COLIN NEWMAN - BASTARD

A standout of Wire’s post peak fallout in the ‘90s, band member Colin Newman’s gauzy turns to trip hop, house, and even breakcore, is characteristic of the way he, and the band, exerted a subtle spin on everything they touched.

After recently getting hard snagged on Newman’s bandmate, Graham Lewis’ sorely overlooked He Said album ‘Take Care’, which is a massive tip and surely gasping for a reissue, we’re hungry for more work by the band post their peak years, but when they were still actively exploring new avenues. 1997’s ‘Bastard’ is in that category, and firmly in step with contemporaneous trends, but also skewed by a feel for hypnotic repetition and texture that carries over from Wire while directly relating to Newman’s sometimes club adjacent work with Malka Spiegel in Minimal Compact. 

The album is interesting at the very least for its embrace of prevailing ’97 trends for dance music, which - as is all too often forgotten - was often anathema to “guitar types” and proper “muso’s” (read: snobs) at the time and for many years after, although the cosigns (£ signs) of David Bowie and Noel Gallagher’s flirtation with jungle would open that gate. Starting out with shoegazey trip hop in ’Sticky’ and the baggy swag of ‘May’, he gets his breakcore on with the sped up thrash of ‘Slowfast (Falling Down the Stairs with a Drumkit)’, and closer melds guitar music with brittle breaks on ’Spiked’.

Best of all, the closing flourish of proper late ‘90s tech step with floating pads and Malka Spiegel’s croon in ‘Turn’ variously reminds of Third Eye Foundation, Digital’s SOS gem ‘Lost’, or Boymerang cuts, in its mix of ruff ’n smooth that didn’t quite fall into that insipid category of “Intelligent D&B” that YouTube thinks i’m into, but hate. Stir in a real sore thumb of horny friday night house swing in ‘G-Deep’, and ambient chamber music on ‘Without’, and its all worthy of fresh ears raking old ground.