It was my brief delusion, when I bought a car last summer, that any car owned by me would need a CD player. I bought the car, after all, in order to perform an appalling, 60-minutes-each-direction daily commute to my new (and ultimately temporary) math teaching job, a task which was sure to deaden my ears through overexposure to the naggingly-spoken words "calculator" and "bathroom". Surely, the only way to keep my ears vital was to spend the commute pumping them with the newest sounds of the day - or at least those new sounds I'd choose to spend my paychecks on. A CD player would be the ticket.

My stronger belief, it turned out, was that any car I bought should cost less than $8,000, be decently gas-efficient, and be reliable. This narrowed my options, and so the Subaru Forrester I ended up with came with cassette player only. Suddenly, I was forced into a position where my primary focused music listening, each day, would be to albums made no later than 1998, albums that I'd already heard. What could I possibly learn from that?

What I learned, first of all, was that I owned dozens (probably hundreds) of cassettes that I'd never really explored in as much depth as they deserved. What I further learned was how music-listening would change, for me, when turning on an album became as passive, as automatic, as turning my car's ignition each morning and afternoon.

I didn't have to choose an album as I staggered from the breakfast table each morning; the last album I'd queued would be there again, waiting for me, waiting to make up for years of neglect by telling me its stories again, letting me learn their rhythms. Albums that had failed to wow me with catchy hooks, when I'd bought them six or ten or twelve years before, instead had the chance to nuzzle their way into my brain gently, going over their ideas patiently until I, the slow student, understood.

Suddenly, in other words, I could appreciate some weird shiit.

Not just weirdness, mind you: other resistances melted away too. I no longer feel any indie-snob doubt in saying that No Doubt's Tragic Kingdom is a truly great pop record, great like if Blondie had had five times the enthusiasm and none of their distancing New York cool. I no longer feel that Suicidal Tendencies music is so simple it's dumb, not after using the Art of Rebellion as warmup for a dozen algebra classes. I'm no longer too white to enjoy the fifteen-ethnicities-at-once party music of Mano Negra's Puta's Fever.

But meanwhile, I've learned to enjoy Einsturzende Neubaten's Tabula Rasa, the album where their harsh machines learn to play pastoral hymns. I've picked up some of Shilmafone's fondness for Coil's Horse Rotorvator, half-tuned shouts and kinky sex and mourning and all. And if I still don't enjoy Spin-certified classics like Wire's Pink Flag or Talk Talk's Spirit of Eden, I'm glad I've had the time, while driving, to learn the unique and artful ways in which they're boring.

Then there's been the reunions with albums I already had loved, albums like the self-titled 1995 debut 2 Foot Flame, whose oddness left wondering "Did I _really_ enjoy this?" Yes, it turns out: of course I did. And given its used prices on Amazon.com, you'll need something like three dollars (50 cents plus shipping) to do the same.

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I bought 2 Foot Flame, then new, at exactly the right time in my checkered young-adult job history. Have you ever wondered how the mechanical process of plastics recycling works? By curious coincidence, neither had I, which is why I still know almost nothing about it. But one day, answering the far more inspiring question "How am I going to pay my rent _this_ time?", I learned that in at least one possible plastics-recycling process, there is a stage wherein windowframe-shaped strips of brightly colored plastic are fed by hand into a machine that grinds them to powder. For two weeks, thanks to the miracle of temp agencies, the hand involved was mine.

It had little to do with my college degree, but it's a skill job. Feed too fast, the machine will jam; feed too slow, your job is toast (my contribution to the world of mnemonics, surely not as immortally evil as the fast-food mantra "If there's time to lean, there's time to clean"). Besides, that was when I learned to use a forklift: my first motorized vehicle!

Another lesson I learned, with all due awe for Trent Reznor, is that industrial music is _wrong_. Oh, it gets the loudness right: if the assignment had been for two months instead of two weeks, it would have done (despite my earplugs) more damage to my ears than 15 years of cautious headphone use. But factory machines do not issue semi-melodic squiggles of clockwork-paced electrobeats. They grind away constantly, unmusically. What rhythm there is, is not for dance purposes, but a tempo-shifting array of screeches designed to tell you, by their frequency, exactly how much pain the machine is in at the moment, and how much it is going to inflict on you as soon as it learns to stand up.

Which means that 2 Foot Flame's debut was, and is, the one album of real industrial music in my collection. Yet it's also, thanks to lead singer Jean Smith (better known as leader of the punk band Mecca Normal), commandingly human.

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2 Foot Flame's sonic ingredients were few enough that I'll give all the details you need to reproduce the songs on your own, except the bit about "how did they _do_ that?". Every song has Smith's passionate voice: a little less feral than Patti Smith's, a little less blues-inflected than PJ Harvey's, taking a break now and then to sound as clipped and measured and clipped again as Elastica's Justine Frischmann. What I love best about Smith, as a vocalist, is how she rolls syllables lovingly over her tongue, drawing them out, trying out multiple deliveries to find the best effect. She's strong, smart, confrontational, and loves performance and the sound of words: in other words, she's sexy. Now and then, she even proves she can howl a tune.

