Officer! - Ossification (1984)

Mick Hobbs discreetely paid his dues in the UK post-punk-prog scene (that is a thing), only to discreetely pour out his confoundingly charming soul under the Officer moniker (gathering around him many other splendid self-rejects from any semblance of the mainstream) and presumably carry discreetely on henceforth, as I am still to hear the sonorous accolades that, if the world were a fairer and quirkier place, he should have had coming his way all this oblivious time. 

Officer's other collections of let's-call-them-songs, "released" in obscure tapes (the bulk of which most likely ended up stored in a few damp and dusty attics in some non-disclosed old european capitals), can be a bit of a I-don't-much-care-if-I-hit-or-miss affair (but, more often than not, still hitting something - both random objects and our capacity to feel, as in the poignant Life at the Water's Edge, from their eponymous release). 

Losing nothing of that lackadaisical approach - i.e. still appearing less to compose songs than to assemble them from disparate bits and pieces of what others might consider musical refuse - Ossification is a definitive statement though, and a most brilliant work of clunky genius. 

Sneaked in just about the time Tom Waits done did a hostile takeover on that aesthetic with Swordfishtrombones (in turn, also his absolute masterpiece; not that anyone asked), instead of Waits' pack of misanthropic mutants breeding an underground strain of blues, here you meet up with a troupe of minstrels scraping by in the cracks of the faltering industrial age, armed only with a host of decommissioned instruments salvaged from the local concert hall dumpster, and an anthology of oulipesque limericks full of that sort of british nonsensical wit that makes it so very hard to run counter the continual reproduction of some cultural stereotypes. To quote solely one of my favourite snippets, from "Origin": "Let's find something really big and call it a god". 

It's always most instructive to be reminded, against our mathematical notions of perfection, how beauty can be brought about into this world in such magnificently messy ways.