The new issue of Loose Lips Sink Ships magazine is truly amazing, and even if you’re poor, you should go out right now and shell out the requisite £4 for it. It presents much of the same classic Careless Talk.. styled gear as the first issue, but by some strange alchemy it manages to bring together more of my favourite bands/people than any previous single magazine issue.

Both the front and back covers may feature images of grumpy, bearded men, but don't let that put you off. (I’m surely not the only one who finds Steve Gullick’s fixation with grumpy, bearded men rather unsettling?)

But anyway, highlights include;

*Sonic Youth musing on the strange trajectory of their career.

*Aaron North of the Icarus Line conducting a joyously straightforward and informative interview with Kevin Shields (complete with classic Gullick My Bloody Valentine photos).

*Some guy writing about watching Comets on Fire on Mushrooms, with predictably frenzied results.

*The first interview I’ve ever read with awesome femme-blues duo Mr. Airplane Man, in which they talk total fucking sense.

Best of all though is the interview with Ian Svenonious.* His walking of the walk may occasionally falter, but MAN, he can talk the talk better than any other boundary-demolishing, self-conscious rock insurrectionist in history. The single page of text that makes up Ben Myers' Weird War feature, (accompanied by a full page photo of the group that makes them look like icons of cool pulled directly from my dreams, which helps) contains more concentrated idea-sparking, jam-kicking post modern rock-theory rhetoric than the collected monkeys-with-typewriters babbling of a million music bloggers. Svenonious instantly justifies his hyperbolic introduction as "Umberto Eco with an Afro, Marshall Mcluhan with an Arthur Lee fixation.." – in fact, I'll go you one further and tentatively suggest him as the Chomsky of Rock n' Roll. Forget making records, I want this guy to write a book and fully lay down the law on the crazy slogans, images and theories he scatters through his music, sleeve notes and interviews. I find he has an extremely refreshing angle on things, and his cross-pollination of po-mo pop cult style fetish with what seems like totally old-school Marxist rhetoric, always wavering between complete escapist parody and deadly seriousness, is surely worthy of further investigation.

I always found it thrilling the way the kitsch-cool image of The Make-up allowed him to make startling exhortations to his audience to "be aware, be armed" and to "off the pigs in all their forms" without ever coming across as completely ridiculous. Combined with the band’s powerful kick-ass dancing tunes, you could easily engage with his rhetoric at any point along the serious/silly spectrum, taking it as a wholly literal straight-faced calls to arms, or as a bunch of more generalised life-liberation slogans, or as completely ironic retro-revolutionary fun and games.

Similarly, his razor sharp dismantling of current pop culture in the Loose Lips.. interview allows him to slip in a line toward the end about seeing Fidel Castro as a 'great hero', without seeming like a total arse. Which is a lot more than can be said for several other bunches of far more earnest psuedo-political rockers who’ve made similar statements over the years.

I'd imagine lot of people might see Svenonious' dabbling with irony and humour to get his (admittedly incredibly vague) political agenda across as being a bit self-defeating, diluting or destroying his message before it’s even been made, but I'd counter by saying that by recognising the inherent contradiction and shallowness of political rock n' roll, and by cleverly fucking with existing forms and expectations of it, he, at his best, manages to create a music/politics fusion with far more guts and excitement (not to mention shelf-life) than any number of lumpen protest songs.

I realise I could well be preaching to the converted here, and perhaps making points that'll be pretty obvious to anybody who’s already listened to a Nation of Ulysses / Make Up / Weird War record, but as this discussion demonstrates to some extent, a lot of music fans still find it hard to get a grip on Ian Svenonious' various bands, and there are still a lot of intriguing uncertainties about his intentions etc.

( *annoyingly I can't find any current website for Svenonious or Weird War's activities, so if one exists, do let me know )