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Amebix - Who’s The Enemy? (Spiderleg)
Who the hell thought of The Amebix? Was it their singer (who has the greatest punk name ever) THE BARON? To me this band makes absolutely no sense. Basically some dudes living in abandoned buildings were into Joy Division, Killing Joke, and Discharge and somehow mixed those together. I don’t understand it. Later they sort of started combining some metal in the mix, and the whole enterprise isn’t so confusing, but I threw on the new Alt Tentacles “Spiderleg collection this weekend while setting up the new crib, and it just hit me, this is one of the weirdest bands ever. 

Listening to early Amebix offerings it’s clear that they’re really into atmosphere and rhythm which are defining characteristics of all of the aforementioned bands. On Who’s The Enemy, opener “Carnage” is pretty much a mash-up of Joy Division’s “Dead Souls” and Killing Joke’s “War Dance”. The bass guitar and tribal drumming leads the charge, while the heavily treated guitars are used more to provide texture than carve out riffs. The Baron delivers his shouts heavily treated in reverb while phasing synth and guitar lines weave in and out of the mix, filling in the gaps with white noise (not music). Curfew starts with more ambient synth noise and distorted speech before kicking into a full on “Decontrol” style ripper, but with the production style of this record, it emphasizes a really different side of it. Well actually it kind of just sounds like it’s at the end of an airplane hanger. The amount of echo they’re using, on a song at this speed gives it kind of a weird hazy feel with the guitar just washing over everything other than the cymbals. Belief on side B takes things back to the more tribal drum attack, it almost reminds me of Joy Division’s “Glass”, but of course taken to a much noisier extreme. The closer is the signature tune “No Gods No Masters”, which is relatively sparse for being such a well known t-shirt slogan. Most of the time the guitar and bass are just working an E-Chord in various rhythmic patterns, often grating against the circular drumming. Vocal effects start to get more extreme as the song pulses its way to an end and the guitar begins running up and down the frets liberally.

So as I said before I can’t imagine what the thought process was in starting this band, and why you’d think to combine the elements of early hardcore, and early post punk in this way, but I suppose these things weren’t quite as far apart in those days. This is the og pressing w/ a wrap around sleeve on Spiderleg btw.