Sounds From The Junkshop #66 - Pitchshifter

 

"I can't deny it's killin' me/No-one loses on TV" - Pitchshifter - As Seen On TV

Hands up, I was quite late to the game when it came to getting into Pitchshifter. It was probably around the time that Britrock started winding down in 1998-99 or so and my increasingly heavier music taste post-Britpop saw me starting to look into other bands on the pages of Kerrang! and Metal Hammer, both of whom were giving a fair few colum inches to these Nottingham noisemongers and particularly their scathing state of the nation address single Microwaved ("Don't you read the papers?/Economics is going to save us/And science never sleeps").

I first heard the above song on a compilation and liked it enough that I went out and bought the www.pitchshifter.com album soon afterwards. Although it's safe to say that I didn't have that many industrial metal records in my collection at the time, I'd sort of gently dabbled in it prior to this. I remember getting Ministry's Psalm 69 album as a teenager after one of my metalhead friends played me the awesome Jesus Built My Hotrod and obviously Pop Will Eat Itself had kind of gone down this route with the excellent Dos Dedos Mi Amigos which had been a big favourite of mine. Pitchshifter had a similarly angry political attitude to the latter day Poppies and I think this definitely helped to draw me in. As I've often said before in this column, bands who are willing to stand up and call our political system out for the bullshit it frequently is have always been a major part of my musical education going right back to Carter USM and the Senseless Things although with both of the aforementioned having disbanded a few years prior to this, pickings along these lines had been decidedly slim in the mid-'90s. So it's safe to say that Pitchshifter definitely filled a gap there.

www.pitchshifter.com certainly had plenty of this anger with the likes of Please Sir and WYSIWYG being ferocious tirades against capitalism and the media's ability to numb people's minds. Certainly as a 19-20 year old who was quickly starting to realise that while we'd finally got rid of the hated Tory government that had been running the country into the ground for the previous two decades that "New" Labour weren't actually that much better, even before they led us into an illegal war, as exemplified by their introduction of tuition fees for university students which effectively barred more intelligent working class kids from getting the extra learning they should have in favour of tilting the system towards posh boy thickos whose dads just happened to know "the right people" (take a look at the conman we've currently got leading this country - I rest my case). Something smelled rotten at the top and the stench has never really gone away in the intervening two decades, make no mistake about it.

That angry confrontational political attitude made Pitchshifter also stick out like a sore thumb against the woeful knuckleheadisms and money-grabbing faux-angst of nu-metal that industrial was starting to mutate into by this point. The next album Deviant was even better with the ferocious As Seen On TV featuring Jello Biafra on vocals which was the gateway to me getting into the Dead Kennedys. So that's another thing I owe 'em for.

There were plenty of other great tunes on the album as well such as Condescension, Dead Battery and Hidden Agenda while the brooding Everything's Fucked and Forget The Facts showed that they were able to vary things up a bit as well. I saw Pitchshifter live around this time sharing a bill with tone-deaf emo dullards Hundred Reasons at Leeds Town Hall and they well and truly stole the show. The future seemed bright for them.

Unfortunately though, it wasn't. Despite good reviews, Deviant failed to do the predicted numbers sales-wise and the group were dropped by their major label paymasters MCA and moved across to the indie Sanctuary label. The resultant album PSI was a poor effort with the fury dialled down and the generic nu-metal saynowtisms dialled up. Even this pandering to then-current trends didn't help the album to sell either and the band duly split. Guitarist Jim Davies would go on to join the Prodigy (who he'd previously worked with in the mid-'90s) with drummer Jason Bowld moving on to Pop Will Eat Itself (see, told ya it wasn't such a big jump) and Bullet For My Valentine.

Pitchshifter have reformed sporadically over the intervening two decades and put a couple of EP's out which I have to confess having gone under my radar. I may look them up after revisiting the group for this article - hopefully they're nearer to Deviant or www.pitchshifter.com than PSI. Apparently recent releases have contained rerecorded versions of Un-United Kingdom and Everything's Fucked which I guess just shows how as a country we still seem doomed into repeating the same mistakes again and again politically. Either way, although their presence as a go-to band for me was quite brief, Pitchshifter definitely deserve a full mention in this 'ere column as those two late '90s albums were definitely a much needed blast of political anger in an increasingly sterile say-nowt climate and are well worth a listen if you haven't heard them already.