#mark riley

Thus we get the rough and riff-y “Squealer,” with its sawed off guitar flares, wheedling keyboards and precise but hoary starts and stops. Segall seems perfectly unbothered by the lack of a live audience, in full performer’s mode. He stutters ironically in the laconic verse and erupts in glammy tremolo in the big feedback fuzzed pay-offs. “Breakfast Eggs” sidles and sing-songs, its ticky-tack melody blown out with corrosive guitar and clamorous drumming. The chorus, “Candy I want, Candy I want your Candy,” has an arena-sized heft to it, honed during weeks on end of squalling shows. Candy is very much on Segall’s mind, for whatever reason, coming up again in the early-Floyd abandon of “Candy Sam,” the disc’s most visceral original cut.

But you can have all these songs in reasonably fine form on the studio version of Emotional Mugger. The biggest payoff arrives when the band diverges from album promotion. This happens in the Door’s cover, “LA Woman,” a tune that Segall—who has his own ties to the City of Angels—had been playing at great length in the live shows that led up to this recording. “Okay, we’re going to play three minutes of a really long cover, and then we’re going to break for the news,” says Segall, as the bass revs up behind him and the guitars twitch and scrawl. “Mark Riley, we love you!” And, indeed, you can see the connection to the original Fall guitarist, in the way that Segall builds pounding dreamscapes out of rough-edged guitar mayhem.

You might be a little surprised that Riley’s former boss, the one and only Mark E. Smith, had a grudging respect for the Doors, and once picked The Soft Parade for a Quietus feature on his record collection. Likewise, Segall shows his appreciation by stripping out the excesses and amping up the volume. It’s not a garage punk song, even so, but then Segall’s band is not exactly a pure garage punk outfit, even in this superlatively guitar-heavy, rock-oriented configuration.

“Eine Symphonie Des Grauens” from 1979 is updated here with a whirling keyboard background. “Alphaville” is lighter, the original guitar churn replaced by with a sci-fi Wurlitzer. In both cases, the Bid’s lyrics straddle the line between metaphor and the literal, rotting lust-ridden corpses transposed with religious fervor in the former, self-harm and mental illness in the latter. He is also a dab hand at sarcastic political satire, the jaunty Falklands War era “Jet Set Junta”, is just as penetrating and singalong-able now as it was then (replace the Argentine generals with Russian oligarchs for added effect). The band broke up in 1985 after releasing four albums. Reforming in 1990, Bid, founding guitarist Lester Square and long-term bassist Andy Warren recorded five more albums before disbanding again in 1998.

Since their third reformation in 2010, punctuated by Bid’s recovery from a brain aneurism, The Monochrome Set have recorded a further six albums, selections from which the BBC 6 Sessions showcase. Bid’s lyrical concerns have widened to include robots, aliens, mysticism and mortality albeit expressed with his customary wit and wordplay. The music ranges through the big beat of “Hip Kitten Spinning Chrome” and “Super Plastic City”, the Merseyside flavored “Lefty”, the organ driven “Iceman” and “Cosmonaut”, the cosmic country feel of the wonderfully titled “Stick your Hand up if you’re Louche” and the noirish “Really in the Wrong Town” with the band in excellent form and Bid occasionally pushing his voice to the edge but caressing his words with elegant conviction. These sessions are a wonderful introduction to The Monochrome Set’s later albums. The inclusion of the early singles a bonus that will hopefully encourage people to dive back into the band’s complete discography.