Something Beginning With 'L'

The Box - Secrets Out

You may be aware, if you keep up to date with happenings on this blog, of my love of the early work of Sheffield's Clock DVA and by early I mean pre-1983. There have been several incarnations of Adi Newton's experimental visions but the most important and innovative was the era which spawned the classic album, Thirst.

The Thirst incarnation disintegrated when three fifths of the band parted company with Newton. Forming a new outfit The Box, they first recruited Cabs front man Stephen Mallinder as vocalist, but then settled on the energetic Peter Hope. Their debut album Secrets Out is the natural successor to Thirst (after all it is essentially the same musicians) but the songs were more compact, funky, jerky with a manic sense of purpose.

Hope dressed onstage like Sheffield's answer to Rob Halford, but his vocal style was much more akin to that of David Thomas. In fact, it easy to imagine that the influence of Pere Ubu contributed much to the overall sound of The Box.

Secrets Out is a manic collection of twelve 3 minute wonders, each of them contorts itself around you, then turns you inside-out with a weird jazz funk pop, crazy chopped guitars, flutes & clarinets toy with Hope's crazed lyrical prose & verse.

You need to listen to this album as a whole unit, it is the only way it can make sense. Each track almost bleeds into the next, not in the way of a prog concept album, but that you just to hear more after each piece, and that very next track satisfies that need and so on. It is such a disappointment when it all comes to an end.

Highlights have to be Something Beginning With 'L' (with Mal on lead vocals), the superb Strike (so blatantly ripped off by Sheffield devil children Arctic Monkeys - you always knew you'd heard that riff somewhere), the laid back flute-filled mellowness that is The Hub is like a pause for breathe until all hell breaks loose again, No Sly Moon is the tune Jarvis Cocker always wishes he'd written and the single Old Style Drop Down is a long lost indie disco classic. But it's far for me to tell you what the best tracks are, as you should all have your own favourites.

Lovingly ripped from a vinyl album released on Go! Discs Records (VFM4) in 1983 to high resolution and high quality lossless 24-bit FLAC audio.

A1. Water Grows Teeth

A2. Skin, Sweat And Rain

A3. Something Beginning With 'L'

A4. Strike

A5. The Hub

A6. Hang You Hat On That!

B1. I Give Protection

B2. No Sly Moon

B3. Slip And Slant

B4. Old Style Drop Down

B5. Swing

B6. Out