How can PiL's second album be best described? It's the most evil disco album ever made. It's arguably the single most powerful post-punk musical statement. It's PiL's best album and it's one of the finest and most influential albums ever recorded. Generally speaking, "Metal Box" gets more respect than your average album (certainly more so than any other PiL album) and perhaps the fact that it's completely uncompromising is the reason why it still sounds like a remarkably contemporary record today. As a Sex Pistol, John Lydon's vocal was almost exclusively in attack mode: in "Metal Box," he's as direct as he ever was, but he screams, he chants, he wails, he howls, he sneers and can conjure up an entirely different mood for every song - not bad for such a famously "one-note" singer. As Johnny Rotten, Lydon sang from the head and at times it was difficult to gauge the genuine outrage from Lydon's warped sense of vaudeville. On "Metal Box," Lydon's anguish comes from the soul and he allows himself to sound vulnerable. However, it's the music that makes this album, and musically, "Metal Box" runs the gamut: disco dub, electronica, world music, punk, funk, melodic, non-melodic, fluid, static, music you want to dance to, music you want to die to. By its ominous nature, "Metal Box" exposed the comatose, non-threatening nature of post-Pistols Punk/"New Wave." The impressive ten-and-a-half-minute opener, "Albatross," continues the theme of the previous album's "Public Image," with Lydon still doing his best to cast off the shackles of public perception of him as Johnny Rotten ("Getting rid of the albatross..."). "Memories" is the perfect amalgam of Jah Wobble's bouncy bass and Keith Levine's withering Arabic guitar line. "Death Disco" is Lydon's decidedly non-sappy tribute to his mother (who was dying of cancer at the time), set to a six-note bass motif from Wobble and Levine murdering the melody of "Swan Lake" on guitar. The heartbreaking "Poptones" is arguably the best PiL song ever, "Careering" is terrifying, Lydon sneers his best on "The Suit," the sinister piquant notes of "Bad Baby" make for one of PiL's most unnerving moments on record, and the instrumental numbers ("Graveyard," "Socialist," "Chant") are effective and avoid pretension. "Metal Box" is a beast of an album, an ugly force of nature that boiled over from a "band" beset by egoism, drugs, money shortages, and drummers changing right and left. Listening to it, you can't help but feel the misanthropy that eventually split the Lydon/Levine/Wobble triumvirate. It's a great album to listen to - but you wouldn't have wanted to been there when they were making it. NOTE: "Metal Box" was originally released as three 12'' singles encased in a metal canister. The American edition, and subsequent 1980 UK re-release, was packaged as a conventional double-LP under the title "Second Edition." The drainpipe
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