“Beautiful, strange, spontaneous, frightening, skeletal, spacious, arid and elegiac: Metal Box by Public Image Limited is made up of the bleached white bones of art rock, disco and reggae, reassembled into a gorgeous noise that defies easy description. It is also one of the best albums of all time. In the era of Radiohead, when any lantern-jawed, hash-hazed Brit dropping a marble on a piano string with a lot of reverb on it gets called a genius, let’s honor a record that is an Everest in effective, natural-flowing art rock. Metal Box is, perhaps, Post-Punk’s signal achievement, its Pet Sounds. (Note: Metal Box, PiL’s second full-length album, was originally released in late November 1979 on three 12” 45 rpm records packaged, beautifully but inconveniently, in a film canister; not long afterwards, the same music was put out, far more conveniently, as a double LP called Second Edition. For the sake of simplicity, throughout this article we will be referring to the dual-titled release by it’s ‘first’ name, Metal Box.) …”
How Public Image Ltd Exploded the Possibilities of Music With ‘Metal Box’ (Video)
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YouTube: Metal Box Full LP
Metal 1.1 Albatross 10:32 Metal 1.2 Memories 5:05 Swan Lake 4:19 Metal 1.3 Poptones 7:45 Careering 4:32 Metal 1.4 No Birds 4:43 Graveyard 3:07 Metal 1.5 The Suit 3:29 Bad Baby 4:30 Metal 1.6 Socialist/Chant/Radio 4 12:31
YouTube: Peel Session 1979 1. Poptones (0:07) 2. Careering (4:39) 3. Chant (12:12)