Instrumentation, meanwhile, was provided by drummer/pianist Peter Jeffries and by guitarist Michael Morley. No song uses more than two instruments at a time, and even that many was clearly seen by the Flamers as a bit la-de-dah for their tastes. Chuck Berry wasn't one to get fancy either.

"Lindauer" starts the album with echoey drums in the unsteady layering of a fireworks display, and feedbacky rock guitar playing fast 3-3-2 beat measures that shift among three chords as if the guitar noise itself was a natural humming of the atmosphere that we'd somehow been brainwashed out of noticing, and as if Morley was shaping it into notes in accordance with an insectoid code. A sample of Jean's lyrics: "Parents condescended unrecognizably to him. They'd slap his wrist and bite his teeth. They just didn't take the wee years seriously". The song closes with a guitarrorist imitation of a dive-bomber landing, and "To the Sea", next, has no percussion; Jean intones long-held syllables over monotone fuzz from which rising monotone harmonics emerge like a sunrise, and behind which a clarinet provides traces of melody.

"Already Waiting" has a jackboot-on-gravel stomp like a slower version of the Sex Pistols' "Holiday in the Sun", and slow, syncopated bass piano patterns with heavy sustain; a clarinet part morphs into a feedback part and back, and a minor bit of string-strangling starts out like a lost kitten "Mrrrow?"ing for help, and ends up like a lost civil defense alarm doing the same.

"Mr. H", with most of the backing done by a "rat-a-tat, tat!" snare drum pattern, introduces an environmentalist theme: "Give way to the tall man, hard objects. Like a camera to the sand. Like a fish to the sea, forest but the trees, Mr. H, H, H, H, H, H, H, H, Mr. Him. Mister concrete cutter, in-the-sand man". Her venomous vocals manage to autoharmonize, compellingly, without ever needing to land on any notes. "Reinvention", next, is just singing over slowly arpeggiated piano chords.

"Compass"'s piano beat again cuts the rock drive of its 8-beat units into a 3-3-2 that evokes the serene flow of Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata". Its guitar sounds less like feedback than the milling of a distant grumpy crowd, as Jean lectures a friend on both the cowardice and the futility of going along to get along: "Alibi, compass to your skin/ uniform of the pack, you'll never fit in/ all the birds to the other side of the room. You'll never fit your legs again. You'll never fit your arms again. I'm insisting on it". "The Arbitrator"'s guitar shifts to a buzzsaw impersonation, while a half-note snare propels a chugging 2-chord riff that opens up into seriously nonstandard 4-chord patterns now and then.

I understand that, as described, these songs sound like grad-student science projects: not music, but Michael Morley at a blackboard demonstrating that, according to Jeffries's Third Correlary of Smith's Theorem, the strings of a guitar could (theoretically) be arranged to produce these unimagined soundwaves. Fine, but: on paper, the Kinks' "You Really Got Me" was the first attempt by a pop band to use hideous electronic distortion. In practice, it sounded like rock'n'roll: momentum, energy, dance. So, to me, do 2 Foot Flame's "Lindauer" and "Mr. H" and "the Arbitrator": they're simple, they move, and while they make more sense every time out, they _felt_ right even when they sounded alien and new.

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"Cordoned Off", the next-to-last track, feels nothing at all like rock'n'roll. It feels like wreckage. It's a nine-minute piece with Jean narrating her memory of the aftermath of an oil spill. One ominous chord is held throughout, there's a covering of static, and guitar noises intervene in direct (though abstract) response to the story, imitating everything from a variety of heavy-duty scrubbing devices, to the downward sweep of an organ at a tense moment of a cheap video game, to the sound of bombed objects sizzling.

On first hearing, I thought both "Wow!" and "I'll probably never play this album much, because I'd hate to ruin this track by repetition". I assumed its power was 75% gimmick. Wrong: it holds its power. If more songs doesn't sound like this, it's only because most songs are scared to. That's just right: most songs _shouldn't_ sound like charred victims of a feral human race. But since we can't - since we wouldn't even want to - wipe ourselves clean of desire and simple daily need, which we (re)move heaven and earth to fulfill ... well, we need a few "Cordoned Off"s to tell that part of our tale.

Finally, 2 Foot Flame winds down with "Chisel". Four descending piano notes repeat with ceaseless aplomb, heavy on the reverb, as Jean asks "I can't believe in Heaven but I understand the need... Can you make a chisel from The Book?" I suspect that, with the right sonic equipment, Mr. Morley could. It probably wouldn't work as religion, or even, it turns out, as a second album: 2 Foot Flame's only sequel, Ultra Drowning, avoided a rut by edging towards rock music as _normal_ bands perceive it, an experiment I approve in theory and have mixed feelings about in practice. It's a good record, but it's not pure.

People who say "Keep it simple, stupid" are not, in general, people I want to hang out with; but I'd love to play them all the debut of 2 Foot Flame. Music, it turns out, can be simple and elemental when you strip away those distracting instruments and notes. I wonder why it wasn't more popular?

Recommended: Yes