Public Image Limited PIL Metal Box Johnny Rotten Lydon

	£		25
	$		33

Public Image Limited - Metal Box

Format: 3 x LP Vinyl Box Set
Label: 4 Men with Beards

The second album by John Lydon's post-Sex Pistols outing Public Image Ltd. was originally released in the UK in 1979 in a limited edition film canister style metal box containing three twelve-inch 45s. Some managed to float across the Atlantic into the hands of a fortunate few, making the Metal Box a bit of a post-punk collectors' holy grail. Unavailable for almost 30 years, the Metal Box is back with the express permission of John Lydon as an exact reproduction of the original. Remastered for better sound than the 1979 vinyl.

Exact repro of this seminal album packaged in a metal film canister with embossed PIL logo PiL managed to avoid boundaries for the first four years of their existence, and Metal Box is undoubtedly the apex. It's a hallmark of uncompromising, challenging post-punk, hardly sounding like anything of the past, present, or future. Sure, there were touchstones that got their imaginations running -- the bizarreness of Captain Beefheart, the open and rhythmic spaces of Can, and the dense pulses of Lee Perry's productions fueled their creative fires -- but what they achieved with their second record is a completely unique hour of avant-garde noise. Packaged in a film canister as a trio of 12" records played at 45 rpm, the bass and treble are pegged at 11 throughout, with nary a tinge of midrange to be found. It's all scrapes and throbs (dubscrapes?), supplanted by John Lydon's caterwauling about such subjects as his dying mother, resentment, and murder. Guitarist Keith Levene splatters silvery, violent, percussive shards of metallic scrapes onto the canvas, much like a one-armed Jackson Pollock. Jah Wobble and Richard Dudanski lay down a molasses-thick rhythmic foundation throughout that's just as funky as Can's Czukay/Leibezeit and Chic's Edwards/Rodgers. It's alien dance music. Metal Box might not be recognized as a groundbreaking record with the same reverence as Never Mind the Bollocks, and you certainly can't trace numerous waves of bands who wouldn't have existed without it like the Sex Pistols record. But like a virus, its tones have sent miasmic reverberations through a much broader scope of artists and genres.

“It's 1979 and the year of post punk albums such as: "Unknown Pleasures" by Joy Division, "Fear Of Music" by Talking Heads, "Entertainment" by Gang of Four, plus some fairly uncompromising music from the likes of The Slits, Pere Ubu, The Fall, This Heat, The Raincoats and Wire.
At the forefront of this post-punk movement came an album in, as its name might suggest, a metal box. The set comprised of three 45rpm records in a circular metal canister, separated only by round paper sleeves! John Lydon and co. got the idea from a cinema film canister, and although the original thought was that the records would be kept safe inside the metal box, the reality was that they were actually hard to remove without scratching the vinyl! And the band forfeited a third of their advance to fund this legendary packaging!
Released just short of Xmas 1979 it was to be their finest hour. The album starts with "Albatross"; ten minutes of heavy duty bass from Jah Wobble, some cutting guitar from Keith Levine and John Lydon who sings like he's squashed between two giant slabs of rock. Then came the pre-album single “Memories” to take it up notch before the epoch defining "Death Disco" which was actually labelled “Swan Lake” due to the hypnotic Swan Lake parody that underlines the track. Another highlight is "Poptones" which has a numbing trance like feel, centred around Wobble's probing basslines. Although, it’s Levine's harmonic guitar that makes it for me, Lydon's vocal snarl matches the music's sinister grace with one of his most quietly unsettling performances, "Careering" has Levine abandoning guitar for lots of swooping electronic soundscapes.”

BRAND NEW MINT HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!