"It's only been a short time since No-Man stunned us with 'Returning Jesus' and already they're back with this collection of goodies they've been hiding in a trunk under Steve Wilson's bed (probably alongside Porcupine Tree's abandoned triple concept album, five boxes of "jihad-workout" collaborations with Muslimgauze, Steve's rumoured death-metal demos and so forth).
If 'Returning Jesus' was burnished marble and broken hearts, this is a big string bag full of unusual flavours, all pulled from the scrapbook between 1991 and 1997 and never heard before. There are some heavyweight visitors to hand - Robert Fripp himself pops up and sprays fiery twiddles of violent King Crimson/'Heroes' guitar all over a couple of tracks, while Mel Collins fires off some of his toughest sax since Crimson '71 - but No-Man themselves are equal to anything their house guests can come up with. Most of the tracks are them alone, sifting through their feverish pop impulses.
The "lost songs" are rougher and less finished than the average No-Man album - it's as if they're lifting the lid and showing you the works before it all crystallises into the formality of a "proper" release. Moods shift, rapidly and invigoratingly, between celestial piano pieces, trapped and sludgy grunge guitars, flirtatious synth burps and flutters. And it's a hell of a lot of fun seeing No-Man lurch fearlessly from John Foxx-styled techno-pop (Coming Through Slaughter) to poisoned trip-hoppy big band swing (Samaritan Snare), from ambient grunge (Amateurwahwah) to smoothie synth-funk (All The Reasons) or shattered industrial-pop agony (Gothgirl Killer). As is catching the odd lyric which creases you up - "all boys are snakes, all girls eat cakes, the stupid noise keeps you awake" might be the funniest thing I've heard all year. Not to mention Tim Bowness' stable of different voices from cynical whisper to blissed-out croon, pinched artiness to something like the Statue of Liberty singing an ice-age lullaby (on the massive but fragmentary Pale As Angels).
No-Man are what links The Associates to Baby Bird, Massive Attack to Edwyn Collins, Momus to Peter Hammill, Scott Walker to The Gap Band and more besides. One of the oddest, most amorphous and yet most satisfying pop bands at work today. This is one of the releases on their new Burning Shed label which is firing out CD-R albums at a rate of knots, all in elegant Godspeed You Black Emperor-style "workers' collective" cardboard packaging - Rothko have got a new one out on there, so have former Peelie faves Navigator and other people you've never heard of like Um, Darkroom and Peter Chilvers; plus a growing number of interesting musicians using Burning Shed as a distribution channel. For an "invisible band" No-Man are certainly pretty active these days...."
- DC, ORGAN
