Various

Glasgow’s Contort Yourself trawl the scuzzier echelons of ‘80s tape culture for the tangiest traces of coldwave, post-punk, post-industrial with an uncanny appreciation of the way the 1980s and 2022 share so much in common.

Delivered to a backdrop of a UK in terminal decline, dominated by ghoulish Tory gas lighters and sex pests, but just about keeping its head above water, ‘’80s Underground Cassette Culture’ offers an ideal soundtrack to disenchantment coloured in morose monochrome and a looming sense of dread. Compiled in Glasgow - proportionally boasting the most record collectors in these blighted isles - the picks are particularly on the money for fans of needling guitars, bleak vocals and general countercultural, antiestablishment aesthetics and rhetoric. 

You’d be doing well if you previously knew even a fraction of the acts on show, with many reserved to knowledge of only the most ardent diggers in this vast but secretive field. While If, Bwana and Years On Earth might be familiar to regular readers of these pages, we’d wager the rest are purely for those of you with a Mastermind-specialist level of nous. There’s the grottiest slop of ‘Bump Beat’ by Misteek (ye, not Alesha Dixon and co), plus Xerox-like grind from Dix Ferro, the ice cold funk of Pornosect, scant melodic relief from M Nomized, and janky blatz by Die Mysteriösen beside salty vignettes such as Solanaceae Tau’s ‘Tekno Pop’ and the machine-made death rock swag of Ob Ovo & Sha 261 to supply an ideal soundtrack to mooching about with a fixed scowl. Good stuff. (Boomkat)