House of Halifax – 3rd October 2025
Christopher Nosnibor
Content’s career to date – such as it is – has certainly not followed a conventional trajectory, or even one designed to gain a following. It’s not the shifting lineups (that’s hardly unusual) but the fact the direction of their output is completely unpredictable. Their debut EP, We Keep Improving, released five years ago, was a riotous DIY racket, which I described as ‘a gnarly mess of electronics, popping beats and a disorientating sonic swirl’. Released in an edition of seventeen physical copies, it has all the ingredients required to become a near-mythical underground work.
So of course, with a different lineup, they followed this with an album which recreated the entirety of Yes Please! by Happy Mondays – an album which was roundly pilloried, and saw one of the weekly music papers review lead with the headline ‘No Thanks!’. It was the Mondays’ Shark Sandwich moment.
Amazingly, their second album is another cover of an album in its entirely, this time the 2018 Geezer by Leeds grindcore legends Ona Snop, who recently called it a day. I can’t think of anything further removed from, the slack, bloated funk of Yes Please! But this is Content, the vehicle of Benbow and – currently – Richard Knight. And this is absolutely guaranteed not to bring them world domination, or even more than a handful of fans. I don’t think they’re fussed about that, though.
Given that Ona Snop’s approach to powerviolence / grind was never entirely straightforward, or serious, Content’s irreverent approach to ‘reimagining’ the album, which blends industrial, techno, ambient, electropop, ‘retains some of the humour included in Ona Snop’s original work’, they say. Indeed it does. It certainly doesn’t contain much else, although that shouldn’t be construed as a criticism. The ‘reimagined’ tag gives them licence to pretty much do whatever the hell they please, and that’s precisely what they do.
And so it is that the first track, ‘In Pieces’, is transformed from forty-nine seconds of thrashing, splashing aural vomit, into a three-and-a-half-minute technoindustrial workout with a funk groove, coming on with the strut and snarl of Revolting Cocks circa Linger Fickin’ Good. It’s grimy and sleazy and fuck – and it’s as ace as it is audacious. It sets the tone for a wild ride: ‘Total Both’ brings bump and grind and flamboyance in spades, like Rammstein covering The Rocky Horror Show – or perhaps the other way around. Either way, it’s camp and crazy.
It’s all going on here: ‘More Important Than Christ’ starts out with wibbly 80s wizardry before going hyper electropop, landing somewhere between The Associates and The Teardrop Explodes in the process. There’s wonky electronica, spoken word, bleeps and horns… ‘Mustard Farm’ seemingly draws from Depeche Mode, Devo, and Man 2 Man in equal measure, while ‘Respect’ goes lounge, and there’s a hint of early Foetus in the warped disco blast of ‘Rotisserie Geezer’, before ‘Cement Head’ goes a bit Tom Waits.
How all this actually works, it’s hard to pinpoint. That each track is well executed – in that it’s apparent what they’re aiming for, and they achieve – helps, but the hectic, drum machine-propelled arrangements are dizzying, and so far removed from the source material at times it feels beyond tenuous. While the original ‘CD / DVD’ opens with a sample, Content rework it as a cut-up collage of glitched-up, mangled samples, harking back to the old-school Industrial roots demonstrated on the EP, with a debt to Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire, and in turn, William Burrroughs. ‘Ona Snop F.C.’ is a super-slick autotuned workout that’s equal parts Prince, Har Mar Superstar, and overprocessed R’n’B. Horrible as it is, the knowing levels of cringiness are something to respect. Then, seemingly from nowhere, ‘Hot Soup’ goes all Mike Oldfield and ambient.
While the original album has a running time of less than twenty-five minutes, pulling the songs out and stretching things apart in every direction means that this reimagining runs for closer to an hour, and it never ceases to confound with its weirdness, or its willingness to embrace the cheesy. It’s almost impossible to judge Geezer Reimagined by conventional benchmarks or assess its merits by the standards one would ordinarily apply, because it simply doesn’t conform, and exists in its own sphere of strangeness. And whether or not you dig it – and I do – it’s impossible to deny that it’s imaginative in its interpretations.
AA
Aural Aggravation 