this heat for soma’s ‘music’ issue

also old…

This Heat, back from the dead
Text: Alexander Provan

The fear of mutually assured destruction can be a wonderful source of inspiration. For This Heat, it helped spawn This Heat, Deceit, and the EP Health + Efficiency, records that did not so much bridge the gap between progressive rock and post-punk in the late 70s and early 80s as forge the latter by dismembering the Genesis-soiled corpse of the former. Twenty-five years after Deceit’s salvo quietly altered the landscape of an England anxiously awaiting annihilation, ReR is reissuing the band’s notoriously elusive discography in Out of Cold Storage. The box set includes the three aforementioned records as well as a new collection of live recordings, a book of photographs and essays and Repeat, a later EP of unreleased material.

Charles Hayward, Charles Bullen and Gareth Williams joined forces in 1977, got their first radio play from John Peel that year, then wallowed in the Bristol squats and Rock in Opposition scene that birthed Henry Cow and Roxy Music until 1982, when Williams left to study Kathakali in India. Preceded by Faust’s tape experiments and Krautrock jams and eclipsed by Sonic Youth’s stateside noise dirges, This Heat’s short lifetime became the stuff of myth rather than legend—frequently talked about but seldom heard, except on tapes copied from tapes copied from friends of friends.

Those tapes are the inimitable artifacts of Cold Storage, the studio built by the band in an industrial meat refrigerator. This Heat surfaced in 1979, a truly experimental record of punk being torn into pieces, all insidious sine tones, scraping tape loops, creaky organs, and tribal drums, with little room to scream. Deceit, the band’s paramount achievement, is an ironic assault on the noxious politics of the Cold War. England is on the outside, the band is on the inside, and the two can’t quite connect: vocal harmonies haunt when they should soothe, guitar riffs churn on past their logical expiration, lullabies become mantras, then elegies. Hayward has described This Heat as the sound of trepidation unspoken, haunting the depths of the subconscious; Deceit is the return of the repressed, that fear and confusion dragged out from the inner recesses of the mind and perfectly articulated.