Estese recensioni dello splendido box antologico Out of the Cold Storage dei This Heat si trovano in questi giorni in Pitchfork e Warped Reality; sul cofanetto, dapprima in sottoscrizione e ora ufficialmente disponibile da ReR, c'è anche un forum di discussione presso Bagatellen.
This Heat were born in the years immediately preceding punk rock. Severe young men Charles Bullen and Charles Hayward were making things go pish-ding-whoosh on London’s free-improvising circuit and had links to the waning days of Canterbury’s whimsical and conceptual prog rock scene. So though punk riled them up - as it riled up many under-30s lurking in the corners of London in the summer of 1976 - it’s unsurprising that what they produced in response sounds little like the Clash. They hooked up with “non-musician” Gareth Williams and took up in an abandoned meat locker dubbed Cold Storage. Like Can in their castle or Faust in their farmhouse, This Heat recorded endlessly at Cold Storage, editing the results down into (semi-) coherent chunks.
What This Heat produced there is a remarkable body of work, even in the context of creative abundance that was British post-punk. Hayward sang in a keening voice with audible debts to Robert Wyatt, but without the former Soft Machine leader's warmth and sentimentality. This Heat’s astringent combination of tape loops, coruscating sheet metal guitar, Krautrock-inspired groove, improvised noise, and Reagan/Thatcher-era political despair felt frigid to the touch. Listening today you can almost hear Cold Storage’s rusted pipes and crackled, mottled porcelain as captured in this new box set’s black-and-white photographs.
Out of Cold Storage contains the complete works of This Heat, along with a disc of live recordings and an informative booklet where the surviving members (Williams passed away in 2001) dissect their discography. It’s a sumptuously packaged, limited-edition, mail-order release, and since most of the material has long been available only as bootlegs or on mp3, the sound quality of these remasters is an obvious improvement.
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