteor that appears in jerks, without continuity, often absent, when it shows its granitic presence that seems to have studied the fairy-tale simplicity of Peter Hook from the other seminal band called Joy Division. There is also a methodical affinity to Suicide's devilish swans: WOV sound like devoted sons writing hypnotic sparks on plastic sheets that could have been designed by the New York duo. If we pay attention to the lyrical part, then we have to add to what I wrote earlier the amount of post-industrial paranoia that fills with synthetic perfume words that seem to be more suffocatingly gloomy than many Gothic bands of the time. Stan overturns centuries-old convictions by writing apocalyptic scenarios with the timbre of an ice flow. Everything seems like a smooth carpet over his soul: linear, hypnotic, the sound of this mental palace that becomes physical shows an excellent continuity, making it difficult to determine which moments to give preference to. Their connection to Devo can be understood in the cinematic vision that the guys from Los Angeles seem to want to express much more than others, but it is a juxtaposition that lasts less than one would think: because if the band from Akron was more interested in scenarios from science fiction movies, in the debut work of Ridgway and company almost everything seems to derive from the dust of Far West fights with its illusions within the grey cloud of a Western full of electronic bullets to weld an unimaginable temporal marriage. Like a long Halloween weekend that seems to hypnotise the future and shrink it down into just two days of crazy revelry, pranks and whatnot, the whole thing sounds like a merry-go-round of electronic sequins in a visual rollercoaster of unwillingness to stop the fear of icy, hypnotic veins.

An essential album, like the fruit of scientific work that came out of laboratories in secret locations and was published by specialized magazines: WOV have opened up a new expressive era, they have issued warnings without the excessive emotional charge of post-punk to thin it out and compact new solutions within an artistic artifice not so far from reality. It is the expressive freedom of the quintet that produces unpredictable material within the circuit of the early 80s, the era so in need of new and charming energies: we had to go to the city where fiction takes over to balance again our convictions for this set of eleven sea quakes within the labyrinths of trails of liquid sandpaper scratches.

An apotheosis of restrained delusions, with tie and shiny shoes, but piloted by unsuspected black souls.

The importance and beauty of what is unique becomes a wild wave that cannot be repeated because the current of the WOV ocean is destined for its own loneliness, while generations of artists will try to steal every molecule of their class, never succeeding: it is also in this way that we understand that what is without the possibility of repetition is confined to loneliness. 

Dark Continent is the door to that laboratory that closes and divides what is perfect from doomed human nature, a work that is simply incredible and regenerative, the violent mass of a waterfall that not only washes and purifies us, but also takes us to unknown physical and mental places. 

And it is precisely there that the art of perfection reveals itself: it is from these grooves that we can learn to wear scrubs to enter their secret chambers like dumbed-down pupils with no chance of stealing candy from these eternal masters. If beauty has a price, with little money we bring in an endless ocean of atomic diamonds...

Song by Song 

1 Red Light

A horror sting with a primordial synth punk vein for the beginning:  the voice with a mode that seems created by antipsychotic find itself in the swamp of semi-glorious proto-punk guitars and swirling synths.

2 Two Minutes Til Lunch

The bold bass on a steamer headed for the saloon creates a gloomy atmosphere, until the guitar scratches the rhythm and Stan's vocals become trembling for a track straight out of the Ultravox factory.

3 Animal Day

Take Suicide soaked in whiskey, show them the Indians from John Ford's movies and lock them in a factory: it's pure chaos, with Devo clapping as they wink.

4 Full Of Tension

The Fall, Cabaret Voltaire, Ultravox and Tuxedomoon: in the cauldron of art that triumphs over all forms of life, here is the track that launches the band into frictionless enjoyment. Short, pyrotechnic and schizoid, it is a manifesto of rhythm and neurosis in the valley of the barren hills.

5 Me And My Dad

Gary Numan goes to dinner at the home of slowest Devo: it's a sombre dance, long synths with a propensity for an uncertain flight and clear inserts of Suicide in apnea.

6 Back In Flesh

Post-punk with fever and the guitar almost coming from Balkan zones invokes an alarm siren over which the synth stutters phrases from German experimentation. Majestic, it is the manifest ability to do wide-ranging pressing. 

7 Tse Tse Fly

The long loop that, like a whip, outlines the zones of one's sensory command, becomes the stage for a theatre company inside salt caves. Rough, heavy, with the bass welding the nervous guitar to the synthetic river, it leads to ecstasy with Stan's ordinance singing.

8 Call Box - 1-2-3

The music box inside a merry-go-round full of lights and obsessive rhythms concedes industrial inserts splattered with speed and raw materials. Delusional, it becomes a game of references on which glass and plasterboard blankets have been placed.

9 This Way Out

Halber Mensch's Einsturzende Neubauten suggest the opening of the track, but then we fall back into WOV's now classic ride, for a further display of stones thrown by electronic slingshots, with a bass coming out of Macclesfield and Salford areas.

10 Good Times

A waltz in the third millennium becomes a bruising march, with spaces of uncalculated playfulness that grants the band sick harmonic games because contaminated by the trails of fumes coming out of weapons factories. Amazing.

11 - Crack the Bell

The album says goodbye with splashes of Cabaret Voltaire and The Human League of the first period as they rummage through the ticks of keyboards on full display. The almost pop-like refrain within Stan's chaotic vocals proclaims the masterpiece of this gem that boarded a nuclear train.

Alex Dematteis 

Musicshockworld 

Salford

26th July 2022