Front Line Assembly will release their first new album in almost six years in early 2019. Having rejoined the group in 2016 in a touring capacity, 'Wake Up The Coma' also marks the studio return to FLA of Rhys Fulber, thus reuniting him with founder member Bill Leeb in the duo line-up that has already made so many classic electronic records together.

The opening salvo from the record is the teaser single 'Eye On You', which features Robert Görl of DAF. Crushingly heavy but with a highly atmospheric mid-section, it is accompanied by a pair of industrial strength techno remixes from the renowned French producer Terence Fixmer and Canadian duo Orphx that sound simultaneously old-school and bang up to date.

Tracklist

1. Eye On You 4:30
2. Eye On You (Terence Fixmer Remix) 6:03
3. Eye On You (Orphx Remix) 7:00

Although the band had several releases since 1985, Isn't Anything is often considerd as the real debut studio album by My Bloody Valentine. It was released on 21 November 1988 by Creation Records. Its innovative instrumental and production techniques consolidated the experimentation of the band's preceding EPs and would make it a pioneering work of the subgenre known as shoegazing.
Upon its release, the album received rave critical reviews and reached number one in the UK Independent Album Chart. A 1988 year-end roundup of the year's top albums in Melody Maker ranked Isn't Anything third of the year and called it “a raving nymphomania and out-of-body experience establishes them as absent-minded rulers of this daydream nation."

Isn't Anything has subsequently become regarded as one of the greatest albums of the 1980s. The album has been included in The Guardian's list of "1000 Albums to Hear Before You Die" and ranked as number 16 in their "Alternative Top 100 Albums" list.

The NME ranked the album at 187 in its list of The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time while Pitchfork selected the album as the 4th best shoegaze album of all time.

Isn't Anything (tracklist)

Soft As Snow (But Warm Inside)
Lose My Breath
Cupid Come
(When You Wake) You're Still In A Dream
No More Sorry
All I Need
Feed Me With Your Kiss
Sueisfine
Several Girls Galore
You Never Should
Nothing Much To Lose
I Can See It (But I Can't Feel It)

Bonus tracks (Originally included as bonus 7" with the album)
Instrumental A
Instrumental B

DISCOGS

The Last Beat of My Heart by Siouxsie and the Banshees was released on 21st November 1988 by Polydor / Wonderland as the third and final single from the band's ninth studio album, Peepshow.

The song is a ballad with strings and accordion. Sioux's vocals addressed a lover who is leaving a relationship, as she asked for him to return to her. She declared her desire to be "close to you til the last beat of my heart".

"The Last Beat of My Heart" reached number 44 in the UK Singles Chart in December 1988. Upon its inclusion on the 1992 compilation album Twice Upon a Time: The Singles, a live recording of the song from 1991 replaced the single version.

The Last Beat of My Heart (7"/12"/CDS)

DISCOGS

The Last Beat of My Heart (Lyrics)

In the sharp gust of love my memory stirred
When time wreathed a rose a garland of shame
It's thorn my only delight war torn
Afraid to speak, we dare to breathe
Majestic, imperial a bridge of sighs
Solitude sails in a wave of forgiveness
On angels wings
Reach out your hands, don't turn your back
Don't walk away
How in the world, can I wish for this?
Never to be torn apart
Close to you 'till the last beat of my heart
At the close of day the sunset cloaks
These words in shadow play
Here and now, long and loud
My heart cries out
And the naked bone of an echo says
Don't walk away
Reach out your hands I'm just a step away
How in the world can I wish for this?
Never to be torn apart
Close to you till the last beat of my heart
How in the world can I wish for this?
Never to be torn apart till the last beat
Till the last fleeting beat of my heart

Songwriters: Budgie / Steven Severin / Susan Ballion

The elder-statement of Goth, Bauhaus released “In The Flat Field” thirty-eight years ago this month, the echoes of this masterpiece still vibrates through modern-music.

This was the punk death-bell soaked in screeches of feedback and vocals scattered in doom and angst, the zero-hour for goth as a genre. The collision of art-experimental and the glam of the 1970s sunk with the darkness of the mind created the big-bang, Bauhaus wove it altogether to create theatrics in the sound, atmospheric and tense, they were the real-McCoy in a world of pretenders.

