Public Image Ltd. - What the World Needs Now... (Pil Official) 2015
8
You can’t disassociate John Lydon from PIL and you can’t do the contrary either, because one cannot exist without the other. No matter how disjointed, chaotic or experimental the music is, ultimately its Lydon’s presence and bravado that gives life to these songs.
He may not be the most gifted lead singer, but the way he is able to channel his dissident and oddball persona, gives the themes meaning and intensity.
When he was fronting The Sex Pistols, his lyrics where, as one would expect from a punk band blunt, abrasive and direct, with PIL his lyrics are more often than not abstract and quasi ethereal. And all is bound together by the talented musicians that constitute this collective.
They can unify seamlessly the disjointed and jumbled verbal abuse with the melodies, to create an intelligible picture painted by Lydon with his acerbic poetry whether he his singing about love, war or plumbing.
After the appropriately titled This is PIL, this is the second album since the reunion and at first glance it sounds deceptively more accessible than their previous effort. Like with all the great records, only repeated listenings reveals the details of the sonic tapestry.
In Lydon’s quest to devise incoherency and disarray, he has managed to create an accessible form of experimental music.