For as legendary and influential as Britain’s Rudimentary Peni have been among fans of goth and deathrock, they’re not widely appreciated outside those tight-knit circles. There’s nothing particularly surprising about this fact. Between the band’s jagged, lurching, and mercilessly compressed compositions and Nick Blinko’s strangled delivery, RP were destined to be an acquired taste from the start. Add to that the group’s peculiar working habits — long stretches between releases, refusal to tour (or even perform live, for the most part), and Blinko’s well-known aversion to doing interviews — and it’s actually kind of a miracle anyone outside the UK was able to learn about these guys at all in the pre-internet days of the 1980s.
Truth be told, they might have escaped my attention if not for Southern Records’ recently initiated project to reissue the band’s out-of-print discography, which was serendipitously preceded at the beginning of this year by Chelsea Wolfe’s excellent Latitudes session Prayer for the Unborn, an EP’s worth of reworkings of Rudimentary Peni songs. Wolfe’s own exposure to RP was perfectly in keeping with the group’s cult status: one day she walked in on her roommate listening to them. Wolfe became fascinated by the records, their intricate black-and-white album art (designed by Blinko himself), and the group’s bleakly surreal, existential lyrics — so much so that some of the selections off Prayer were composed without her even having heard the original songs they were based on.
Cacophony is considered by many to be the band’s finest work, and it is undoubtedly their most ambitious. The album was recorded following the first major disruption in the band’s career, a four-year hiatus during bassist Grant Matthews’ bout with cancer. Cacophony finds Blinko assuming control of the songwriting duties, which had chiefly belonged to Matthews prior to his illness (“Well, I thought that Grant felt that his lyrics weren’t relevant anymore or something,” Blinko explains in a rare interview from 1992). Under Blinko’s lead, the band fully detached from its anarcho-punk roots and grew into an honest-to-goodness deathrock band. Leftist politics was Matthews’ thing; Blinko was all about Lovecraft. The album shows a deep immersion in Lovecraft’s life and work, appropriating his mythology (both literary and personal), lapsing into his grandiloquent diction, and tracing the sordid lineage of his macabre visions. While RP were never strangers to the gothic (their previous album had sported tracks titled “Cosmic Hearse” and “Flesh Crucifix,” after all), Cacophony was the album that would forever endear them to the black eyeliner set.
In terms of its complexity, diversity, and sheer density, the record was a giant leap beyond anything the band had previously attempted. While Blinko’s voice seemed to max out at a piercing rasp in the band’s early work, his vocals on Cacophony are so protean and unpredictable one could almost believe he was playing host to a demonic legion. He employs well over a dozen voices throughout the record: inhuman utterances (the dry croaking on “Crazed Couplet” and “Nightgaunts,” the ghastly keening at the end of “The Only Child”), distinct musical personae (the clinically detached narrator of “Better Not Born” and the reedy, crisp diction of the speaker on “Dream City”), and dramatic spoken word interludes (the frantic newscaster at the end of “The Evil Clergyman,” the Shakespearian monologue in “Brown Jenkin,” and the wizened New Englander who mourns Lovecraft’s wasted talents on “Imps of the Perverse”). There’s also Gregorian chant, drinking songs, and a track that’s mostly just fart noises.
The dramatic shifts in persona are matched by a musical accompaniment that’s ready and able to change tempos or time signatures at a moment’s notice. The album contains some of RP’s heaviest tracks up to that time (check out the plodding riff on “Zenophobia” and Jon Grenville’s thundering rhythm on “The Only Child”), pointing towards the almost-heavy-metal leanings of their more recent work. Yet other tracks, like the instrumental “The Evil Clergyman” or “Dream City” move into a post-punk territory that sounds like a more amped-up version of The Cure. And while Blinko may be the most visible member of the trio on this release, it’s impossible to calculate just how important Grant Matthews is to making these songs pop. Matthews’ bass sits high in the mix and works its ass off to earn that place of prominence. He continually finds unique ways to introduce wrinkles into what could otherwise have been overly-pat melodies.
Trying to take Cacophony in as a whole is an experience not unlike trying to look upon one of Lovecraft’s Great Old Ones. The totality of it is too mottled and gnarled, its form dictated by a geometry not of this universe — it’s not for nothing Piero Scaruffi dubbed the album “the Trout Mask Replica of British Punk.” But sinking into its peculiar madness is a sweeter fate than that experienced by Mr. Delapore or Robert Olmstead. The more time you spend with this eldritch tome, the more you may come to realize you’ve developed a taste for its ghastly pleasures.