Thanks to the crate digging blogs of the last several
years, Adrian Borland's music, both with The Sound and his side projects have
been rediscovered by a new army of online fans. Of particular interest is
Second Layer, the duo he formed with The Sound bassist Graham Bailey. The first
thing that's noticeable on listening to World Of Rubber is how utterly
different the sound and aesthetic of Second Layer is compared to that of The
Sound. While The Sound had songs of gloomy introspection and a sweeping
romanticism, Second Layer strips all of that away, leaving in its place a
monochrome worldview morbidly obsessed with the dehumanising effect of war,
nuclear weapon annihilation, and the fracturing and negation of the self within
an increasingly distorted and technologically mediated society. The lyrics on
World Of Rubber don't trade in subtlety or ambiguity, instead preferring to
overwhelm you with its ugliness. The opening song 'Definition Of Honour' has
Borland drawling explicit anti-war rhetoric such as "the definition of
honour is the hole in the side of your head." 'Underneath The Glass,' has
an almost freakish level of paranoia with Borland neurotically singing about
germs, disease, assassination plots, and disturbing things squirming in the
brain.
The music, mirroring the blunt lyrics, is as harsh as it
is austere, with Bailey's drum machine rhythms and bass providing the stiff
regulatory pulse, and Borland's abrasive guitar providing the platform onto
which faltering synths and industrial metal noises are bolted and welded
together. It's an assemblage of machine parts that seeks to characterise the
inhuman worldview shown on the album's cover, where veins, flesh, skin and
emotions are replaced by wires, pistons, plastics and cybernetic feedback
circuitry. By the time they made tracks such as 'Japanese Headset', 'Underneath
The Glass', and 'Distortion' they move more into the cyberpunk territory that
you hear from Chrome and Cabaret Voltaire. The deep well point in World Of
Rubber though has to be 'Black Flowers,' an almost apocalyptically grim dirge,
with shuffling walls of bass and atonal synth wash, with Borland singing 'Black
Flowers' like a poisoned nursery rhyme. It's the sort of song that I'd like to
hear at the death of the earth, standing on a beach when the sea turns black
and putrid and the grey skies open up and piss blood red acid rain on me.