The The

From the yahoo group intro: “New York/Gothenburg based British artist Matt Johnson and his ever changing band THE THE”

Music review (a few years old):

new internationalist
issue 201 - November 1989

http://www.newint.org/issue201/reviews.htm

Mind Bomb
by The The
(Epic)

Matt Johnson, who constructs The The out of different musicians for each album, continues to skirt the fringes of commercial success. Critical respect is no problem - and the innovative video for his last album, Infected, even won a prize at the Cannes Film Festival, despite the troubling sexism of a couple of its sequences.

Mind Bomb offers as uncompromisingly bleak a world-view as ever. As before, Johnson rails against injustice and oppression, but more as an everlasting fact of human existence than as something that might be fought and corrected. You get the feeling that if a genuine utopia ever came into being, Matt Johnson would be the one person wanting to tear it all down.

His ‘love songs’, for example, are like nobody else’s on earth - they positively scream with the pain of relating. ‘You will come to me,’ he says, ‘to stroke my hair, to cuddle my flesh, and to quell the torrents in my subterranean depths.’ This is uncomfortable listening, especially when coupled with Johnson’s own determinedly spoken’ singing. But the discomfort is cased in rich and even beautiful arrangements. Johnson has always had the ability to find haunting musical settings for his songs and here they have the extra benison of ex-Smith Johnny Marr.

If there is a theme here, it is religion. At first it seems to be an entirely negative force. Yet at other points the problem is rather the hijacking of the original message, as in the phenomenal lines: ‘If the real Jesus Christ were to stand up today! He’d be gunned down cold by the CIA! Oh the lights that now burn brightest behind stained glass! Will cast the darkest shadows upon the human heart! But God didn’t build himself that throne/ God doesn’t live in Israel or Rome! God doesn’t belong to the yankee dollar! God doesn’t plant the bombs for Hezbollah’ Few Christians would quibble with that, and by the end Johnson is even talking about ‘previous incarnations’ and straining for ‘a happiness beyond human reach’.

He’s confused. But he is also utterly compelling.

Date	ALBUMS / Singles
1980 July	Controversial Subject
1981 August	BURNING BLUE SOUL
1981 September	Cold Spell Ahead
1982 October	Uncertain Smile
1983 February	Perfect
1983 September	This Is The Day
1983 October	SOUL MINING
1986 May	Sweet Bird of Truth
1986 July	Heartland
1986 October	Infected
1986 November	INFECTED
1987 January	Slow Train To Dawn
1989 February	The Beat(en) Generation
1989 May	MIND BOMB
1989 July	Gravitate To Me
1989 September	Armageddon Days Are Here (Again)
1989	Kingdom of Rain
1991 February	Jealous of Youth
1992	DUSK
1992 December	Dogs of Lust
1993 June	Love Is Stronger Than Death
1993	Slow Emotion Replay
1993	LIVE IN NEW YORK (EP)
1994 January	DIS-INFECTED (EP)
1994	I Saw The Light
1995 February 14	HANKY PANKY
1999	NAKED SELF
1999	Shrunken Man
2002 May 21	45 RPM: THE SINGLES
2002 July 29	LONDON TOWN 1983-1993

http://www.thethe.com/sections/jukebox/jukebox.html