13th Chime: Complete Discography

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It's not surprising that 13th Chime never found commercial success, remaining one of Britain's most obscure and under-appreciated bands and their hard-to-find catalog primarily of interest only to hardcore fans and collectors. With a difficult style that mixed post-punk with goth rock and made no concessions to the more accessible elements of either genre, the group self-released just three singles and recorded a handful of songs for I.R.S. Records before the suits at that label decided they weren't particularly interested in the Chime's macabre subject matter and claustrophobic, experimental arrangements. Lead singer Mick Hand would depart soon thereafter, leaving remaining members Gary O'Connor, Terry Taylor and Ricky Cook to recruit a new vocalist and attempt a few rehearsals before eventually calling it quits in 1985. With no sympathetic record label to keep the group's work readily available, the Chime's standing as a band with a cult following was assured.

Complete Discography, then, will likely be most listeners' first introduction to the band. With the exception of live performances, the release presents the group's entire known recorded output and shows the band deserves far more than just passing mention in the post-punk story. Though much of the band's theatricality (the group took its name from a line in George Orwell's 1984, dressed predominately in black and presented themselves as androgynous sub-creatures, while their live shows featured pagan images, animal bones and speakers that were stored in custom-made coffins) now seems both dated and perversely quaint, the music itself remains unnerving and entirely original. The Chime's earliest songs are conversely the group's most discordant and striking efforts. Hand's vocals on "Cuts of Love," "Coffin Maker," "Cursed" and "Dug Up" are delivered as demented, echoed chants - sometimes reminiscent of PiL-era John Lydon - Taylor's bass is oppressively up front in the mix, while O'Connor's guitar and Cook's drums alternate between precision and improvisation. The songs recorded for I.R.S. are more rock-oriented and professional but no less worthwhile. Hand's vocals are fairly straightforward and mostly audible on "Radio Man," "Fire," "Two as a Couple" and "Help Me Street," with the group's instrumentals more developed and mature, the underlying melodies more pronounced.

Though the Chime's catalog contains heavy amounts of stereotypically goth themes - doom, gloom and enough caskets and corpses to fill a cemetery - and the group itself invented a persona to match, their best songs are notable for their introspective undertones and social concerns. The tough instrumentation would never suggest it, but there is a sense of a more personal type of loss in the group's singles beyond all the deathrock images and conceits they contain; indeed, the death of friend Steven Woodgate, with whom Hand, O'Connor and Cook played in the short-lived band Anticx, possibly influenced some of these songs. At their best, the band's lyrics railed against many of the popular topics of the day with both caustic humor and a sharp critical tongue: "A woman's heart is such a small price to pay/ For the exploitations of the people's culture," Hand declares in the barroom drama "Sally Ditch." If this release confirms anything, it's that the Chime should not be typecast as a prototypical goth band.

Complete Discography might not pull 13th Chime out from obscurity, but it does finally make the band's recordings readily available to the public and is a well-produced document of the band's blink-and-you'll-miss-it career. The sound and subject matter won't appeal to everyone, and there likely will be plenty of detractors ready to dismiss the band as just another black-clad, overly theatrical collective. And while goth rock has become its own punchline, the Chime's music still sounds desperate, urgent and unique enough to clearly show that the band should be considered in the broader context of the British post-punk era.

The Raincoats: The Raincoats

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Although The Raincoats don't exactly qualify as an entirely unheralded post-punk band, in many ways they were never afforded the broad critical acclaim their music warranted. Relying on an odd mixture of sometimes-shouted, sometimes-spoken vocals, intricate vocals and harmonies that floated above and underneath each other, as well as arrangements that fell somewhere between abrasive and bouncy, the band quietly released a series of remarkable albums that were met with little commercial fanfare and polite, but modest critical reception. The group seemed destined for little more than a cult following until Kurt Cobain, in the type of patronage that did wonders for other bands, offered his endorsement in the Insecticide liner notes. It's no coincidence that the band's albums were soon thereafter reissued by Rough Trade in 1993, with Cobain and Sonic Youth screecher/killer of songs Kim Gordon offering their fan boy-like thoughts on the band as part of these reissues.

Kill Rock Stars' vinyl-only reissue of The Raincoats' self-titled 1979 debut confirms that the record deserves a spot among the most essential post-punk releases. The Raincoats has aged remarkably well and shows none of the musical shortcomings and idiotic posturing that have made numerous albums that arose from punk's ashes unlistenable and downright laughable. While time has a way of cruelly exposing an album's flaws, there is very little to quibble about with The Raincoats, even 30 years after its original release.

Though the band's members - Ana DaSilva, Gina Birch, Vicky Aspinall and one-time Joe Strummer girlfriend/Slits drummer Palmolive - were clearly products of the British punk scene, a second glance at the album reveals that the band had more in common with groups like Pere Ubu and the Pop Group than the myopic and musically-stunted British punk rockers with whom they are usually associated. The album still defies easy categorization. With its chanted vocals and searing guitars, the band's first single, "Fairytale in the Supermarket," - added as the leading track on this reissue, though it wasn't included on the original LP - is reminiscent of the Clash circa 1977, but the remaining songs are far more diverse. Though some past reviews never got much further than gushing about the novelty of an all-female group covering Ray Davies' "Lola," the album's best moments occur in the band's original material. Songs like "No Side To Fall In," "Off Duty Trip" and "Adventures Close to Home" juxtapose rough vocals with hypnotic harmonies and repeated phrases with layers of instrumentation that incorporate elements of punk, folk and 1960 garage rock. Though the lyrics aren't incidental, the band was clearly equally interested in how words and phrases could be manipulated to create unique sounds.

In retrospect, the album sounds far less harsh and severe than it likely did in 1979. Even the record's most experimental moments - the tempo shifts and shouted vocals of "Life on the Line," Lara Logic's squealing saxophone on "Black and White," Aspinall's piercing violin squawks on "The Void," "You're a Million" and "In Love" - are tempered by a range of musical styles and textures that relieve some of the songs' fairly desperate sentiments and avant-garde tendencies. While a vinyl-only reissue will likely find only a limited audience, it nevertheless allows listeners to place The Raincoats and their addictive debut within a broader context of both its influences and later bands that would claim it as inspiration. The Raincoats is now, quite simply, a classic album and one of the most thrilling debuts to emerge from the post-punk era.