After last week’s filth and dirt, let us wipe the slate and this week, clean things up.

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/amodelofcontrol.com now has a Patreon page, at this stage purely as a potential way of helping to cover the running costs of the site. There is absolutely no compulsion to do so: if you feel you can chuck a small amount to the site each month, that would be appreciated.

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As the variety of songs suggest, the word “clean” has a number of connotations: not just sweeping away physical filth, but also purity and sobriety, and all of them feature in one way or another this week.

Thanks to everyone that suggested songs as usual: it still amazes me just how many different songs can be suggested each time, from so many different styles and genres.

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A quick explanation for new readers (hi there!): my Tuesday Ten series has been running since March 2007, and each month features at least ten new songs you should hear – and in between those monthly posts, I feature songs on a variety of subjects, with some of the songs featured coming from suggestion threads on Facebook.

Feel free to get involved with these – the more the merrier, and the breadth of suggestions that I get continues to astound me. Otherwise, as usual, if you’ve got something you want me to hear, something I should be writing about, or even a gig I should be attending, e-mail me or drop me a line on Facebook (details below).

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/Hilary Woods
/Cleansing Ritual
/Birthmarks

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The idea of ritual purification, or a cleansing ritual, go back pretty much as long as humans have had belief: a way to clear the body and mind of impure thoughts, actions and of course dirt and disease. And in eras before science understood the transmissions of germs and disease, and before bathing was commonplace and available to everyone, they would be important methods of restricting the transmission of diseases.

As I’m sure I’ve noted before, the new era of music from Irish musician Hilary Woods is a world away from the brash, powerful indie-rock of JJ72, the band she was a part of in the Millenium era. Cleansing Ritual comes from her remarkable second solo album, recorded while she was pregnant and sounding like wind-blasted, apocalyptic folk music. Drones and field recordings cleanse the mind, shedding any pretense of emotion in a desire to reclaim oneself and start afresh.

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/Now Wash Your Hands
/A Good Scrubbing
/Always Clean

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Taking a much more modern view on cleanliness is Nathan Nothing, whose noise-industrial project Now Wash Your Hands was entirely preoccupied with matters of hygiene and self-care, offering instructions and suggestions around keeping oneself clean amid scorched-earth noise. A Good Scrubbing is the aural equivalent of five minutes with a really rough cleaning cloth against your skin, all screeching synths and grimy fuzz. Live the show went one stage further, with Nathan in scrubs, gloves and a facemask, covered up and sterile ready to deal with the germ-laden masses who would attend his shows.

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/X-Ray Spex
/Germ Free Adolescents
/Germ Free Adolescents

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Poly Styrene was quite the frontperson. Unusual in the punk movement as being mixed-race, her style was dramatic and different too, and musically the band she fronted took in as much reggae and ska as they did punk, seemingly uninterested in just being another guitar band, and rather than nihilism, songs were rather more considered in their subjects, too. Such as the title track to their debut album, a deceptively gentle song that hides the scars beneath until you listen carefully. Describing the life of an adolescent who is obsessively clean, and struggles to initiate any form of contact with others who aren’t similarly so: pretty much a song about a form of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.

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/Katatonia
/Clean Today
/Last Fair Deal Gone Down

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Arguably the point where the Katatonia that many of us know and love came to be (although the preceding Tonight’s Decision already saw them moving that way), it was my entry point to the band, and contains a number of my favourite songs. One is this searing examination of someone getting clean – in the sense of sobriety, and ending their use of alcohol and/or substances – and the struggles that follow in trying to stay clean. It alternates between the demon of addiction (in the form of the oppressive, heavy riffs that appear during the song) and the determination to stay clean (the more melodic elements of the song), and like so many of Katatonia’s greatest songs, the plaintive melodies give the song so much power.

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/Mercury Rev
/Car Wash Hair
/Yerself Is Steam

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I’ve been a Mercury Rev fan long enough that I remember first discovering the band in the early nineties, thanks to hearing the majestic beauty of Car Wash Hair on 120 Minutes on MTV when I was just entering my teens. This was a track added to their debut Yerself Is Steam (read more on Pitchfork’s Sunday Review about it from a couple of years back) after they improbably got signed to Colombia, presumably to provide a song that could be radio- and MTV-friendly without the unsettling blasts of shoegazey noise and feedback that peppers most of the rest of the songs on the album.

Trying to attribute meaning to Mercury Rev songs of their earlier period is pretty much worthless: hazy, psychedelic wordplay from the two very different vocalists that at points feel like they are fronting different bands, never mind different songs, is never going to be easy to decipher, but Jonathan Donahue has a star turn here, on an elegant song that seems to celebrate the beauty of someone, even if car wash hair isn’t perhaps likely to be the cleanest…

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/Nirvana
/Molly’s Lips
/Incesticide

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One notable thing about the short career of Nirvana, and particularly Kurt Cobain, was that he went to great lengths to bring a number of his idols to greater attention, and no band perhaps benefitted more than relatively obscure Glasgow band The Vaselines. Cobain covered two of their songs, with his version of Jesus Wants Me For A Sunbeam one of the breathtaking highlights of Nirvana’s legendary MTV Unplugged performance. The other, Molly’s Lips, fuzzed up and energised the original song into one much more overtly about desire. That said, the song is a tribute of sorts to Molly Weir, best known to many as Hazel the McWitch in Rentaghost, a desire to do more than kiss her – as long as they stay clean in every sense…

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/kidneythieves
/Lick U Clean
/Trypt0fanatic

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One of the best KT tracks from their more recent period is this slinky track, where Free Dominguez is definitely not thinking about cleaning someone in the conventional sense. This is (to me) about sex, but more about the anticipation of what’s to come, and how the use of a tongue can be one hell of an extended tease. The track writhes and twist between bubbling electronics and grinding industrial rock, while Dominguez floats and swoons over the top. Getting, er, cleaned by your partner never sounded so much fun…

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/Curve
/Come Clean
/Come Clean

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The title track to Curve’s third album – and the album where they fully embraced an industrial sound more than their shoegaze roots for good, particularly on the monstrous lead single Chinese Burn – was something of an outlier on it. Much more skeletal in form than the rest of the album, it more an electronic punk track, as Toni Halliday seethes at another party that needs to get their shit together and own up to their mistakes (i.e. coming clean). A relatively common subject in Curve songs, sure, but here Halliday sounds possessed with fury.

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/George Formby
/When I’m Cleaning Windows

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A song with a hell of a shelf life: it was originally released in 1936, and saw a number of releases, and even survived a BBC ban thanks to apparent royal patronage (the story is that certain royals loved it, so how could the BBC ban it?), despite hinting at the window cleaner character in the song apparently being a voyeur and seeing homosexual acts – something incredibly “modern” for 1936. The song is a fun ditty, too, and has a habit of getting stuck in your head…

As for a window cleaner? Well, now we own our own house (which came with a conservatory), one is needed every now and again, and at least these windows are easier to reach than those in our second floor flat in Finsbury Park…

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/Blind Lemon Jefferson
/See That My Grave Is Kept Clean

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One of the legendary, early proponents of the blues – in this case Texas Blues, rather than most of his peers who were further east – Jefferson’s most enduring song remains this bleak track. A song that asks for the simple, titular task to be maintained after his death also hints at the pain and suffering of the black population around that time – among others, there was a bubonic plague outbreak in Galveston in 1920, the the Spanish Flu epidemic in 1918 swept the Texas Oil Industry, not to mention the general prevalence of disease that affected the poor regardless.