Throwback Thursday: Adam & The Ants - "Kings Of The Wild Frontier" (1980)

It's a fairly straightforward recipe:  mix a handful of twangy spaghetti-western guitar riffs with a pair of rumbling Burundi Beat drummers, toss in assorted yips, yelps and yodels, and wrap it all up in gooey wad of time-tested bubblegum hooks.  Now, tilt the whole works just off-center, and voila - you've got Antmusic.

A strange concoction in many ways when you think about it. It's a light, airy kind of ear candy that threatens to evaporate into the ether upon first listen.  Yet, it demands repeated listenings, and seems to get better, grow stronger, with every revolution of of the turntable. The dual rhythms both compete with and complement one another, and the whole sound sinks into your brain and makes a home there.

For a few years, Adam & The Ants' Kings Of The Wild Frontier was my favorite album (eventually losing that crown to the Violent Femmes' debut LP); 35 years later, it's still a Top Ten pick.  Adam would eventually go on to a solo career that could be described as spotty at best, with the occasional shining gem glistening among some pretty dire dreck.  The early Adam & The Ants stuff from the late 1970s showed a lot of promise, but had not yet found the right balance of ingredients.  By the time the band invited us to "try another flavor" on Kings, the recipe was just right.

The album opens with a stunning one-two punch: "Dog Eat Dog" and "Antmusic" are simply classics of the New Wave era and probably the strongest tracks on the album, but to let them overshadow the rest is to miss out on some truly outstanding songs.  "Press Darlings," "Feed Me To The Lions" and "Los Rancheros" each are catchy, hook-filled confections that could have been hit singles themselves. But all is not just bouncy fun here in Antland:  "Ants Invasion" strikes an eerie sci-fi pose, "Killer In The Home" ups the creepy factor, and "Physical (You're So)" is much darker here than even Trent Reznor could make it when he covered it years later.

It was with the first single after Kings Of The Wild Frontier that Adam & The Ants hit their absolute pinnacle, but "Stand And Deliver" would have to wait until Prince Charming to appear on an album, and by then The Ants were starting to lose steam.

Kings Of The Wild Frontier belongs on anyone's short list of defining New Wave albums and still sees fairly regular airplay around these parts.

Throwback Thursday: Richard Hell & The Voidoids - "Blank Generation" (1977)

With its defiant opening lyric,"I was saying 'Let me outta here!' before I was even born," "Blank Generation" (the song) immediately defines the ground rules under which Richard Hell is playing: "It's fascinating to observe what the mirror does, but when I dine it's for the wall that I set a place." Similar themes of undefined alienation, social misalignment, and Life as constant irritant run through the entirety of Blank Generation (the album), Hell's stunning and startling debut album with his own band, The Voidoids (Ivan Julian, Bob Quine and Mark Bell, who would soon thereafter become Marky Ramone).

Richard Hell had been in the young NYC Punk scene for some time already, having been a founding member of Television and doing a stint as one of Johnny Thunders' Heartbreakers.  Hell was a musician, a poet, an artist and a confrontationalist.  Hell skulked around CBGBs in a t-shirt festooned with a bullseye and the words "Please Kill Me," and is often pointed to as the originator of the razor cut spiked hair and safety-pinned clothes look that the Brit Punks quickly appropriated.

While the title and lyrics of "Blank Generation" may seem on the surface to be the perfect representation of the expected "no future" mindset of many of  his contemporaries, Hell saw it as hopeful.  As he explained in a 1978 interview with Lester Bangs, "To me, blank was a line where you can fill in anything ... It's the idea that you have the option of making yourself anything you want, filling in the blank. And that’s something that provides a uniquely powerful sense to this generation. It's saying 'I entirely reject your standards for judging my behavior.'"

That anthem is the clear centerpiece of the album, but the rest of Blank Generation is much more than simply an undercard to the main event.  Quine's sharply angular guitar carries Hell's painfully honest lyrics into the dark underbelly of after hours rock and jazz clubs, careening through dark passageways and pushing past sweaty, overpacked crowds of faceless onlookers.  The vocals howl and shriek and plead and cajole; the overall sound is insistent if inconsistent; the lyrics are brilliant.

The opening track, "Love Comes In Spurts," might just have a been a snickering double-entendre in anyone else's hands.  It turns out to actually be a painful realization that relationships are not always what the appear to be: "Love comes in spurts/In dangerous flirts/And it murders your heart/They didn't tell you that part."  That painful realization is expanded upon later on the track "Betrayal Takes Two," leads him to question its purpose on "Who Says?" ("Who says it's good, good, good to be alive?/It ain't no good, it's a perpetual jive."), and finally brings him to the album's closer, "Another World," in which he decides, "I could live with you in another world...but not this one."  Elsewhere, Hell calls out the fakers ("Liars Beware"), indulges in "New Pleasure," interprets Credence Clearwater Revival's "Walking On The Water" and invites us all to meet up "Down At The Rock And Roll Club."

Start to finish, Blank Generation is as solid an album as you could possibly want, filled with surprise turns and unexpected moments.  Simply put, it's a must-have. However, avoid the 1990 CD reissue, which inexplicably opts for completely different recordings of some tracks and chooses to replace the original artwork.

Throwback Thursday: Never Mind The Bollocks, Here's The Sex Pistols (1977)

You may need to sit down for this one: This week, Never Mind The Bollocks, Here's The Sex Pistols is 38 years old.

How can that be?  It can't possibly have been that long ago, can it?  Oh, it can, and it is, my fellow grumpy old punks. The album that signaled the end of civility and the utter collapse of the social order is getting to be downright middle-aged, like the bloody lot of us.

