LP reviewed in Sounds, 15th May, 1982
DISCHARGE ‘Hear Nothing See Nothing Say Nothing’ (Clay LP 3)***1/2 CHEERFUL BUNCH, Discharge. For four singles and a twelve incher, Discharge have continually bombarded their audience with never ending and hugely repetitive descriptions of massed slaughter by nuclear weapons, and inevitably after all this time, the intended provocative shock effect has worn very, very, thin.
So here’s the Discharge album. How does it go? “The nightmare continues/ Blinded, disfigured and mentally scarred . . . /Men women and children groaning in agony from the intolerable pain of their burns . /The savage mutilation of the human race is set on course.”
Are they having us all on? By positioning a horrific photograph of an atom bomb victim’s back underneath one of a girl sunbathing, are Discharge actually suggesting that whenever we fancy a few hours spent in the sunshine we ought to stop, think of Hiroshima’s victims and go back indoors again?
Discharge | Hear Nothing, See Nothing, Say Nothing | (Clay) 1982
Their intentions are honourable. The subject of nuclear war is one that must be raised, contemplated, and regarded with all the disgust and fear that it deserves. Yes! Somehow sanity must be restored, but by constant repetition, by tiresome, consistent over-usage of words like “nightmare”, “mutilation”, “pain” and “destruction”, the horror becomes ultimately unhorrific, becomes simply just another impressive slogan to stencil onto your leather jacket. Discharge reduce nuclear war to a great big terrible joke.
Discharge | Hear Nothing, See Nothing, Say Nothing | (Clay) 1982
Yet musically it’s devastating. For once, we have an immaculately produced album. With ten times the power of Motorhead, at ten times the speed of Motorhead, Discharge steam their way through fourteen erupting, churning volcanoes of immense, unbearable noise.
Crisp, savage and horrible, and with none of the infuriating sound problems that reduce their songs live to indistinguishable roars of anger and their gigs to endurance tests, ‘Hear Nothing See Nothing Say Nothing’ is the perfect Discharge album, musically a pleasure . . .
But if they really believe £3.99 for half an hour of music is good value, if they can’t think of any subjects other than war to sing about, and if they don’t stop printing endless glossy pictures of roasting, bubbling bodies, then Discharge will soon begin to look pretty bloody stupid.
Now that would be a killing joke . . . (Winston Smith)
THE FLAW IN THE FLOW
DISCHARGE, Hear Nothing See Nothing Say Nothing (Clay) LIKE MONKISH flagellants, Discharge whip themselves into a frenzy of impassioned protest over the passive acquiescence of the race they belong to in its descent towards self-destruction.
To Discharge the holocaust is less probability than inevitability and they go all out to shock the world into a like state of mind, impressing on it the horror of oblivion in the hope of motivating it into taking steps to avoid it.
Thus Discharge daub post-apocalypse landscapes littered with blistering bodies and burning, screaming children, colouring them garish reds and grisly greys or obliterating them totally behind savage thick swathes of black . . .
The flaw in the Discharge flow, of course, is that such landscapes, no matter how horrific, can also be compelling, as those who’ve seen Mad Max 2 or read Marvel mags know. Despite the terseness of their descriptions, limited by a vocabulary gleaned from CND brochures and SF comics, Discharge, too, fall into the trap of painting pretty/grim pictures that are liable to guiltily excite where they’re meant to frighten:
“Can you hear the sound of an enormous door slamming in the depths of hell? The possibility of life’s destruction! Can you hear the cries of pain, the mournful sound?”
No doubt this eliciting of dubious pleasure from pain is why they feel the need to scourge themselves so ferociously. Discharge’s is a madcap chariot ride through desolate battlefields, during which they’re pitched from side to side, simultaneously attracted and repelled by their own hideous vision.
At least they seem to recognise the ambiguous position their chosen task thrusts upon them, and they endeavour to neutralise it with the numbing, yet embracing noise they make.
Guitars and flailed cymbals are speed-blurred into a totality of sound not unlike Boyd ‘Non’ Rice’s industrious assaults, over which preacher Cal declaims, if only just discernibly.
The grating mesh of voice and noise is perfectly suited to their breathing hellfire about the wastes of war and only marginally less so when they more locally concern themselves with the iniquities of the system they involuntarily live in.
Beneath the squall it doesn’t really boil down to much, more than simple calls to self-determination, theirs differing from mainstream laissez-faire only in that they’ll fight for the right to be left alone.
They don’t appear, however, to be too hopeful, either in achieving their smaller aims, or avoiding the inevitable. Their positive moments — ‘Protest And Survive’ and their last, excellent single ‘Never Again’ — are too quickly swallowed by the flames which, so Discharge predict, will engulf the world.
Then, Discharge’s uncompromised stance has never been about making things easy. Discharge begin with The End and defy you to go on from there. (Chris Bohn: NME, 22/05/82)
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