Starting off with some organ-like synth sounds churning around in the distance — as if recorded on the other side of a concrete building — an electronic kick drum starts beating in a nearer field followed by a bass guitar line reminiscent of a slow jazz piece starts to loop in a five note pattern — including an extra eighth note to transition to the beginning of the loop — filling in the rest of the low end. The background synths swell and release in the background in masses of discordant notes. An electronic snare pats over to with some delay. A voice chants the phrase “black flowers” at the beginning of each five note phrases with phrases of additional lyrics filling in the gaps. A guitar quietly fades in, ringing out with chiming notes to bring a bit more melody to this overall pattern.
This is a summary of the closing track of the album World Of Rubber by an obscure early post-punk group called Second Layer — the track being called “Black Flowers”. It’s an album I’ve become super familiar with over many, many years and still holds a great deal of fascinating mystery to me, in part due to the slim amount of information even now about this band, but more so in the way that I found this record which was done completely on instinct.
Back in my first few years of living in Vancouver after moving to the big city from growing up on Vancouver Island — this being the late 1990s — it was a period that I was really keen on discovering artists from the first wave of post-punk and synth, that period being the late 1970s into the early/mid 1980s. I would trawl the second hand bins in Vancouver’s notable independent record stores at the time, at flea markets and even the charity (second hand) stores. Back then vinyl stock wasn’t so picked over as vinyl hadn’t reached that stage of fetishization — at least not quite yet. Discogs, eBay and other sites acting as a utility metric for pricing and worldwide marketplace for rare releases weren’t really around yet.
There used to be this expansive charity shop at the edge of this industrial part of town that separates the bulk of East Vancouver from downtown — a part of town full of trainyards and industrial warehouses. It wasn’t really a part of town with a lot of passing foot traffic. The shop itself seemed to just sprawl into multiple rooms and I never really remember seeing anybody in there, save for maybe one other person quietly flipping through rails of clothes. There was almost what was a secret back room of the shop, tucked away, containing shelves of books and a rather sizeable series of record bins that I’d thumb through on occasion.
On one such visit I pulled out an album from the bin in this shop, printed in a glossy silver and black cover — the artwork here being a series of fractured geometric square frames nested inside one another, the centre containing two highly posterised images of bald, female mannequin busts. The text was rendered in a very retro typeface I now know as Pump — which was sort of a stereotype of science fiction leaning design from that late 1970s time period. I was perhaps attracted to it because it reminded me of the aesthetics of George Lucas‘s first film, THX 1138 (which I had a minor obsession with at the time), or maybe as it just looked completely different than anything else in there. The whole package was weird, avant garde and menacing. At a cost of $0.99 as listed on the shop’s price tag, it was definitely a shot in the dark I was happy to take.
So put down my loonie at the checkout counter of this sparsely populated shop and made the walk down to my then Powell Street basement suite and put it on the turntable, as the mystery of what this record was going to sound like was overwhelming me. Opening up is the track “Definition of Honour” with it’s fractured analogue drum beat accompanied with a bassline that rumbles underneath using a progression of undiscernible note, overlaid with delayed guitar feedback noise and a quivering narrative delivered about being sent to war only to have the track abruptly end.
A few tracks in we get “Fixation”, a guitar-driven upbeat number with a faint parallel with the work that Iggy Pop was doing in the late 70s. There was a track written for Radio Berlin‘s second record The Selection Drone (2001) that I wrote called “Kill The Moment” (see below) that was very similar to the vibe of this track although I didn’t clock it at the time, only to put “two and two” together after a listen to World Of Rubber in the mid-2000s in where yes, there was glaring similarities between the two tracks, at least in their main motifs.
But it was the closing number of the whole album, “Black Flowers”, that really pulled it together for me. It’s cavernous, moody uneasy feel would become a soundtrack to those days where the seratonin was a very low levels, or when I was feeling moody and ill. It sort of become my anthem for “the day after” for a good number of years.
At the time I still didn’t know anything about this band but as information on the internet began to bloom with fan sites and blogs, it was revealed that Second Layer was a side project of guitarist/vocalist Adrian Borland and bassist Graham Bailey of the UK post-punk band The Sound, who wrote a number of incredible albums including 1980’s Jeopardy, which would become more loved in the 21st century as newer generations discovered it. Around this time I had also discovered that Borland had taken his life only a couple of years early after many years of dealing with depression.
A couple of years ago some of Second Layer‘s earlier work released on two separate EPs — Flesh As Property (1979) and State Of Emergency (1980) — as well as other miscellaneous tracks would be compiled on a release called Courts Or Wars, which after the gap of decades since I first listened to World Of Rubber I ended up giving a listen to. It’s more claustrophobic sounding (good) and more leaning towards the band’s punk roots. If anything I see a correlation between the band at that point and what a then new band from Liverpool called Echo And The Bunnymen were doing simultaneously — likely because both were using early drum machines in their early days to provide the rhythm rather than a live drummer.
To this day I still think the fact I found World Of Rubber was a complete fluke, as it on a label (Cherry Red) that itself was a bit fringe, and contained music within that seemed to be destined to dingy, concrete clubs built in European former factory spaces. The copy I picked up was probably previously from a collection from someone really into what was happening in UK and European post-punk at the time, probably alongside records by Joy Division, Magazine, Siouxsie And The Banshees and other similar music exploding out across the Atlantic back then.
One interesting thing I’ve picked up is that the cover art — I guess depending on what release version this album is — is that there’s variations where the band name is spelled as Second Layer or 2nd Layer. It’s a little detail I’ve picked up over the years.
Speaking of my copy of this record — it’s getting pretty battered. The outer sleeve could do with a bit of touch up glue to be honest as it’s literally coming apart at the seams for many, numerous plays in the time I’ve had it!