“In The Flat Field” arrived almost fully formed, for a debut it was a well-realized piece of work, “Double Dare” acts as the perfect entrance to their world or into ours. Feedback screeches and descending, menacing guitar-riffs herald their arrival, Pete Murphys vocals are astonishing coming directly from the abyss itself.

The title-track takes things to another level, more Bowiesque and rock-orientated, still it is drenched in a weird-collage of feedback squeals, whereas “A God In An Alcove” is a surrealist terrifying journey, slower paced for that maximum impact.

The interspersed electronic sounds of “The Spy In The Cab” creates a minimalist background for Murphy to paint his pictures of despair, the noise-generated guitar of Daniel Ash is eerie at best, using the instrument as a machine and not in the conventional sense.

David J gives a hypnotic bass-riff, funky at times to the proceedings, a perfect base for Ash to perform his guitar-acrobatics of doom, thirty-eight years later “In The Flat Field” still stands as a masterwork of terrifying art.

"A gut pull drag on me
Into the chasm gaping we
Mirrors multy reflecting this
Between spunk stained sheet
And odorous whim".

Tracklist:

1. "Double Dare"
2. "In the Flat Field"
3. "A God in an Alcove"
4. "Dive"
5. "The Spy in the Cab"

1. "Small Talk Stinks"
2. "St. Vitus Dance"
3. "Stigmata Martyr"
4. "Nerves"

What some have called the most original and best album of the original punk generation was unleashed forty-years ago in November 1978, Germfree Adolescent by X-Ray Spex stands as the pinnacle of what punk would accomplish in its first incarnation.

The dynamo that drove this punk-rock strike of defiance was loaded with anti-capitalist view which all spewed from an unlikely young girl, only nineteen at the time of its recording but this respectable, well-mannered young girl with braces on her teeth which were a feature when she smiled, but then she would open her mouth to sing and the shy, quiet Marion Joan Elliot-Said would transform into the high-priestess of a revolution, Poly Styrene.

The album opens with a four-syllable disdain:Ar-ti-fic-ial! as it phases the music launches and this Richard Hell in knickers summons up the powerful and depressed emotions of the day in a twelve-track assault. It becomes clear that Poly Styrene delivers conviction in every word she sings, every sneer and roll of the tongue, each phrase is delivered with the same oppressed intensity as the last.

As for the musicianship of X-Ray Spex, they provide the perfect backdrop for Styrene to wage a verbal war, this album contains some of the best drumming on a punk record over which a very loud, old-school guitar pumps distorted rock and roll riffs that build in intensity throughout the albumthe inclusion of a saxophone to give the songs an extra depth may not be not common on records of the ‘Generation-X’ but it works here in galvanizing the sound.

The songs themselves are not love songs as such, they are rather the points of everyday society such as; Warrior In Woolworths, Plastic Bag, I Am A Poseur and of course the title track, not many bands could make songs about personal hygiene and supermarkets cool, though these themes make the album relatable and accessible to the youth of the day and stands as a time-capsule of late 70s culture.

Germ Free Adolescents

I know you're antiseptic, your deodorant smells nice
I'd like to get to know you, you're deep frozen like the ice
She's a germ free adolescent, cleanliness is her obsession
Cleans her teeth ten times a day
Scrub away, scrub away, scrub away the S.R. way
You may get to touch her if your gloves are sterilized
Rinse your mouth with Listerine, blow disinfectant in her eyes
She's a germ free adolescent, cleanliness is her obsession
Cleans her teeth ten times a day
Scrub away, scrub away, scrub away the S.R. way
Her phobia is infection, she needs one to survive
It's her built-in protection, without fear she'd give up and die
She's a germ free adolescent, cleanliness is her obsession
Cleans her teeth ten times a day
Scrub away, scrub away, scrub away the S.R. way
She's a germ free adolescent, cleanliness is her obsession
She's a germ free adolescent, cleanliness is her obsession
She's a germ free adolescent, cleanliness is her obsession
She's a germ free adolescent, cleanliness is her obsession
Cleans her teeth ten times a day
Scrub away, scrub away, scrub away the S.R. way

The original 1978 track list:

Side A;

Art-I-Ficial

Obsessed with You

Warrior in Woolworths

Let's Submerge

I Can't Do Anything

Identity

Side B;

Genetic Engineering

I Live Off You

I Am a Poseur

Germ Free Adolescents

Plastic Bag

The Day the World Turned Day

Kevin Burke November 2018