Public Image Ltd. Album: “Metal Box”

UK Metal Box was remastered in 1996 under John Lydon's direction, all the songs are 1-2 seconds longer than US versions. Surprisingly, these longer seconds seem to be apparent in the songs intros; little jangles, noises, and voices.

The track/song listing is different No Birds and Socialist are reversed.

Overall, the UK Metal Box is punchier, and feels more musical. If you are a Second Edition fan I think you will enjoy Metal Boxes nuances.

The classic PiL album, this is essentially John Lydon moaningover the top of avant-garde dub reggae, and it's fantastic, andunique. A mixture of synthesisers, Jah Wobble's bass lines and some stuttery beats combine to make something that sounds like being sick, but musically, and yet it works as music to listen to. It's alien and strange, and sounds as fresh today as then. The music was re-released as 'Second Edition.'

Metal Box is revered by many, and rightly so. There is this continuity with Lydon and that is simply being himself. He is gloriously misunderstood. A true working class hero. In his book 'No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs' he mentions that he was a shy boy who became the most notorious rock star in the history of rock and roll (or words to that affect). Simple psychology however, will reveal that the man is still shy. That is what is so endearing about him. Apart from his intelligence and cutting remarks, he is an extremely sensitive human being. This is why this album works. There is no 'knowingness' to it.

Metal Box is a heartfelt album. It is not just the ramblings of an angry young man, but a sacrifice. Cynics are probably the most sensitive people in the world. They want the truth, that is all. Lies bug them (Read 'Conversations With Kafka' by Gustav Janouch. Maybe then, people will see how important Lydon is). Lydon himself refuses to be seen as an intellect. His habit is to destroy myths. There are no heros.

Pil are more relevant to me then the Sex Pistols will ever be. Morbidly, it is because I find them less fun. They are a wry smile rather than a good laugh. Listening to this album is like being with a best friend. Why is Jah Wobbles bass playing so celebrated? It is the heart beating in expectation.

Stop Making Sense and don't accept the madness which everyone accepts as the norm. Be gloriously misunderstood!

I have the original vinyl, the black grooves worn gray, in the metal film cans. I didn't know what to think when it first appeared way back when, but I couldn't stop playing it over and over. It's a worthy replacement to my weathered vinyl. The Metal Box may have lost a little of the sheen over the years because so many bands have copied the style. But it hasn't lost any of its power. Love that the CD comes in a metal box. Turn it up to 11 and let the walls throb and the china rattle. PiL was never better than the Metal Box.

Metal Box is an album as impenetrable as the case in which it comes... a fifty-minute swirling bombardment of Kraut-rock rhythms, dissonant keyboards, jagged guitars and Lydon's bitter lyrics and screaming vocals. It follows on nicely from their first album, which took the sound of the Sex Pistols and fused it with disco, Kraut-rock and the kind of guitar music that would later become known as "post-punk". As a listening experience there is little else to rival it, with Metal Box offering up twelve tracks filled with a pain and anguish that can seemingly only find true catharsis through the screaming angular music found within. This is the sound of a band falling out of love with each other... and with the world around them.

The opening song, the near-legendary Albatross (which is almost eleven minutes of Beckett-like lyrical ruminations, over screaming guitars, a heavy and monotonous bass-line and some trance-like percussion) picks up where Theme (the opening track of their first album) left off, giving us more of Lydon's existential anguish and torment, as he screams about death and all manner of other related-horrors that infuse the album with a bleak, gothic and claustrophobic sound. Unlike the first album, the emphasis here is more on sound rather than song, so there's no real standout singles like Annalisa or Public Image, instead, we get longer tracks with much reliance on layered instrumentation. This is very much a precursor to those Radiohead classics, Kid A and Amnesiac, with PiL creating a landscape of cold synthesisers, an aching violin and that great integrated sound of Keith Lavene's scratchy, distorted guitar and the dub pounding bass of Jah Wobble.

This is dark music, as bleak as albums like Tilt, OK Computer, Regeneration, Blood on the Tracks and The Final Cut... although it has a sound that is unlike any of those albums, or indeed, anything else you've ever heard. The album progresses on from the epic Albatross onto the dark Memories, which sets Lydon's grating vocals and doom-laden lyrics against a backdrop of distorted, echoed guitars and a funky monotonous bass-line, which is further complemented by an Eastern-tinged and somewhat alien violin (or possibly keyboard) refrain wailing away in the background. It leads us perfectly into my favourite song on the album, the mesmerising Swan Lake.

Enough said, in the late 70's, PIL is unique with this punk Funk : only the bands Siouxsie & the Banshees and Wire offer a music as original as theirs. Inspired, Lydon makes psalmodies on the breathtaking " Careering" which with " Poptones" is enough to justify the acquisition of this precursor recording