Throbbing Gristle

 40th Anniversary Edition, on Double CD. Restored and remastered by Chris Carter from 24bit 'baked tape' digital transfers of the original first generation analogue master tapes.  The tragic death of Peter 'Sleazy' Christopherson earlier this year signalled the end of Throbbing Gristle, whose surviving members are currently working to complete their final album before retiring the name. It couldn't be a more appropriate time to revisit their revolutionary records of the 1970s and 1980s, remastered by Chris Carter and reissued on Industrial Records.  

Their first proper album, The Second Annual Report is essentially an edited collection of live and studio takes, and still sounds fresh and uncategorisable. 'Slug Bait' has lost none of its transgressive power: the ICA recording foregrounds Genesis P.Orridge's gleefully macabre lyrics (inhabiting the mind of a particularly nasty murderer), while the shorter Southampton and Brighton versions emphasise the minimal synth drones and sampled voices. 'Maggot Brain' sounds like 60s psychedelia that's taken a wrong turn and ended up in hell, while 'Live At Rat Club London' is probably the closest thing on here to the common conception of industrial, all disorientingly looped spoken vocals, brutally mechanized percussion and needling synthesizer jabs, while 'After Cease To Exist''s oppressive atmospherics - taking up an entire side of the original LP - pretty much gave birth to the entire dark ambient genre.

The comparatively bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, Kraftwerk-influenced single 'United' - the tune that ushered in a million inferior cold wave pop bands - is included along with its gloriously compressed and distorted B-side 'Zyklon B Zombie'.  It's insane to think The Second Annual Report came out in '77, the same year as Never Mind The Bollocks. Pause for a moment and reflect on that, then press the buy button.