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This Heat was nominally a rock trio, but they paid little heed to the conventions of the genre. Despite how influential they were, the band’s scant recordings have regularly gone in and out of print. That’s part of what made the release of Out of Cold Storage earlier this year such an event: an essential box set containing all of the group’s music. This Heat only made two studio albums (the second, Deceit, came out in 1981) and one classic 12-inch single, “Health and Efficiency”; the rest of the set includes Made Available, a collection of Peel Sessions from 1977, Repeat, a posthumous 1992 album that included a radical remix of material from the debut with some previously unreleased stuff, and a never-before-released live CD.
Prior to forming the band Hayward had played with prog-rockers Gong and Quiet Sun (a group led by Roxy Music’s Phil Manzanera), and while it seemed that This Heat would follow a similar path, they stumbled upon something altogether their own, masterfully employing tape loops, rhythmic phasing, noise, radical editing, and weird overdubs. Deceit is comparatively more melodic and song-like than the first record, but the sonic make-up is just as strange and slippery. And as the new disc of live material proves, the trio painstakingly found ways to translate their studio creations into a live setting with remarkable resourcefulness and power. There are few bands as tough to write about as This Heat, and in my mind that remains one hell of a compliment. This certainly stands as the year’s most important and necessary box set.
