I apologize to the 20 or so of you who regularly download albums from these installments for not doing a Digging For Fire entry last week. Work responsibilities kept pushing me away from doing it until it was late enough in the following week to just wait until this Sunday. Either way I’m sorry!

This week I bring you a Psychic TV. A band who I’ve found from personal experience is the type of band a lot of people know, but a small percentage actually own or have listened to any of their albums. The Fall was always another such type of band. Despite their name recognition and pedigree of their members, I don’t blame most people with similar musical tastes for not getting into either bands. Truth be told both bands have such dense catalogs and dramatic shifts in direction that it’s hard to make a plan of attack. You really had to have made the mental choice of wanting to be into these bands, read up some on them just to know where you should began. Plus add to the fact that Psychic TV albums have seen so many re-issues by various labels (each providing worse cover art than the next) that it was hard to even be sure what albums were new, or their chronological order. That’s more than enough to prevent people from ever even taking a small taste!

I got into noise music and Throbbing Gristle at a relatively early age, so I had a natural curiosity about Genesis P.’s follow-up Psychic TV. It wasn’t strong enough to blindly pull and buy a random album, but enough so that if I stumbled across a used copy of anything I made it a point that I would buy it! The first album I found was Ultrahouse: The L.A. Connection, and it wasn’t exactly the right lace to start to further my digging! Ultrahouse: The L.A. Connection came out while Psychic TV were knee deep in their Acid House movement and it was hardly the sound I was looking for when Throbbing Gristle is what prompted me to search out some Psychic TV. Worse of all is that Ultrahouse: The L.A. Connection album doesn’t even hold up well with the great Acid House albums Psychic TV had put out with Towards Thee Infinite Beat & Jack the Tab, all of which I would discover much later. So after that I gave trying to get into Psychic TV a rest and focused more on Coil, & Chris & Cosey… both of whom lead to much more fulfilling results.

But eventually I decided to re-visit the whole getting into Psychic TV phase, but this time armed with a little more knowledge and where to start and album chronology! Finally I had discovered the PTV I was expecting! All the eerie tape loops, electronics, dark folk-pop and the subtle to not-so subtle progression into dance music that littered all of their early albums. The reason I chose Allegory & Self for this installment is not only because it a favorite of mine, but my favorite kind of album. It’s one of those albums that’s caught in-between a bands stylistic jump. I always tend to enjoy those albums best because there’s a sense of honesty and awkwardness in them. The compromises made while trying to stay true to your past and hinting at a new direction always make for the most interesting music… at least for me anyway. The album stood at that point where PTV were not only saying goodbye to longtime collaborator & bandmate Alexander Fergusson, but also their more experimental and unaccessible nature in lieu of Acid House. Allegory & Self has kind of a everything and the kitchen sink feel to it in terms of the Psychic TV sound. At times it becomes as straight-forward pop as PTV could hope to make creating a great intersection between new wave and UK Madchester rave sound. And while a good deal of the rest of the album stays true to their (at the time) trademark experimental/industrial meets psych & folk sound, you can help but notice that in between all of the cascading noise, tape loops and healthy doses of hedonism each song on Allegory & Self sounds like a compromise in creating what at the time would be something more accessible than they were ever used to. It’s pulling in all directions and that tension creates for some excellent music that jumps stylistically from track to track, but always makes sense. I always thought this album was an excellent starting point for anyone curious about the band.

Psychic TV – Allegory & Self

- My Pal the Crook