All The Masters Licked Me

All the Masters Licked Me was the debut full-length from the husband-and-wife team of Lee Newman and Michael Wells. Originally issued on the Side Effects label in 1987, it is here reissued in a slipcase box along with a bonus CD containing Trust (a two-track, 32-minute program that will be of primary interest to completists) and a third sleeve that is empty. The purpose of the empty sleeve is to allow the buyer to download and burn a free copy of another early recording, Kill the Pedagogue, and store the resulting copy in the box with the other two discs. The reissue package combines vintage album art (crude collages that owe more than a little to Crass and its related projects) with an almost complete lack of annotation or even a track listing, making it a bit difficult to figure out exactly what one has in hand. But the music is generally fairly interesting and provides something of an aural catalog of the elements that would eventually coalesce into a much more coherent musical statement for this duo: ethnic field recordings, dark echoey sound effects, sepulchral organ, industrial electro beats, muttered and chanted vocals. There is also a good deal of tongue-in-cheek humor in evidence here (notice, for example, the self-explanatory "Trendy Afrika" and the very nearly hilarious "Slog On (Dead Beat)"), which was already a good omen for this duo's future. Not an essential purchase, but those interested in early industrial music should definitely check it out. ~ Rick Anderson|