After making its debut with four Wire-y/Pere Ubuesque jagged pop songs on the 12-inch This Is Your Life, Bristol’s Glaxo Babies went through some personnel changes and veered off in a Residential direction. The resulting album uses all manner of noises to intrigue, confound, aggravate and entertain. Except for three song-like tracks that actually resemble rock music, Nine Minutes to the Disco consists mainly of formless sonic experiments, piling up seemingly unrelated sounds into an electronic jungle full of disjointed voices. Somehow, there’s a pleasing quality to these random adventures into low-budget ambient insanity.
The second longplayer, a rarities compilation which overlaps the EP, consists of pre-Nine Months recordings. There’s a lot of variety — from disarmingly fragile pop to lightweight Public Image maunderings — with glimpses of Pere Ubu, Modern Lovers, Television and even the Cramps filling the spaces in between. As musical sketches for a group in progress, the tracks offer an interesting pastiche; taken as a proper album, what it lacks in consistency it makes up in unpredictability.