TRONICS - LOVE BACKED BY FORCE (LP)

Tronics Love Backed By Force on LP

Back when most bands in the '70s tried to make records, they found they'd hit a wall. Then punk happened, and they started to realize their power to claim the means of production. All of a sudden, music that existed completely out of joint with anything before it or since started to surface, unannounced and uncalled for, on the shelves of independent record stores. The sounds within these records went against nearly any pop/rock/punk convention you could hope to throw against them. People who needed to categorize these things gave the most mental portions of the movement a name: DIY ie Do It Yourself. That acronym has been re-appropriated time and again in the decades to follow, but really, this is where it all comes from: abrasive, brittle, personal sounds that exist to enrapture some and thoroughly ignore others.

Enter Tronics, the inner workings of London artist Ziro Baby, and later to change his name to Zarjaz. He started out in a teen band-cum-street gang called the Star Dogs, but he first hit vinyl as a 16-year-old with the Tronics, who between 1979 and 1984 released four singles, two cassette albums, an LP and a flexi-disk. Apart from one single on the Creation label, Zarjaz has always been more comfortable as the administrator of his own musical omniverse.

Love Backed By Force is the album in question. Released in 1981, it sold out completely in its first week. His label, Alien Records, celebrated the success by going out of business. Until now copies have only been available through tape-trading, file-sharing, bootlegging and expensive second-hand dealers.

Said to have been created as a clearinghouse for Tronics songs to make way for a more focused effort, Love Backed By Force registers as an instant classic of outsider folk-pop, a true mutant of an LP that never sounds the same way twice. It may take a few listens for its pull to take effect, but once you settle into its orbit, it'll be difficult to remove yourself. Music will never sound the same again, and in the world of Love Backed By Force, it doesn't even sound the same from song to song on the same album. Layer upon layer of close-talking lyrics are buffeted by mind-clogging guitar, synthesizer abuse, and rudimentary drumming, made by a man who regularly discussed seeing ghosts to general disbelief.

Tronics Love Backed By Force Track Listing:

1.  Charlie Manson
2.  Love Backed By Force
3.  T.V. On In Bed
4.  They're Talking About Us
5.  Ice Flod Festival
6.  Ultra Pol
7.  My Baby's In A Coma
8.  Min Dama
9.  Spending Time
10. Love Tan (In A Two Way Circus)
11. L.B.B.F. (Reprise)
12. Crush on You
13. Le Monde