Even in these post-Rapture days when punk-funk has become a yawn-inducing phrase, there’s still nothing around that sounds quite like The Pop Group, genuine frontiersmen in pop culture. These five Bristolian teenagers released their debut only months after Public Image Ltd and Magazine had set out the parameters for post-punk music. The opening track, She Is Beyond Good & Evil, reset them, and it still retains its power to astonish: they never did acheive anything superior to its awkward, fervent dub-punk paranoia. “Our only defence is together as an army/I’ll hold you like a gun,” hisses Mark Stewart, whose haunted vocals sound as if he’s been cast into the outer darkness with much wailing and gnashing of teeth.
Even on less successful moments such as the confused, wandering Blood Money, they’re never anything less than compelling. The album benefited from fantastic production from reggae producer Dennis Bovell, who bound their youthful anger, primitive rhythms, free jazz, radical politics and hypnotic grooves into a seamless, terrifying and danceable whole. Although calling this edition ‘expanded’, stretches the term, with one extra track (3.38, the B-side of She Is…), the remasters sound terrific, emphasising the vast sense of space and the tense energy. Poptastic.
