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Metal Box, the second album by John Lydon’s post-Sex Pistols project Public Image Limited, is a gloriously ugly thing, feeding the group’s fascinations with Krautrock, reggae, and musique concrete into an industrial smelter. Somehow, the steely, nasty-sounding tunes on that 1979 masterpiece have also become the raw material for the band’s bassist Jah Wobble.
In 2021, he released Metal Box – Rebuilt in Dub, an LP that smoothed away the jagged, razor-sharp edges of the original material to an occasionally parodic degree. That well-meaning but ill-advised LP also forms the nucleus of Wobble’s current tour, which recently stopped at Mississippi Studios. Backed by a tight-knit group of players that included former Siouxsie and the Banshees guitarist Jon Klein, the 65-year-old Wobble diluted the caustic formula of Metal Box into a sleek simulacrum that, at times, took on the anesthetized tone of fusion jazz.
Specks of corrosion did manage to mar the otherwise glossy tone of the evening. A run through “Fodderstompf,” a patience-testing favorite from PiL’s debut, carried a thread of nastiness within the disco-pop makeover courtesy of Klein’s granitelike guitar tones. And when Wobble set his bass aside to play percussion, his attempts to maintain a steady rhythm were charmingly wonky.
Any other efforts to approximate the challenging tone of Metal Box were long gone by the time Wobble and company settled into a cover of John Barry’s theme from Midnight Cowboy and a medley that included a version of the 1969 rock-steady classic “The Liquidator” and a bit of Fleetwood Mac’s “The Chain.” It was the type of crowd-pleasing caprice that a younger Wobble would surely have sniffed or spat at. When it comes to the modern-day musician, he only wants to be loved.