World Domination Enterprises – Lets Play Domination

World Domination Enterprises - Lets Play Domination

What a welcome surprise to have this release: Lets Play Domination (sometimes spelled with the apostrophe) by World Domination Enterprises. This reissue of the band’s 1988 album reminds you of what effects a radical record from the past can have on today’s music. While not without its missteps, this is still a breakthrough record that hasn’t gotten the attention it deserves. Musicians (Julian Cope writes at length about this album’s staying power) and critics have long celebrated and cited this band.

The raucous, Birthday Party noise of “Ghetto Queen” takes Public Image and slows it down and makes it even choppier. “The Bullit Man” has a sloppy, Big Black aura to it — sloppy because the drummer and bass player aren’t precise about their timings. No matter, because that’s the band’s intention. “Do Do Go Go” sounds like a dance number for the disaffected. It’s got the right beat but the heavy guitars and percussive clanging don’t encourage any shimmying.

The record opens with the acerbic and forbidding “Message For The People,” whose start-stop rhythm and over-the-top Mary Chain guitars introduce you to the world of WDE. “Blu Money,” “Look Out Jack,” and “Hotsy Girl” take an otherwise-boring blues-based approach and mutate it with deep bass and the distortion set to 12. WDE wasn’t the first band to crank out what was then “unlistenable,” atonal tunes, but they put such a stamp of their own on it that you know a WDE song just from the first few seconds of hearing it.

Probably best known for the cutting “Asbestos Lead Asbestos,” later covered by Meat Beat Manifesto, the band had a wonder of a song with this one. Sure, it sounds like Big Black musically, but its anger and outrage are stated almost indifferently (well, the delivery drips with venom but it’s not screamed, anyway). With lyrics like “Equal opportunity, except if our pedigree dogs don’t like the smell of your children” and “They’re stealing and fighting / We live on the west side” convey the class-difference resentments that inform the song’s message. As always, the Mark E. Smith singing perfectly suits the sound.

“I Can’t Live Without My Radio” sounds almost laughable now, and it’s not clear whether this was originally intended to provoke laughter or meant as an earnest take on the LL Cool J track. Probably so, given the band’s iconoclastic leanings. The bombastic beat and faux-ghetto rapping just has to be a joke, in the same way that their cover of “Funkytown” destroys the original with paint-peeling guitars and snarled vocals. WDE leaves the original’s essential melody intact but blows the rest of it away in favor of assaulting your ears.

If you enjoy post-punk noise and haven’t yet heard WDE, do yourself a favor and check them out. Take advantage of the opportunity to get your hands on songs that would otherwise be lost to history.