Colin Newman
Bastard [Reissue]
SWIM~
By the time of its initial release in 1997, Colin Newman’s first complete solo album in nine years, Bastard, was something of an outgrowth of his time with Wire V.1, a subdivision of his electro-morphing work as Oracle and Immersion, and a record born of his professional and personal relationship with Malka Spigel—his wife and partner in running the swim~ label. For all Newman’s restless experimentalism in electronic music and post-rock, he—like so many early sonic pioneers of the 1970s—had grown into an affection for drum ’n’ bass, techno, jungle, house, and industrial music.
With that, it would be no shock to remind listeners that Bastard came out the same year as David Bowie’s techno-testing Earthling. Yet while Bowie and his large arena band toyed with their experiments in an abrasive yet colorful pop-rock format with something intimate as its guide, Newman and co-writer Spigel stuck to his aggressive past and its shadowy art-rock landing (e.g. his Wire-like guitars throughout Bastard) without concession to brash melody writing or shapeliness.
Bastard, then, is Earthling’s subtler, supple, lo-fried, finer-boned cousin, a nearly all instrumental work built up from cranky samples, damnable drum machine kicks, and aggravated guitar loops guided by the goal of atmospheric mood-shifting and a love story just beginning to build. With that, the aptly titled likes of “Sticky,” “Slowfast (Falling Down the Stairs with a Drumkit),” and “Spiked”—to say nothing of this remastered reissue’s previously unreleased tracks such as the snotty attitude-driven “Cut the Slack”—are all dedicated to the sound of two people falling into each other’s arms, accompanied by harsh metallic grooves and squiggly, sharded noise rather than Cupid’s harps. Aw.
