Recently, I've been reading the book Micro Bionic: Radical Electronic Music & Sound Art in the 21st Century by Thomas Bey William Bailey. It's a very good book about under-studied topics, my favorite chapter of which is the one about Whitehouse. If you're initiated at all, you know that Whitehouse are one of the single most influential bands of the 20th century; a project so singular that it completely changed the course of extreme music. Anyway, one of the things this chapter talks about is how people always frame their praise of Whitehouse in very particular ways; as Bailey says, those who praise Whitehouse are "usually compelled to temper their admiration for [the band] with an assortment of disclaimers and carefully worded rationales" (66), usually defending the music itself while distancing themselves from the subject matter or apparent messaging. I think that's moronic, basically. So, I just want to state that I love Whitehouse without any reservations. If you need me to qualify or explain that statement, then you just don't get it, and frankly I feel bad for you. I think you should feel bad, too.
Discourse around Whitehouse's music usually identifies the initial Come Organisation period (1980-1985) or the later part of the Susan Lawly period (circa 2001's Cruise onward) as most worthy of critical attention, which is understandable. Those initial albums, although outrageously primitive and monotonous, were really unlike much else out there at the time and spawned countless imitators, while their final string of albums see the band's sound and lyrics at their most complex and fully-realized. And while I love these albums, too (the later stuff more than the Come Org material, admittedly), I've always felt that the band's middle period, spanning the 1990s, ends up unfortunately overlooked in this scheme. It's a period of extraordinary metamorphosis, and there's a wonderfully unique accumulation of factors - the gradual deviation from standard Wasp-esque timbres, the increasing complexity and predatory narrativity of the lyrics, the growing contributions of Peter Sotos, the absolutely bewitching album art by Trevor Brown and Miguel Angel Martin - that makes these albums extremely interesting and enjoyable for me. While 1990's Thank Your Lucky Stars hews pretty close to the band's previous work, each subsequent album explored greater swaths of sonic territory. Whitehouse could still pummel you into submission, but they could also punish you for expecting that, which was often even worse - in a great way, of course.
The title track - which shares its name with the infamous story by Sotos published in Answer Me! #4 and Tool - is a good demonstration of of the band's stylistic evolution. While the synth tones are harsh and lurching, recalling for instance "Total Sex," the constituent elements - sub-bass bubbling muck, high-pitched sine waves, ersatz dental drills - mix and flow together with surprising subtlety in comparison to the often in-your-face sonic violence of their earlier work. Indeed, much of the track's power comes from the vocals which, unlike the noise-subsumed indecipherable wailing of the Come Org days, are clear and at the front of the mix. The lyrics - and the vocal performance which realizes them - are similarly distinctive, shifting focus away from the hideous violence of "Rapemaster" and "Bloodfucking" towards more insidious and dreadfully quotidian evil. William Bennet's outlandish repetition of the title at track's end - a great moment which falls back into the classic Come Org vocal and lyrical tropes - is like releasing a pressure valve, but instead giving comfort and escape we are given only emptiness and pain, left to think of exactly how we've been used. Extremely charming stuff.
The rest of the album, of course, does not disappoint. "Execution" is one of the most wonderful, physically-moving tracks in the whole Whitehouse catalogue, in my opinion equaling the infamous "Torture Chamber" on Never Forget Death (plus, unlike the earlier track "Execution" to my knowledge hasn't ever destroyed anybody's hi-fi). Comparing the two tracks, something could probably be said about their contrasting composition and parallel narrative gestures: "Torture Chamber" driving towards a crescendo of extraordinary noise, while "Execution" at its conclusion instead drops off into eerie quiet (but - importantly, I think - not silence). This eerie quality is realized to even greater effect in "Baby," where an utterly-normal sample of a bathing infant is warped, melted, laid open and vivisected into something menacing and unclean. There's an issue of Parasite where Sotos discusses people's impositional imagination with Whitehouse, often reading into and creating things that are not necessarily there (narratives, social commentary, political positions, endorsements, etc). "Baby" is a track where the horror is solely in our own hands. The looping sample also reminds me of Sotos' later Waitress and Proxy CDs, albeit not quite so... singular? It's also so charming to think of the incredibly pointed reactions this track spawned thirty-odd years ago. The more things change...
The unquestionable standout on the album, though, is the penultimate track, "Just Like a Cunt": an amazing and inexplicable Bob Dylan appropriation (mixing Dylan's "Just Like a Woman" with echoes of Whitehouse's earlier track "Vulgar") whose lyrics straddle the scatological simplicity of the Come Org period and the NLP-Scientology carpet bombing of the later albums. Some years ago I worked with a guy who'd written specialist books and articles about Dylan. I showed him the track, and while he was understandably slightly appalled he told me that Dylan would probably appreciate the opening lyric "You look like a fucking bat, you old slut," and explicitly compared it to the opening of "Like a Rolling Stone." It's a truly awesome, pulverizing track, certainly up to par with the more lauded "Why You Never Became a Dancer" and "I'm Coming Up Your Ass." The only criticism I can level against it is that the William Bennett vocal version, released as a Japan-only single on the Fanatics label, is even better than the album version with Philip Best singing. Sorry, Young Philip, but I suspect you know it's true. The slimier version on Mummy & Daddy, retitled "A Cunt Like You" and featuring Bennett and Best tag-teaming the vocals, is also a real treat, but I think I prefer the pure mania here. Highly recommended, and I have filed notarized paperwork ensuring it's played at my funeral.
In comparison to the eras surrounding it, the middle period of Whitehouse is easy to ignore, lacking the simplistic stability of the group's infancy and the majesty of the band in imago. Quality Time is certainly an album of a group in pupa, offering only intimations and strange resemblances towards its more familiar stages. However, just as in nature, the pupa here is perhaps most worthy of attention.
By the way, I find it funny, somehow, that Whitehouse were distributing some of their music in this period on MP3.com. I know it was a pretty major site at one point, but somehow the only other group I can think of who hosted there was Erotic Golf. Does anybody remember Erotic Golf? I'm looking for their album The Anti-spork Revolution, by the way. Send me an email if you have it or just hate Whitehouse and want me to die.