Well, I don’t know, children. My Christmas break starts on Saturday 20 December, and it’s not inconceivable that I’ll get another blogpost in before Christmas Day, but if I don’t, I hope you’ll embrace the spirit of the season, crack open a bottle of Baileys and round off your festive preparations to the growling, grand sound of Pitchshifter with their second and final Peel Session. The band recorded three tracks for the session, which are presented here in the order that they appeared on the 1/5/93 show.
Although Pitchshifter have featured on this blog before - more on that in a moment - I’ve always been rather dismissive of them. I didn’t even know who they were until 2002 when I saw a tour dates advert for them in one of the music monthlies and thought they looked like just another emo band. But this session has shown me how good they were and why they have lasted to the present day. I know that their style has changed and they’ve incorporated many new influences over the years, but this session catches them firmly in their Industrial metal pomp - which appears to have been when Peel was most enthused by them - and demonstrates that if the world had been brave enough to embrace them, they could have been a genuine cultural phenomenon. The songs here manage to be both extreme and accessible. Two years after this Peel Session, the band became the first in the history of the Phoenix Festival to have to finish a set early due to a stage invasion. Had someone given them a genuine push, the quality of the music should have merited nothing less than full-on Beatlemania.
If we stretch that theory to its fullest point, does that make session opener (A Higher Form of) Killing stand as Pitchshifter’s version of Revolution 9? Or maybe it’s their Give Peace a Chance…
The title phrase was coined by a German chemist called Fritz Haber, who was a leading figure in the development of early chemical weapons as used in World War I. It’s one of those bizarre ironies that a man who played a prominent role in developing a creeping killer (poison gas) on the battlefield would end up being awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in the final year of the war - although this was not for his work with weapons but rather the development of a process which assisted global food production.
In the context of Pitchshifter’s song, the phrase Never look back, never look back speaks of the way in which use of these forms of weapon almost seems to liberate the soldiers themselves from being active participants in the killing of others. I’ve never had to do it myself of course but firing a shell from a distance, which is loaded with poisonous gas and which you know will cause death/severe harm to those it detonates close to, has to be less psychologically confronting than looking someone in the eye and mowing them down with a gun. As with drone warfare nowadays, when you’re watching someone get killed through a laptop screen, perhaps it stings a little less to be ending a life when you’re two miles away from the killing. And as a result, you try and use the equipment more strategically and in areas where it can cause maximum casualties. On with the spree, indeed. The piledriving drumming brings the feel of heavy artillery and the stretched guitar notes sound like White phosphorus bombs being blasted out across the skies. It’s the sound of a war spread across 4 minutes and 56 seconds: Terrifying, destructive, relentless and awesome.
Ironically, the band’s timing was off given that in January 1993, the Chemical Weapons Convention was signed off by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. It came into effect in April 1997 and prohibited the development, stockpiling and use of chemical weapons. Currently, 193 countries remain signed up to this treaty.
The second track, Diable, moves the topic from killing to living. Starting out like an industrial metal cover of Welcome to the Pleasuredome by Frankie Goes to Hollywood, the track is built around a sample in which we’re reminded of how transient life is. The metaphor switches from a drop in a bucket to a light in the universe to a temporary vapour. Our lives may be full of meaning and hope to us, but they will come and go in line with most organic phenomena. However, our souls are what will endure and JS Clayden’s vocal makes clear that the devil holds more of them than God does. In lines like:
Sit back, relax. Forget it.
Can’t hate me like I do.
I know me better.
Sit back, relax, don’t sweat it. Forget it.
the implication is that what we do in our lives is an irrelevance. Any attempt to lead a good and just life is doomed to fail, because somewhere along the line, we’ll slip up and find ourselves one of the Devil’s converts. So, relax, accept your fate and don’t let it upset you. It’s the kind of tempting line of thought that could persuade someone to give their lives over to a more persuasive force.
Pitchshifter subtitled this version of Diable as the Wayco Survival Mix. They recorded the session on 30 March, 1993, about three weeks before the fiery end of the Waco siege and it’s entirely possible that the band had David Koresh in mind as the central figure of the song. Koresh believed himself to be a reincarnation of the Lamb of God, and what was the devil but a formerly beloved angel. Any religious cult relies on building its numbers by reaching out to the demotivated and disappointed, by encouraging them to believe that they’ll be on the winning side when the apocalypse comes, and to put their trust in someone who knows what’s best for them. The achievement of Diable is the way it manages to combine both fire and brimstone with a certain air of Bacchanalia.
The first two tracks previewed content which would feature on Pitchshifter’s next album, “desensitized”, released in December 1993. They closed the session with an oldie, Deconstruction (Reconstruction), taken from their Submit EP. It’s already been covered on this blog when Peel played the studio version, 51 weeks earlier. Back then, it was only known as Deconstruction. It’s included here for the sake of completeness and it’s great to hear it, but if you’re looking at the appended Reconstruction subtitle and expecting some kind of reimagining of the original, you’ll be disappointed. The session version is a minute longer than that on Submit, but the additions amount to little more than some backwards hi-hat tapes and an echoing descending guitar line through the final 25 seconds. I haven’t felt so ripped off since I heard the Tee Hee Hee Dub Mix of Teethgrinder by Therapy?
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