Highly recommended. 

Sticky Fingers is a collection of previously scattered recordings from Cleveland, Ohio’s 1978 No Wave provocateurs X__X. The retrospective has been overseen by John D Morton, guitarist in X_X and the Electric Eels, whose signature tune ‘Agitated’ is covered here in a shambling, raucous take. The Electric Eels, from 1972 to 1975, were using free jazz and improvisational approaches combined with a proto-punk garage squall. They also used confrontation as part of their performance well before it became a punk staple in London and New York. Not that having done so before more canonical punks makes them more authentic or ‘better’ punkers, but it nicely punctures some of the myth of punk’s Year Zero having marked some kind of revolutionary cultural break with its recent past. When asked in an interview “What did you make of the punk explosion?” Morton replied: “Left out & "Oh, now you get it!"”.

Not only Morton had a wider contribution to stretching the punk genre’s limits. Drummer Anton Fier went on to play with Pere Ubu. His rhythms all over X Sticky Fingers X vary and mutate, and on a song like ‘No Non cs’ find him causing the two-note riff that lasts the whole length of the tune to take completely different forms – it starts off a simple thugged-up thrash but later flails wildly skittering in and out of time pulling it all over the place. ‘A.’ does indeed sound like the cyclone alluded to in the Ektro Records bio, with a rapidly whirling circular bass line driving the chaos as John D Morton screeches and crunches like a motorcycle careering into a ditch. A couple of tracks show up their nihilist prankster ethos: ‘Rattler’ and ‘No No’, barely two minutes between them especially. ‘No No’ is basically the title shouted over the synchronised two-hit clatter of the rest of the band. The ultimate No Wave manifesto, if such a thing could exist? Elsewhere, ‘Moorish Weirdo’ ends with what sounds like the line, ‘It’s like sleeping with Idi Amin, Dada.’ This absurdist streak was not just an on-stage pose however, the band were apparently notorious for brawling, provoking their audiences and each other, and generally seeking conflict at every opportunity. Morton again: “I did send death threats to artists I didn't like and suicide notes to other people, like my mom.”

Despite the band’s nihilistic stance, they reckoned that musically they were way ahead of their peers, whether in Cleveland or in the thriving downtown New York scene: “We fully expected to be a mammoth success on the level of Roxy Music, the Stooges or the Dolls.” Sadly, of course, this never happened, but thanks to Finnish psych heroes Circle’s Ektro Records, a fascinating document from one of No Wave’s unknowns can now receive deserved attention.