Public Image Ltd.* – The Flowers Of Romance

You've got to deliver an album to the record company, but your "band" consists of only two people: one a vocalist with no formal musical training, the other a guitarist who apparently is losing interest in the guitar. Solution? Get creative, and that's exactly what the remnants of PiL did on "The Flowers of Romance." John Lydon, Keith Levene and occasional guest star Martin Atkins (who would soon become a full-time member of the group as Lydon froze Levene out) cobbled together bits of synthesizer noodling, digital samples and relentless drum rhythms into a coherent, if not always listener-friendly, whole. There's one track on which PiL almost sound like a band again ('Go Back,' which has a live-in-the-studio ambience but was actually tracked, with Levene playing both guitar and drums) and another that's a pretty good facsimile of the dark, claustrophobic "Metal Box" vibe ('Banging the Door')...but the album's masterpiece, and the track most representative of its strange, challenging sound, is 'Under the House.' Layers of frantic percussion topped with a haunted-house lyrical chant, it's four and a half minutes of unrelieved tension that every fan of avant-garde postpunk should hear.

Three stars for listenability; five for making the best use of limited resources.