MEDIUM MEDIUM - THE GLITTERHOUSE 2LP+12"

35th Anniversary Deluxe triple vinyl gatefold edition pressed on colour splatter vinyl with printed inners.

Medium Medium’s debut album, The Glitterhouse, was originally released on Cherry Red in October 1981. This reissue also features the “Hungry, So Angry,” single version which was produced by Adrian Sherwood at Berry Street Studio in London. In Sound International magazine Dave Henderson wrote prophetically, “It could be one of the most important records of the type to emerge this year and will doubtlessly be revered as a classic after the group have long since departed.”
Also included is a selection of tracks from Cherry Red’s 2001 Hungry, So Angry retrospective compilation album, the B-side of the band’s debut single on Apt and a previously unreleased demo version of a song from the 1982 Sound-Products EP. It includes a bonus EP featuring previously unreleased tracks from the 2008 Village recording session. All of the various lineups of Medium Medium are represented.

Formed at the end of 1978 Medium Medium’s self-described “extreme dance music” had reviewers scrambling to draw comparisons with the band’s contemporaries and find a label for its post punk sound.

Medium Medium’s solid dance rhythms and chaotic, chiming guitar were superficially reminiscent of the Gang of Four and Talking Heads, but Rees’s tangential sax playing and Graham’s tape and keyboard interjections from the front-of-house mixing desk took Medium Medium in another direction. “Free-blown dubbed-up white funk” was how Max Bell described the sound in England’s New Musical Express (NME). “At the forefront of the post punk funk movement,” raved Cashbox in the U.S. Billboard magazine opined that this was “post punk and post disco dance music.” Marketing materials referred to the band’s “searing Zen funk

Dave Hill, reviewing The Glitterhouse for the NME, was struck by the lyrical content of the album. “Great slabs of tormented lust,” he wrote, “some dirty deeds, some sour morality tales from grubby emotional backstreets.” The album, he commented, revealed “a startling new surge of frowning soul.” In Sounds, Phil Sutcliffe described the songs as “savage,” “scalding” and with the “power to hurt,” characterizing the sound as “shivering funk and a frantic complaining voice; bass and drums carry the momentum while guitar is cut back to scratches and whines entwined with groaning sax.” Music critic Robert Palmer, writing in The New York Times, described the album as “airy, moody, strangely gripping psychedelic jazz-rock, with guitar and saxophone textures grating against each other in an echo chamber and a beat that’s more implied than stated. This is impressively original new rock.”

Tracklisting

side 1
Hungry So Angry
Serbian Village

Guru Maharaj Ji
The Glitterhouse

side 2
Further Than Funk Dream
Mice Or Monsters
That Haiku

side 3
Nadsat Dream
Them Or Me
Freeze
Splendid Isolation
7th Floor
If You Touched Her She’d Smear

side 4
Hungry So Angry (Single Version)
Frightened Child
Full Of Secrecy
Praying
Hidden Fears

side 5
OK We Go

side 6
Let Me Breathe
Obsessed Master