Test Dept.

condition (record/cover): NM / EX-

Multifold sleeve.

The single most confrontational sleeve in the Some Bizzare catalogue unfolds into a four-foot crucifix. Inside the multi-panel fold sits Malcolm Poynter's sculptural imagery, tableaux of toy soldiers and plastic weaponry cast into apocalyptic figures, deliberately oversized. The visual stakes mirror the musical ones.

The Unacceptable Face Of Freedom is Test Dept.'s second Ministry of Power broadside, following 1985's Shoulder To Shoulder cut with the South Wales Striking Miners Choir in solidarity with the pit strike. By 1986 the miners had been defeated, the Greater London Council was being dismantled by the Thatcher government, and the New Cross collective, already peers of Einstürzende Neubauten on the same label but more rhythmically driven than their German counterparts, were operating at the height of their rhetorical powers.

The record detonates with "Fuckhead," bagpipes and a strident protest rant over minimalist loops, and continues through "51st State Of America" (on Anglo-American vassalage), "Comrade Enver Hoxha" (in which the Albanian dictator turns into a figure of anti-imperialist sarcasm), "The Crusher," and the eight-minute closer "Corridor Of Cells." Percussive weight, found metal, taped political speech. Less industrial vérité than industrial polemic, sharpened to a point.

Live, the band staged the piece as a full multimedia action at British Rail's Bishopsbridge Maintenance Depot in Paddington, commemorating the GLC's abolition. Forty years on, the record's socialist fury reads neither dated nor nostalgic. It reads urgent, which is probably the clearest index of how little has changed.