Rema-Rema were some of the Wolfgang Press with Marco Pirroni from out of off of Adam and the Ants, and they we so cool they split up after about five minutes.

This is going to be good, right?

Entry on the ‘a’ is one note, a load of feedback, some shouty nihilism and a bit of blasphemy. It’s genuinely epic, far above the dull grey nothing of its post-punk contemporaries.

I’ve never got on with post-punk. Punk was shit, right? Everyone knows that, and the only people who like it are the people who were (or pretend they were) there at the time. I think post-punk is the same. There’s no way I can see that, given the availability of other music, a person could like Joy Division unless they got into them when they were a stroppy teenager and there was little else available. I believe every Joy Division fan is the same age to within about six months. (I have no hypothesis whatsoever to explain why people listen to New Order. I’ll let you know if I ever come up with one.)

Entry on the ‘b’ doesn’t have lyrics, but it still towers. Rema-Rema could have been great. But then we probably wouldn’t have Kings of the Wild Frontier. So I dunno. Life, eh? It’s a tricky old thing.

I already have this, on CD, but it’s such good song that when I happened across its lovely orange 7” in Reckless, I had to have it. I know it from that Annie DJ mixtape album thing.

Now, here’s one more area where the modern world confuses me. Annie is bloody brilliant: I’m on safe ground saying that. What I want to know, is, on a scale of “fine” to “practically rape”, how acceptable is it for me to say that I also find her very attractive? Because I do, because she is. Same goes for Annie Clark, Janelle Monae, Taylor Swift, etc etc. I mean, you can be a complete musical genius and still be hot, right? Isn’t being hot part of a pop star’s job, boy or girl or man or woman or whatever else they have these days? And a huge part of it is that, to me at least, there’s nothing more attractive than brains and creativity. I’m not buying Annie’s records because she’s “got a fit arse” or something, I buy them because they’re great records that I enjoy listening to. But do I now have to pretend I’ve never noticed what she looks like? Do a significantly large body of people assume that if you think a person looks good then you must have reduced them purely to their looks and that you’re a mansplaining manspreading mantainer of the fascist patriarchy who thinks women should be in the kitchen, or covered up, or prostitutes or something?

I’ve stopped reading the Guardian because this kind of identity politics conundrum got mixed up in everything I ever thought about, and it made life seem unbearably complicated. The more you ignore of the modern world, the better your life will be. Trust me. We were far happier before we had the internet, and before our mindless pursuit of tolerance somehow turned us into a world of petty, intolerant accusers, dismissing any opinion but our own as hatred or some vague but evil –ism.

So, Rabbit Pushing Mower. It’s great.

Continuing our Scandinavian theme, with a record so Swedish that how much more Swedish could it be, and the answer is none, none more Swedish. The writing is in Swedish and everything. Blimey. Apparently it’s a political record, but as I speak not a word of Swedish, I couldn’t tell you exactly what political opinions it contains. Let’s hope they’re not dodgy ones, eh readers?

I understood nothing, but I enjoyed the gentle melody and plodding retro synth riffage. I think the sentiments expressed were good, because the man sounds nice.

Complains – creaking doors; footsteps; occultism; broken clock; warped shellac.

Ducks – untuned guitar; pretty melody; half-remembered childhood.

Stupid is Natural – John Cage’s pendulum; distant clapping; earworm.

Holes – something is happening in another room of an empty house.

!!@#?!! – why can’t you be more like your sister?

This was a bit of a find. I used to love these back in the day. They were a Cramps-ish garage band who drowned everything in feedback and were fronted by that bloke who was a wrong ‘un in Police Academy 2 but one of the cops in Police Academy 3. (I may have the numbers wrong there. I kind of hope I have.)

This is no Just Let Go (their magnum opus), being a slightly watered down version of their usual shtick, whilst still sounding exactly the same as all their other songs.

The ‘b’ is better, probably because it’s rougher around the edges. The ‘a’ is too sanitised. Like Gilded Lil. They were a blinding live band, but with one exception their records were such weak representations of their powers.