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that this may be the real lost chord in rock-jazz-experimental fusion music. “No One Receiving” has a discoish rhythm that seems to arc off into space with haunting vocal “in these metal ways/in these metal days,” “Kurt's Rejoinder” is a whirlpool of plucked strings, percussion, and synthesized voice, and “King's Lead Hat,” emphasizing Eno's affinities with New Wave in its rushed mechanical rhythms and clacking dissonances, has more of the dense Velvet Undergroundish charge and churn of Tiger Mountains “Third Uncle.” All of it is music that you can almost literally see, as befits Eno's current interest in movie soundtracks. In fact, the album is being marketed in conjunction with four offset prints from watercolors by artist Peter Schmidt, paintings that parallel the music in portraying very little—usually interior worlds, lonely and haunted, where often the only human presence seems to be the passive eye of the beholder.

The Village Voice, April 3, 1978

John Lydon

Across the Border

Corrective comedy doesn’t always work.

If the jewel which everyone desired to possess lay far out on a frozen lake where the ice was very thin … while, closer in, the ice was perfectly safe, then in a passionate age the crowds would applaud the courage of the man who ventured out…. But in an age without passion … people would think each other clever in agreeing that it was unreasonable… to venture so far out… the eyes of connoisseurs would appraise the accomplished skater who could skate almost to the very edge (i.e., as far as the ice was safe and the danger had not yet begun) and then turn back…. And then, stimulated by a gush of admiration, they all comfortably agreed that they might as well admire themselves.

—Kierkegaard,

Kill someone

Be someone

Kill yourself!

—Sex Pistols, “Belsen Was a Gas”

With that furious shriek the (real) Sex Pistols’ recorded career stops. There is a moment of silence and then the San Francisco crowd goes wild. It's one of the most frightening things I’ve ever heard, but it also makes clear why the Pistols had to break up. Because there are only so many times you can tell somebody something in plain English till you realize they don’t get the irony even in that; they don’t hear the words. All they see is a reflection of a spurious notion of the self and a spurious passion too, so you stop attempting to communicate. If people want to think Belsen was a cheap joke, that's their problem.

Maybe you just realize that you cannot kick intentional cripples awake, so you tell everybody what not to expect (first Public Image Ltd. album) and then give ‘em what you really want to do (second) and if they don’t like it, fine. Because you are left alone to make music, which is finally more important than fucking with the media.

Second Edition née The Metal Box (the latter perhaps the greatest packaging concept in history, and I don’t give a damn about the price, I’ve bought two copies already and how much else is there that's worth any money at all?) is one of the best records I’ve heard since, oh, say, maybe White Light/White Heat. It's assured. It's no joke unless you want it to be, in which case you’re welcome to all the Gary Numans. This is a real ensemble making passionate music out of noise and sonic scraps. Quote me: “the first music of the Eighties.” It's not entirely new; there's Spanish guitar in “Memories,” and the ending of “Swan Lake” harkens back to the Velvets’ “Loop” and the ending of the original “White Light/White Heat.” “Radio Four” even sounds a little bit like Eno, but all those hours in the studio and remixes (there are between three and five—I’m not entirely sure which—mixes of “Swan Lake” a.ka. “Death Disco” on various records) paid off. It's not arty, either—what it is is bitter and variform, an hour well-spent. It hasn’t a commercial chance in hell and wasn’t even necessarily designed that way, nor is it particularly obscure—you can’t get much more blatant than the group's name itself.

John Lydon, on this album, sheds an image he wishes desperately the rest of the world would