Liquid Liquid - Slip In And Out Of Phenomenon
People of a certain vintage will remember watching Blue Peter and occasionally seeing crazy groups of urban reprobates making ludicrous music out of everyday objects like tin cans, bin lids, chain saws and the decomposed corpses of once loved family pets. Well perhaps not the latter but you get the gist . . . this was raw, experimental and edgy for children’s television. Only it wasn’t, it really really wasn’t. It was essentially just an attention seeking group of tuneless journeymen masquerading as avante garde musicians. Just like Liquid Liquid!
‘Slip In And Out Of Phenomenon’ is a sort of best of Liquid Liquid, the one time post punk pioneers; and encompasses their (thankfully) brief recording career. It’s a stagnant mess with an almost jazz like disregard for coherence or structure resulting in a garbled train wreck of a CD. Not one track on this stands out as being better than dire not a single solitary one. Isn’t the whole point in experimental music to make it different and stand out from everything else? Well yes Liquid Liquid do stand out from everyone else (in that they are irredeemably awful) but they fail miserably to make any of their ‘songs’ stand out from one another, it’s almost like listening to one single monstrous musical entity - an hour long orgy of poor musicianship and headache inducing vocals.
Even ‘Cavern’ their most famous song is a total disappointment. Brilliant funky beats greet you at the start but by the time the inaudible vocals and erratic percussion kick in you realise it’s just as bad as the other tracks on the CD. ‘Scrapper’ the best of a bad bunch has smatterings of promise - like an early Happy Monday’s song it’s got something about it and just for a moment when you listen to it you aren’t as bored as you were two minutes ago. You are still bored and it’s still rubbish, but certainly not as horrendous as the others. That said you really are in trouble when you start thinking about how wonderful glockenspiels are; which is essentially the high point of that particular number.
Liquid Liquid can claim to be whatever they want to be, but the unavoidable fact is that their music is in essence not music at all but a wildly unlistenable noise. Unadulterated, unstructured, uninteresting, uninspiring noise. If 23 tracks (they generously force five bonus ‘songs’ upon the listener) of monotonous mayhem is your bag then by all means give it ago - before that is you are sectioned under the Mental Health Act which you should be if this is your idea of a good listening experience.