or better or worse, we here at Stylus, in all of our autocratic consumer-crit greed, are slaves to timeliness. A record over six months old is often discarded, deemed too old for publication, a relic in the internet age. That's why each week at Stylus, one writer takes a look at an album with the benefit of time. Whether it has been unjustly ignored, unfairly lauded, or misunderstood in some fundamental way, we aim with On Second Thought to provide a fresh look at albums that need it.

Every time we write about, say, hardcore, we’re having a synesthetic experience, ascribing the stimulation of one sense to another. Hearing a warp-speed bass breakdown or past-any-reasonable-breaking-point screamed lyric, we can’t help but feel we’re in sweaty free-fall or getting pummeled by invisible forces (and sometimes, even punched in the face). Reggae and funk might conjure up certain odors, ambiances: marijuana and sweat, respectively (or both at once). A more specific synesthesia, though, and one that few could claim to possess, pertains to color. Vladimir Nabokov, for example, could see the letters of the alphabet in corresponding colors. “Perhaps one in a thousand has that," he wrote. “But I’m told by psychologists that most children have it, that later they lose that aptitude when they are are told by stupid parents that it’s all nonsense, an A isn't black, a B isn’t brown -– don’t be absurd." Though it is certainly tempting to write all this off as another fanciful claim, a bit of find-the-sailor trickery, many cases of what he called “color hearing" seem to exist.

I don’t really believe that I am one, mainly because only two specific forms of recorded music seem to produce these effects in me. The first is House, and I find it a bit more likely that the throbbing densities of dark pop-art hue (usually indigo and an occasionally black-dimpled set of reds) it elicits in me come from some preconceptions I’ve got about the music: I’ll always describe it as shiny, brisk, decadent, and clearly meant for cooler and more good-looking people than myself. But Second Edition, by Publicusic is no less tactile – hearing it come from anything besides headphones with the bass turned up as loud as my small stereo will muster doesn’t feel nearly intimate enough – I feel it in a different way. Maybe I’ve just internalized it, spent so much time with the album that it’s left its imprint in my temporal lobe, or else some brand of permanent static along my optic nerves, resulting in a now-familiar set of pooled blues and twitchy grays. I don’t know.

"Albatross", the monolithic, knowingly sluggish opening track, gives you a good idea of what’s to come in the next fifty minutes. Put it this way: by the time its slurred drums, pulsating mixed-to-the-threshold bass, and sinewy, unpredictable guitar dissonance have ground to a stop after a good ten minutes, giving John Lydon a chance to shed his spectral persona and return, for a moment, to something more like the vocalizing of his Sex Pistols days – albeit a damaged, post-traumatic take on the Rotten persona – as he taunts his bandmates with an impromptu, bilious “Onnnnnlly the loooneelllyly!", you have a good idea if this is the record for you or not.

PiL wasn’t, in theory, doing much new on this album: they had already decided on sonic abrasion as an anti-pop tactic – Lydon, a devotee of Lee Perry, Can, and Beefheart, having gone on record as stating that the Pistols sounded more like arena metal than anything else – as can be heard in its often bleak first album’s collapsing mantras ("Theme", a lengthy tumult that hypothesizes on giving a would-be suicide his wish; "Religion", a sophomoric yet wholly satisfying assault on hypocrites in the clergy). However, the infinitely more refined strategy employed on this record – confound the listener, leave them with a slight distaste but engross them where you used to repulse – pays off remarkably well. Even "Poptones," a lengthy, hilariously repetitious mixture of mocking, diseased guitar melody, a murderous beat from Atkins and suitably pumped-up bassline from Jah Wobble, topped off by perhaps the most distantly unsettling Lydon vocal (complete with nose-blowing!) on the album (though "Death Disco", a lyrical documentary of his mother’s deathbed, offers enough near-Joycean stream-of-consciousness grotesquerie to offer it some stiff competition), manages to come off as a subversive, likeable fuck-you instead of a mere irritant. Witness the band’s downright surreal impromptu "American Bandstand" performance of this song, where Lydon made a too-mock-disgusted-to-be-confrontational run up into the crowd, scaring them from their bleachers as drummer Martin Atkins bashed on his kit out-of-time to the backing track. Clearly, they took unconventionality to an altogether different level than their peers.

Of course, this is no mere avant-garde exercise: "Memories", a danceable rant supposedly directed against Paul Weller and his ilk, spills over into guitar-effects chaos, but maintains a remarkable drive, particularly in the startling condensation of rhythm that suddenly takes place in its bridge. On this and the album’s other best songs (the moody "No Birds", the feedback-and-arpeggio highlights of "Death Disco"), Keith Levene’s guitar takes free flight, transforming a minimalist, occasionally sour rhythm section’s workouts into an astonishing psychedelic mess that occasionally tops even classic Gang of Four moments like "Anthrax". When ironically airy keyboards are added to the mix, on instrumentals like the precise "Socialist", the album assumes an altogether different shade of menace. What color is all this? Red, I think. Wait, yellow. Um. I think.