Wait. I think I remember MLA format for this:
"Oof." [Contraceptron, Steve. "Listening To Come's Rampton A Bunch Of Fucking Times: Managing Your Desire To Listen To Something Else." Listening To NWW List Garbage. My House, New Windsor. 19 April, 2014. Boredom.]
I think we can all agree that didn't add anything to the post.
As Nelson Mandela taught us, we must embody a certain fluidity in our posturing, and allow ourselves the space to negotiate even in the face of our most virulent and unyielding opponents. Simultaneously, we must ensure that the establishment of consent amongst parties is weighted by an understanding of the context and conditions of these negotiations, lest insurrection occurs. In the case at hand, the conditions described were tragically unmet, and under a law of such myopic tyranny as the internally imposed "I Need To Listen To Every Album At Least 3 Times Before I Review It" principle, violence erupted. With hindsight as my guide, I could posit that my rigidity and ignorance during the establishment of such stipulations could only be met with me listening to this shitty album like 4 times even though I totally hated it after the first time and then getting really bored and annoyed with myself. I dunno, fuck you this album blows.
I've kind of always liked buying into the zAnY mythologies of "legendary", "crucial", "groundbreaking" "slabs" of "historical importance", mostly because it's fun to get excited over stupid shit like "lost" records and super obscure record collector junk. In this case, Come's Rampton LP/CS is pretty rare and sought after for being the predecessor to Whitehouse and You're Interrupting Me Scraping Foetus Off The Incorporated Symphony Of Corruption (or whatever words surround "Foetus" this week), and I was really excited about hearing this. But then I listened to it a few times and... wrote that stupid opening paragraph.
Come is made up of William Bennett, J.G. Thirlwell (under some pseudonym), Peter McKay, and Daniel Miller (also under some pseudonyms), and is pretty much what you'd expect from such subversive, visionary deconstructionists of polite Western civilization when they were, like, twenty year old kids. It's basically just some rudimentary "industrial" fuzz guitar, a bloopy synth bass of hilariousness, and Bennett making funny "whooOoooEeeeEHhheeeee" noises on top. If I had to describe the vocals, I'd probably put them somewhere between leprechaun surface noise (like if a leprechaun was giggling and brogue-ing 30 feet away and you were recording it. And then played it through an echo pedal) and someone babytalking to a cat they like to an uncomfortable degree. I always kinda liked Bennett's vocals in early Whitehouse, 'cause they provided a human counterweight to all the screeching, pointless machinations going on, but here I'm not really sure what the intended effect was. They're definitely not an interesting foil to the high school basement post-punk riffs, anyway.
For a second I was having one of those thoughts that seemingly everyone who explores the NWW list (ie 'why is _____ on the list but not _______?') (though seriously where the fuck is Sun Ra) but then I saw the cover of the LP version and it kinda made sense:
I mean, that's totally Stapleton's art, right? And he did put Whitehouse in the To The Quiet Men... list, too, and they did do that pretty solid collaboration with Bennett as The 150 Murderous Passions a few years later. Were they buddies way back in '79? I guess I could figure this out with ten seconds of internet browsing, but I also wanna go make dinner right now.
Come apparently have a second LP called I'm Jack (whose cover might be the second of three gajillion Bennett-related releases to feature Peter Kurten), and apparently it's more in the drone/noise vein, comparatively, and is a bit more prescient than this shit. I haven't heard it yet, but I'll be sure to update this once I do with the EXCITING CONCLUSION.
Also, I can't embed Come videos here for some reason, but if you'd like to hear this shit for yourself, here's a great link for that sort of thing: www.youtube.com
Okay, here's a less smarmy link.
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