Public Image Ltd

Where does the line end between visible reality and a stage of devastating uselessness that breaks through the fleeting mental geometry used to contain an overflowing madness? The seeds of a childhood with an electroencephalogram broken in several places foretell a brilliant discontinuity, admirable in its delirium, unspeakable in its explosion, tragic in its most indignant scream, vital in an accelerated flow.

An active life that, with nervous arms, grabs everything around it and, in a positive fit of rage, flips it over and hurls it to the ground, reducing every vacuum-sealed mental framework to miserable shreds.

All paradoxically understandable and obvious for a father and mother indignant more out of duty to social convention than out of real anger.

John “Rotten” Lydon, after the “greatest rock 'n' roll swindle,” decides to return to his older, more considered steps, latching onto an approach that could finally let shine through a spark too quickly squandered by the Sex Pistols. Or perhaps the stint with the Sex Pistols was the obligatory stage of a curiously backward path, functional in drawing from old ghosts the living matter with which to feed his own, self-aware claustrophobia.

There are never any stories too amusing, nor too embellished, on “Metal Box,” the second album by Public Image Ltd., the new outfit John forms alongside bassist Jah Wobble, guitarist Keith Levene (converted to the post-punk gospel after his stint in Clash) and drummer Tim Walker.

What happens on “First Issue,” their 1978 debut, is an act of raw, promising rage, still not quite skilled enough to govern itself and fully render that art of nihilism which, on “Metal Box,” reaches a chilling degree of self-awareness and refinement.

The outside, a cold, minimal metal box, is a faithful mirror of the flaying ordeal within. An ordeal that begins the moment you open the door onto a room thick with smoke, dense enough to block the view and force you to stumble through a disorder full of jagged fragments dropped from below in the grip of a dark, piercing sob (“Albatross”). But the will to power is such that it emerges unscathed, wearing every single shred with remarkable candor, a survivor of a war against its own irritated nervous system, through a danse macabre, convulsively arabesque-like and as if clinging to a diseased tree during the apocalypse (“Memories”).

Right after, in three suffocating movements of a Self shattered against its own phobia, we're hurled into a noxious dub precipice one hopes has no bottom (“Swan Lake”), and, if that bottom does exist, that it be as dense as possible (“Pop Tones”), a sticky glue of sonic textures vibrating with an anguish that seems to answer, in its own way, the most desolate episodes of inner crumbling found in Ian Curtis (“Careering”), which, in the second half of the record, continues with the chilling rhythms of the instrumental “Graveyhard,” with Jah Wobble deciding to coax out the slowest, most bloodied sounds his bass can produce.

The observation of a humanity reduced to the mortifying schematism dictated by an unwitting obedience to primary and secondary needs becomes the central theme of the bored monotony of “Suit,” before reawakening with adrenaline in the electrified atmosphere of “Socialist,” a pre-A Certain Ratio psycho-dance, with the last stretch of this inextricable reel dissolving into liberating tears, after the despair of a long nervous breakdown (“Radio 4”).

A nervous breakdown that, salvific, finds its most painful yet resolving catharsis in a metal box, where everything is petrified and electrified, still sobbing with the most violent electroshock that society, sworn enemy of awareness, could inflict on the fragile inner fabric of post-modern man.

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19/03/2008