Pop Group

What strikes you about "Y" is its utopia, its expressive urgency, the catharsis that extends far beyond the mere song; the revolutionary ideas and the music that clothes those ideas, as if nothing else were capable of giving them a higher value, the wonder of hopes that will remain just that - and are therefore all the more true, all the more human. With Mark Stewart & co., the stage becomes a place of reconciliation with the world: the scenery is tinged with gazes blinded by the moment that opens up in its own mystery, with the lacerating trajectories of Gareth Sager's sax, with dub chasms that simulate an impenetrable darkness behind so much harmonic dissolution.

The Pop Group is no ordinary band. In fact, deep down, it isn't even a band at all... It's an "impossible project": the project of an extreme awareness; extreme because it's pushed to a place only pure emotion can reach. Because being aware, at bottom, means devoting yourself to what of the world seems "merely" surface and simplicity. Being aware also means not squandering your own dreams; not turning them into something concrete, but making them ever more your own, ever more rarefied, made of the same stuff as the sky. "Don't Sell Your Dreams" is the definitive message from the Bristol, England outfit.

Mark Stewart's voice is faint as candlelight. But his passion is imperious, uncompromising: it's a continuous explosion, a psychic geyser that blows apart the already fragile interplay between the bass's hiccups and the guitar's circling creaks. Ultimately, you have to picture the whole scene as if set in an empty theatre, the stage dimly lit, and a mask caught between rage and wonder. Listening to "Savage Sea" means psychologically immersing yourself in a collage of images from our time; discovering its contradictions; remaining powerless, eyes closed. Then continuing to replay, inside yourself, a perfect balance between horn calls, vocal jolts and piano notes left to drift. And, further still, having the strength to return to the celebration of life, to the clash with the gods, to the theft of light and fire that still bears Prometheus's rebellious mark. That's why the funk of "Thief Of Fire" is furious: as furious as any act of reclamation. The fury turns into vertigo, unwinding amid ferocious sax vocalisations and rhythmic swarms openly indebted to black Africa.

Free-jazz regurgitations (Cecil Taylor, perhaps?) and electronic noise soaked to the bone are, instead, the key elements around which the schizophrenic cabaret of "Snowgirl" is built. An incredibly "mutant" structure, dissolved by its own subversive charge. Then again, doesn't the grotesquely slowed-down disco-funk of "Blood Money" possess the same charge, stretching in its finale toward an abyss of harmonic crashes and monstrously filtered screams? And isn't the funk marvel of "We Are Time" enough to give James Chance goosebumps? Except that only the wreckage of funk remains, because here everything is set up for dissolution, for torture repeated until collapse.

In a superhuman delirium of creativity, even the rhythm section is deconstructed, relegating the bass to a shadow zone where funk becomes connective tissue between voice and sax, while Bruce Smith's percussive drive is broken down into ever smaller, ever more microscopic fragments. In the end, the experimentation ends up reducing the original funk matrix to a mere shred within a wider chaotic design, organised according to the "dictates" of free-form improvisation.

Amid so many unrestrained vibrations, Stewart still manages to spit out words like projectiles: "Your world is built on lies": every word is elevated to a higher level of meaning; every word is delivered with a wildly "theatrical" emphasis placed on its sound.

But disgust isn't something that vanishes in an instant: "Words Disobey Me" bears witness to that. An exceptional mosaic of paranoia and atrocious dissonance. Skirting ever more "dangerous" territory along the road to a "total fusion" of tribalism, urban art music and postmodern neuroses, the Pop Group, song after song, increasingly appears as a unique and unrepeatable event in the history of rock. This is confirmed by "Don't Call Me Pain" and "The Boys From Brazil" too, further examples of apocalyptic hybridisation between seemingly distant and irreconcilable genres. These are songs that essentially present themselves as putrid musical carcasses, savaged by the corrosive violence of an inner torment: a torment that finds its only redemption in the act of artistic creation. The whole of "Y" is the vibrant, "excessive" story of that redemption.

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06/11/2006