Tackhead Tape Time

Tackhead was producer Adrian Sherwood’s industrial funk outfit, releasing a series of incendiary, neck-snapping singles in the mid ’80s, some of which featured furious MC Gary Clail. This album is something of a DJ mix/remix collection, offering alternate versions of tracks like “Mind at the End of the Tether,” “Reality,” “Hard Left,” and “What’s My Mission Now?” Clail’s sloganeering, fed through distortion until it sounds like he’s shouting at you over a train’s PA system, is perfectly suited to Keith Leblanc’s face-punching electronic drums and Sherwood’s sample-heavy production, which offers stinging critique of capitalism and Cold War militarism, with a heavy dose of apocalyptic millenarianism thrown in. Bracing stuff.