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Black Box Recorder:  ‘Life is Unfair,’ so kill yourself or get over it
09.23.2019
12:24 pm
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This post was originally published here a little over a year ago, before ‘Life is Unfair,’ the Black Box Recorder box set, came out on vinyl. It was originally only a CD/DVD release and if you are like me, and don’t like CDs clogging up your living space, but are fine with records doing it, this is simply to alert you to the availability of this new iteration of ‘Life is Unfair.’

Which you should go out and buy immediately if not sooner.

The new vinyl version of ‘Life is Unfair’ includes each of their three original albums on wax, the same odds & sods “BBREXIT” collection from CD box (still on a CD), a (very strong) live CD that is unique to this set, and the same DVD as before which includes a short live performance and the group’s three music videos. You might say it’s the catalogue raisonné of Black Box Recorder.

*****

In their 1973 occult cookbook The Third Mind, novelist William S. Burroughs and painter Brion Gysin discuss the notion that when two like-minded individuals are harmoniously tuned to the same creative task, a ghostly “third mind” will arise during the proceedings, almost independent of the original two participants and take everything to a higher level. It’s not just that two minds are better than one, they’re better than two minds, too:

“The third mind is the unseen collaborator, the superior mind constructed when two minds are put together.”

One plus one equals three in creative matters, in other words. It’s all very mathematical obviously and therefore cannot be disputed.

And so it was that one-time Jesus and Mary Chain drummer (and then absinthe importer) John Moore teamed up with the leader of the Auteurs, Luke Haines. Both were participating in a folk ensemble called Balloon—Haines on guitar, Moore on electric saw—and they decided to write some songs together. The initial results were promising and after the pair had composed a ditty titled “Girl Singing in the Wreckage” they needed a girl to sing it naturally and so enlisted another Balloon participant, vocalist Sarah Nixey.
 

 
Now Sarah Nixey happens to be the owner of one of the very, very best British female voices of all time (Nixey should be doing all of the voiceover work for British Airways and Jaguar. They ought to declare hers the official voice of Great Britain by royal decree or something, it’s just that perfectly English-sounding.) There is no one in pop—not one singer I can think of—who has her precise and exacting command over her instrument. Not only are her almost whispered gossamer vocals as resonant as Tibetan glass singing bowls, her diction is so astonishingly crisp and well-enunciated that it leaves her, frankly, without peer, as an archly ironic sprechgesang-singing posh girl rapper with one raised eyebrow.

With Nixey’s advantageous addition to what was already the working “trio” of Moore and Haines, this meant that the three of them together were now as good as seven or eight lone musicians, perhaps even an entire orchestra. Burroughs and Gysin never explained what came after two minds equalled three and math was never really my strong suit, but to be able to compose music knowing THAT VOICE would be interpreting your material must’ve spurred Moore and Haines to give it their all as songwriters. Writing to the strength of a chanteuse with the talents of Sarah Nixey would have an exponentially positive effect on any musical endeavor and thus was born Black Box Recorder, already greater than the sum of its thoroughbred parts before the project even gets out of the gate.
 

 
With Nixey fronting the group this meant that the two cynical bastards writing the music had to channel the perspective of a female of about her age (early twenties) in the lyrics she’d sing and so over the course of their three albums, a sort of morbid, spoiled, narcissistic Sloane Ranger character develops while the lush minimalism of the music reminds one of Air or Portishead. Black Box Recorder’s darker lyrical preoccupations—Ballardian musings on car crashes and “The English Motorway System,” police digging up bodies in a trendy neighborhood, swimming with the ghosts of murdered Victorian-era children—could be seen as representing evil Cousin Serena to Saint Etienne’s sunnier Samantha Stevens. 

As a remarkably assured debut album England Made Me compares favorably to something like Please by the Pet Shop Boys: cynical, funny, intelligent with sonic invention and arrangements of the highest caliber. (England Made Me is also as perfect a soundtrack to the Tony Blair era as the PSB’s first album was for Thatcher’s final years in power. I fully expect that future filmmakers producing period pieces about pre and post millennial Britain will ransack BBR’s discography song by song.) Here’s their first single, “Child Psychology,” a catchy number about a world-weary six-year-old girl who simply stops talking:
 

 
“Child Psychology” was blacklisted for radio play by most UK stations and MTV and it was released as a single in America just one week after the Columbine massacre, ensuring its quick demise on the US pop charts as well. If you found yourself wondering “How did I miss this?” just watch the video and you’ll instantly know why. England Made Me‘s title track, in which the protagonist tells of a dream that she’s killed a man and left his body in a trunk, didn’t burn up the charts here or there either, but it’s also a damned good song:
 

 
It was with their classic all-killer-no-filler second album The Facts of Life in 2000 that saw BBR release their sole chart hit. “The Facts of Life,” an aerial view of the birds & the bees and DNA (“there’s no master plan”) went top 20 and the group was invited to perform on TV’s Top of the Pops. As told in the pages of Haines’ Post Everything: Outsider Rock and Roll his second memoir of life in the music business, aiming to create a hit record with the aid of science, he and Moore forensically autopsied and then back-engineered the Billie Piper earworm “Honey to the Bee” to come up with what they—and the public, for a few weeks at least—thought was an irresistibly catchy pop tune.

