Gang of Four "Content"

I couldn't believe what I was seeing, a new album by Gang of Four.  I recall their debut album exploding onto the playlists of some of my fellow WPRK DJ's my senior year.  Being the Mad Rocker, famously opposed to punk music, doing on-air commentary battles with several punkers and dueling with Paul Vonder Heide in the Sandspur, I wasn't supposed to like this anti-establishment, political angst.  But there was just something about it I couldn't shake, though I would never own up to it to those guys.  A couple of years later, I embarked on the music retailing career, resuming my exposure to tons of music, and we get a promo album for a film called "Urgh!  A Music War."  Great live tunes from an A-list of bands like OMD, XTC, X, & Oingo Boingo (had to include a complete name).  The label rep had a VHS copy of the film and loaned it to me for a weekend.  That's when I saw what Gang of Four was all about and here's the clip.  Well, I WAS HOOKED!  That rhythm section was simply nasty, and the guitarist didn't play as much as he stabbed the instrument, missing it at times, creating that staccato scratching.  I went backwards and collected everything issued.  The current record at the time was "Songs of the Free", and it signaled a change in the band.  The bassist had left to start Shriekback, which was easily less political and more rhythmic/danceable, but "Songs..." leaned that direction, too, with the track "I Love A Man in Uniform" actually receiving a remix for club play.  By putting funk into punk, it pissed off the purists but helped swell the growing New Wave scene.  The next album was "Hard" in 1983, and it turned out to be the final one for the first stage of Gof4.  Compare the earlier clip to this VH1 Classic, "Is It Love" to hear the difference.  "Hard" was the highest charting record for them and "...Love" was a top 10 Dance/Club track, but of course, to a punk act that's selling out, so they call it quits.  Over the next twenty-something years, some form of the group release three different albums, with two of them eliciting shouts of joy, "the Gang is back!", "Andy Gill is a guitar god", etc., etc., etc..  Pretty amazing to be called "Innovative" twenty-five years later. 

So now we come to "Content" in 2011.  From what I could gather, this was a project fueled and funded by fans, a new generation of fans, that is, the 30 and under crowd.  Gill and singer Jon King are the constants here, and it is certainly a Gang of Four record.  Is it great or groundbreaking?  Nope.  Is it funky and/or danceable like the more commercially successful recordings of above?  Not really.  But it is a good album, like an OREO is a good cookie, the best part is the middle.  Plenty of the scratchy guitar and militaristic rhythm section Go4 is known for.  As a matter of fact, they performed track 5 of the ten on the record for Letterman a couple of months ago.  A short album at 35 minutes, it's still a keeper.