Hysterical Blooze

James Chance and the Contortions : Flip Your Face

[Purchase]

In December of 1978 Antilles Records released No New York, a compilation of 16 songs by four artists, produced by Brian Eno who was in New York at the time to produce the sophomore Talking Heads album More Songs About Buildings and Food. The New York no wave scene consisted of bands that were experimenting with dissonance, noise, and elements of free jazz and funk. The bands Eno agreed to producer were The Contortions ( whose "Flip Your Face" has been cited by Steve Albini has his favorite song); Teenage Jesus and the Jerks ( featuring Lydia Lunch); Mars and D.N.A. ( featuring singer/guitarist Arto Lindsay). All four bands were friends and shared the same rehearsal loft. Each band had one day to record. Eno was mostly hands off . Lydia Lunch remembers seeing him reading a newspaper while they were recording. Eno did add some echo and compression to the guitars on Mars' "Helen Forsdale". The album has been recorded for Island Records but, upon hearing the noisy, dissonant sounds of No New York, they passed.

Critics did their best to celebrate the album. Robert Christgau gave No New York a B+  writing

 Especially with Adele Bertei on organ, the Contortions can be a great band, extending Ornette Coleman's Dancing in Your Head into real rock and roll territory, and it's exciting to be able to hear them minus James Chance's stupid stage shtick. (Maybe they'll become a studio group, like Steely Dan.) But the rest of this four-band compilation has the taint of marginal avant-gardism: interesting in occasional doses, but not as significant as it pretends to be. Arto Lindsay's hysterical blooze singing holds DNA together--wish they were on side one with the Contortions. I like the relentless music of Mars's "Helen Fordsdale" (the words are incomprehensible even with a lyric sheet, which if the lyric sheet is any indication is just as well) and the paranoid poetry of "Puerto Rican Ghost." And although in the wake of Chance's theme song, "I Can't Stand Myself," I've begun to tolerate Lydia Lunch droning "The leaves are always dead" etc., she credits herself with too much maturity by publishing as Infantunes. Abortunes would be more like it.‘

Rolling Stone's Tom Carson adds

While Eno initiated the current project, he doesn’t seem to have put much energy into it: his production is unusually restrained. On the whole, he appears more taken with the basic idea rather than the actual substance of the music, and such priorities seem perfectly appropriate.