this heat: deceit

But the bargain's fulfillment has too often been too trite, and understandably: are you gonna stumble out of your garage or art school and start a revolution? The Ramones did, but who else? Wire, maybe. The Sex Pistols had timing and a sneer and not much else. The Clash were eternal dilettantes, though they sure could write an anthem. Even more structurally audacious postpunkers like Gang of Four fell prey to fake funk and up-its-ass spectacle-crit. Really now: how feasible is a program that calls for the defeat of the Old and the creation of the New, each and every time?

Which makes it all too tempting to cream my britches about the long-awaited reissue of This Heat's seminal (?) 1981 Deceit. It's an attempt to remake the world from the ground up—the materialist answer to the year's other crucial punk reissue, Kleenex/LiLiPUT's pure energy discography. Deceit too often reads like an Ex album title, blueprints for a blackout, rather than the thing itself. But still!

This Heat disguises its roots, but not very well. Mighty drummer Charles Hayward came out of the British prog-jazz scene (indeed, his vocals are a little bit too much like Robert Wyatt's unmanned floatiness for comfort), and his band's songs are geeky convolutes as much as punky raw-powers: dense, confusing things that mass together messes of tape edits, discomfiting guitar intervals, vocal duelings and ululations, drones, screams, and syncopations, all mussed up by a weirdo Marxism that presents spectacle as is so that it might destroy itself by force of irony, slogans torn from commercials or the Declaration of Independence, commented on only by the queasiness that underpins.

Problem: there isn't much raw power here, not much directness, only obliqueness and strategy. And punk, whatever it is, demands volume and directness besides all that other stuff: rock! But still: all that other stuff! This Heat had it, Deceit has it, the difference and affirmation, even if not enough negatory stuff. It's a dawn for tomorrow that can't quite set the sun on today. (These) —Sam Frank

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