condition (record/cover): EX+ / EX
Presswell pressing.
The third installment of Robert Fripp's "Drive To 1981", released in February 1981 on Editions EG with PD-1-6317 as the US Polydor pressing, is the studio album by the short-lived dance-band Fripp had assembled in March 1980. The League Of Gentlemen (album and band share the name) brought together Barry Andrews (organ, ex-XTC), Sara Lee (bass) and Kevin Wilkinson (drums, replacing original drummer Johnny Toobad mid-sessions). Fripp described the project as "a second-division touring new wave instrumental dance band". The description was accurate and modest.
The music is almost entirely instrumental, tight-knit, riff-based and interlocked in ways that point directly toward Discipline's formal vocabulary, but with an angular, dance-club intensity that Discipline would deliberately strip away. "Inductive Resonance", "Trap", "Heptaparaparshinokh", "Cognitive Dissonance" and the "Pareto Optimum" pieces are tight, brittle, beat-driven workouts. Three short pieces of spoken-word collage ("Indiscretions I-III") interleave the band tracks. The whole record clocks at forty-two minutes of relentless, looped-pattern post-punk that anticipates everything from This Heat to Tortoise.
The original vintage US Polydor pressing of PD-1-6317, with the Editions EG logo and EGG sub-imprint. The League Of Gentlemen lasted only ten months. This is their sole studio document and the only Fripp-led ensemble of the Drive To 1981 era to leave behind a proper album: an early post-punk record hiding in plain sight inside Fripp's official discography.
