What's in the bag (77)
P.I.L - - What the world needs now
I was in Seismic Records at the weekend and the nice chap behind the counter, the owner I guess, was playing the new P.I.L album, which I have to say is not very customer friendly, unless that customer is me as I knew it was coming out, but didn’t know if it was going to be on vinyl. I asked and there it was, so I bought it at the same time I bought ‘Sapphire’ by John Martyn, which, admittedly, are strange bedfellows.
I had listened to the last three tracks in the shop and liked them already so picking up a copy was an easy decision really. Now, I had been a tiny bit disappointed by Lydon being the frontman for the advertisement of Country Life butter, until I discovered that the purpose of that perceived conformity was to fund the production of a new P.I.L album. I am in no position to judge anyway, if I’d have been offered the same money, I’d have done it, in a pair of string Y-Fronts if needs be.
“The toilet’s f-king broken again / I repaired that, I told ya / Get the plumber in again and again and again” bemoans the first lyric on album opener ‘Double Trouble’ (which I think may also be a single). So he’s still an ornery bastard then, which is good to know. I did read a couple of reviews last week before the album release and having now listened to the whole album a couple of times I disagree with them on several points, particularly the NME who say:
“‘What The World Needs Now...’ sounds much the same as PiL’s last album, 2012’s ‘This Is PiL’ - a mite scuzzier, perhaps, and with added bloopy synthesizer, but broadly conforming to the same formula.”
I don’t really think so, I like ‘This is PIL’, but I like this new release considerably more. To me it is more consistently good, in both writing and production values. There are often tracks on albums that I want to hurry up and end because either I’m not that keen on them or the next one is better, a favourite, but with vinyl it’s not as simple as pressing the skip button so I tend to sit through them patiently, well, a little impatiently sometimes, but I do sit through them. This was not the case for ‘What the world needs now’, I happily sat through, and enjoyed in one way or another, every track. It’s probably fair to say that this new release is a progression from ‘This is PIL’, but it is not, as the NME infers, the churning out of the same as last time.
Track listing
"Double Trouble" - 3:52
"Know Now" - 2:45
"Betty Page" - 3:21
"C'est la Vie" - 6:08
"Spice of Choice" - 5:43
"The One" - 3:42
"Big Blue Sky" - 8:14
"Whole Life Time" - 3:46
"I'm Not Satisfied" - 5:43
"Corporate" - 5:23
"Shoom" - 6:30
It looks like ‘Double Trouble’ is a single as there’s an official video, which is below:
Click to viewThere’s also a short ‘Making Of Double Trouble’ that I watched a couple of weeks ago, have a watch:
And finally, Glastonbury 2013, just because I love it!
As with much of the cover art recently this one has been done by John Lydon, and I read somewhere it is an anti-religious piece, which it might well be, but I have little or no idea about these things. What I did very much like is album closer ‘Shoom’, which loudly proclaims that ‘“What the world needs now is another fuck off!” and in keeping with the last two words of the album, I am going to do as suggested, ‘Fuck off.’
8/10