Art Bears

condition (record/cover): NM / EX- (light edges wear and creasing)

Booklet included.

The World As It Is Today is the Art Bears' final statement, and it sounds it. Recorded at Sunrise Studios in Kirchberg between 24 August and 7 September 1980, released on Rē Records in 1981, it abandons the medieval iconography of Winter Songs for the unblinking present tense: surveillance, capital flight, the slow death of a class horizon. Chris Cutler's lyrics are his most direct, Fred Frith's music his most stripped-down, and the singing the most exposed of Dagmar Krause's entire career.

"The Song Of Investment Capital Overseas" lands like a manifesto set to industrial machinery, Krause biting through every syllable while Frith's guitar and bass move in synchronised mechanical loops. "Civilisation" is a dirge in waltz time. "Albion, Awake!" rephrases Blake for the Thatcher era. "Rats And Monkeys", "Truth", "Freedom": even the titles refuse decoration. Cutler's drums and electrified percussion stalk the record from behind, less rhythm than weather. Each track is a panel in a frieze; nothing is incidental, nothing is filler.

An original vintage Rē pressing, Rē 6622, the version Cutler oversaw himself. It closes the trilogy that opens with the half-Henry Cow Hopes And Fears and tightens through Winter Songs into this final, lean, terrifying record. After this, Cassiber, News from Babel and the Lindsay Cooper solo records would carry pieces of the project forward, but the Art Bears as an entity would not return. A central document of European avant-rock in its most politically lucid moment.