They were right about that:
 

 
Much more after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Richard Metzger
|
09.23.2019
12:24 pm
|
Life is Unfair: Black Box Recorder want you to kill yourself or get over it
07.25.2018
07:57 pm
Topics:
Tags:


 
In their 1973 occult cookbook The Third Mind, novelist William S. Burroughs and painter Brion Gysin discuss the notion that when two like-minded individuals are harmoniously tuned to the same creative task, a ghostly “third mind” will arise during the proceedings, almost independent of the original two participants and take everything to a higher level. It’s not just that two minds are better than one, they’re better than two minds, too:

“The third mind is the unseen collaborator, the superior mind constructed when two minds are put together.”

One plus one equals three in creative matters, in other words. It’s all very mathematical obviously and therefore cannot be disputed.

And so it was that one-time Jesus and Mary Chain drummer (and then absinthe importer) John Moore teamed up with the leader of the Auteurs, Luke Haines. Both were participating in a folk ensemble called Balloon—Haines on guitar, Moore on electric saw—and they decided to write some songs together. The initial results were promising and after the pair had composed a ditty titled “Girl Singing in the Wreckage” they needed a girl to sing it naturally and so enlisted another Balloon participant, vocalist Sarah Nixey.
 

 
Now Sarah Nixey happens to be the owner of one of the very, very best British female voices of all time (Nixey should be doing all of the voiceover work for British Airways and Jaguar. They ought to declare hers the official voice of Great Britain by royal decree or something, it’s just that perfectly English-sounding.) There is no one in pop—not one singer I can think of—who has her precise and exacting command over her instrument. Not only are her almost whispered gossamer vocals as resonant as Tibetan glass singing bowls, her diction is so astonishingly crisp and well-enunciated that it leaves her, frankly, without peer, as an archly ironic sprechgesang-singing posh girl rapper with one raised eyebrow.

With Nixey’s advantageous addition to what was already the working “trio” of Moore and Haines, this meant that the three of them together were now as good as seven or eight lone musicians, perhaps even an entire orchestra. Burroughs and Gysin never explained what came after two minds equalled three and math was never really my strong suit, but to be able to compose music knowing THAT VOICE would be interpreting your material must’ve spurred Moore and Haines to give it their all as songwriters. Writing to the strength of a chanteuse with the talents of Sarah Nixey would have an exponentially positive effect on any musical endeavor and thus was born Black Box Recorder, already greater than the sum of its thoroughbred parts before the project even gets out of the gate.
 

 
With Nixey fronting the group this meant that the two cynical bastards writing the music had to channel the perspective of a female of about her age (early twenties) in the lyrics she’d sing and so over the course of their three albums, a sort of morbid, spoiled, narcissistic Sloane Ranger character develops while the lush minimalism of the music reminds one of Air or Portishead. Black Box Recorder’s darker lyrical preoccupations—Ballardian musings on car crashes and “The English Motorway System,” police digging up bodies in a trendy neighborhood, swimming with the ghosts of murdered Victorian-era children—could be seen as representing evil Cousin Serena to Saint Etienne’s sunnier Samantha Stevens. 

As a remarkably assured debut album England Made Me compares favorably to something like Please by the Pet Shop Boys: cynical, funny, intelligent with sonic invention and arrangements of the highest caliber. (England Made Me is also as perfect a soundtrack to the Tony Blair era as the PSB’s first album was for Thatcher’s final years in power. I fully expect that future filmmakers producing period pieces about pre and post millennial Britain will ransack BBR’s discography song by song.) Here’s their first single, “Child Psychology,” a catchy number about a world-weary six-year-old girl who simply stops talking:
 

 
“Child Psychology” was blacklisted for radio play by most UK stations and MTV and it was released as a single in America just one week after the Columbine massacre, ensuring its quick demise on the US pop charts as well. If you found yourself wondering “How did I miss this?” just watch the video and you’ll instantly know why.

Continues after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Richard Metzger
|
07.25.2018
07:57 pm
|