Things Can Only Get Wetter

My pick of the must-haves and must-haven’ts of new releases for 2017.

Each year, like a wound seeping gentle blood into the turbulent waters of an empty swimming pool that you were warned not to swim in, especially so soon after your lunch and also being wounded, an old year turns into a new one. This time it was the turn of 2016. 2016 (a year that marked for many the aggressively hesitant regurgitation of a spiritualistic upjumped freak-pop, a style seen not in this country since the demise, demystification, degentrification of bands like Mountains of Tony and For The Last Time), having been nailed upside-down to a cross at some point mid-September, and left to bleed out, has finally, chokingly come to its soggy confusion, uttering naught but predictions for the future, whispered-dictions that only this reviewer remained to transcribe, whilst everyone else got off with each other and criticised their own reflections. These are those predictions: releases, re-rereleases, leases, Reece’s Pieces and the odds-and-jetsam that surface at the end like sick that just won’t flush.

Baroness Gut

The self-reclaimed Queen of Crass is finally out of prison and back onto the shelves of record shops with not one, not two, but forty new releases, each louder than the previous by a factor of ten, and each equipped with its own syringe. For this is to be the first music taken intravenously, with the intention that, in the Baroness’s own words, it “will still be playing inside your head even after you’ve switched the record player off”. An intriguing, purgatorial possibility, sure, but almost certainly one that will lead to many, many deaths for which the Baroness will almost certainly return to prison. Let’s hope it’ll be worth it.

Ron The Musical Chop

“RTMC IS BACK!!!!” proclaimed an advertisement on the side of an armrest on the seat of a train going from Crewe to Stafford I was on the other day. The revelation startled me from my mixture of tea and sleep, an affectionately depressive mélange that I like to refer to as ‘teap’, leading me to blurt, grovelingly, in the face of a child that “I’m happy now!” RTMC was, in literally my opinion, the leading novelty punk-fuck doublesome of some of the ‘90s, not consecutively, and now they’re BACK. Some of them are old now! Some of them, somehow, aren’t! Those of a certain age will remember tuning in to Emp-TV every other Saturday brunchtime for a mixture of profanity and swearing, sung over the top of what I recall to be an upside-down organ, a heart perhaps, interspersed with adverts for products of the day – Re-Peelable Bananas, Stroke Medicine – and subtitled throughout in nonsense speak/Latin. They’ve said that their newest offering will be “a significant departure, like the Gatwick Express”, and that “it isn’t any good”.

Bathing Difficulty

Last July, I was fortunate enough to fall down some wells in, appropriately enough, Cardiff, and came across a fabled ‘Un-Derground Happen’, something I’d read about and once seen a bit of cloth about on a bus. Filling up the cavern and dripping, slightly repulsively, off the walls was music that was almost too worthy of the name, emitting from the mouth of a solo artist that appeared to be playing nothing but herself. It emerged, after several efforts to stop and ask her, that she was called Bathing Difficulty (her actual christened name) and she swallowed a band when she was small. Whilst, for many, this would be an almost instant cause of death, she embraced it, like a spring lamb enjoying the digesting warmth of an anaconda, and started a career aged 5 performing to her aunts and few others. She is now 7, and will be the next big thing. Her bellows and burps are collected in what is quite literally a new ‘release’ in February.

Hurt the Hen

Less a new record and more of a phenomenon, musical types from across the land are calling for people to make music by attacking animals. From Golden Oldies to Nolden Noldies, and everything in between, or not, it appears 2017’s answer to 2016’s #whisperintomymouth musical trend of one-on-one concerts inside an audience member’s throat will certainly be much more aggressive and uncertainly a lot sadder.

Crouton Robinson

Many will have come across Crouton Robinson in his co-Lab-orations, musical offerings performed alongside artists that are always about dogs. So he participated in The Rear’s Let’s Hear It For Hounds in 2014, he donated his nails to be featured in a painting called Some Dogs Tired by the murderer and watercolourist Mary, and recently brought his flagship Dog Choir programme to BBC4, in which he put dogs into a choir. So it is, perhaps, somewhat surprising that he has announced that his latest project, Mark My Words, is a sensitive merger of a poetry collection and acoustic Spanish guitar, meant to be experienced together, and having nothing to do with dogs. Bring on 2018.