Remember the furor? The filth and the fury, so to speak?  The Sex Pistols were introduced to much of middle America by stories on the evening news touting them as foul-mouthed, rude invaders from the UK who were surely harbingers of the end at least of rock and roll if not the very fabric of society. They were unkempt, unclean; they couldn't play their instruments; they spit on their audiences and begged their audiences to spit on them!  They wore ripped clothes held together with safety pins, with more safety pins stuck through their lips and cheeks!  They hacked their hair into spiky mohawks and disheveled messes, and they hacked themselves bloody with razor blades, and they sang about anarchy and death to the Queen!  And they were getting ready to come here, and YOUR KIDS were going to start listening to their music!

(Never mind that most of those assertions were, at best, a bit of public relations hyperbole and, at worst, flat out wrong.)

I do remember the excitement of hearing the record for the first time; at a friend's house, hearing Johnny Rotten sneer "Fuck this and fuck that, fuck it all and fuck a fucking brat..." and being amazed that they let anyone record lyrics like that!  And wasn't there something vaguely dirty about the way he emphasized the final syllable of "Pretty Vacant?"  What strikes me listening to the album now, all these years later, is how remarkably tame it sounds in comparison to what came after it; hell, in comparison to what you can hear nowadays on the radio!

Without the hyperbole, without the shadow of Sid's (and Nancy's) drug-addled demise, without the fears that the Pistols were taking us all to hell in the same handbasket that neither Elvis nor The Beatles quite got our parents there in either, the album holds up surprisingly well.  Sure, there's nostalgia attached to it (still recall my friend Tom and I mimicking Johnny's over-pronunciation of the last word of "No Feelings:" "...see his picture hangin' on yer walllllllllll-uh!"), and some of the political posturing is a bit dated, but there really isn't a bad song to be found here:  "Anarchy In The UK" and "God Save The Queen" are, of course, the classics, but "Sub-Mission," "Problems," "New York," and "Holidays In The Sun" are all right up there, too.  And how can  you not smile and sing along with their snub at former label "EMI?"

Never Mind The Bollocks, Here's The Sex Pistols was officially released on October 28th of 1977. 38 years on, the album neither destroyed music nor society, but it remains both an important touchstone in pop culture history and a damn good record.  If you don't have a copy, what the hell is wrong with you?

Throwback Thursday: The Jesus And Mary Chain - "Psychocandy" (1985)

In the category of Things That Remind Me Just How Old I Am, I was gobsmacked to see notices popping up around the Internets that the Jesus And Mary Chain would be touring this year in celebration of the 30th anniversary of the release of their debut album, Psychocandy.  Good grief, how can that record be 30 years old already?

Had the Internet as we know it today existed when Psychocandy hit the shelves in 1985, the Jesus And Mary Chain would have been the then-current darlings of music bloggers everywhere; as it was, their name and dour, poofy-haired images were splashed all over the cooler zines of the day.  I recall NME, for example, practically gushing for what seemed like months about how fantastic they were. College radio stations talked them up long before the early import singles like "Upside Down" and "You Trip Me Up" found their way across the pond from Scotland.  There was an album coming soon and was gonna be a big deal.

In today's world, Psychocandy might not seem particularly special, but in its time its was groundbreaking.  Literally nothing sounded like it before.  Every song was drenched in feedback.  Certainly, feedback had been used as an integral piece of composition and performance in rock and roll music before, but not like this: on Psychocandy, the feedback shimmered and sang.  It provided the foundation for some tracks and threatened to drown out others.  It hummed along with the melodies and tried to kick your turntable's stylus right off the vinyl.  This was noise, but not just random white noise; it was tamed, at least to the extent it could be, and made to put on a show.  (I vaguely remember reading somewhere at the time that at least one major record label had returned the Jesus And Mary Chain's demo tapes to the band believing the tapes to be defective because of the feedback noise!)

What makes Psychocandy such a good record, though, is that beneath the feedback lay a collection of really good songs.  Take away the gimmick and you still have an album that would score high marks.  Winding and rolling amidst psychedelic garage stomp ("My Little Underground"), sticky bubblegum hooks ("Just Like Honey") and punky attitude and imagery ("Taste Of Cindy"), every cut is solid and memorable.  The centerpiece of the LP is "Never Understand," a crashing, claustrophobic statement of purpose that encapsulates everything wonderful about the full album in a handy three-minute chunk.  Play it loud - turned up to 11, as they say - to fully experience the gut-rumble.

Though they kept at at for several years and managed a handful of likable tunes over the course of several albums, the Jesus And Mary Chain never were truly able to live up to where they set the bar on Psychocandy.  In honor of it's 30th anniversary, I pulled the record out for the first time in a long while the other night, and it sounds every bit as good now as it did then.  If you don't own it, pick it up.  And play it LOUD.

Throwback Thursday: Social Distortion "Mommy's Little Monster" (1983)

Every record collector has his stories of great finds and amazing deals, and I'm no different.  Among my crate-digging stories is the day I scored an unopened second-pressing copy of Social Distortion's outstanding 1983 debut album, Mommy's Little Monster, from the swiftly thinning vinyl racks of a mall chain record shop that was making the conversion to CD and cassette only and therefore dumping their vinyl stock for cheap.  Total out-of-pocket cost including tax: $2.12.  That, my friends, is a bargain.

Mommy's Little Monster captures Social Distortion immediately after their 1982 US tour with Youth Brigade chronicled in the excellent documentary Another State Of Mind.  In the interim they had disbanded, but the film got enough interest going in the band again that they reformed and slashed out the album in a single day.  Instead of making everything sound like a rushed job, the extremely short process imbues the album with a consistent sense of immediacy, urgency and energy that reflected the band at that point in time very well.

This isn't the Social Distortion that would evolve in later years, after Mike Ness became a hardened, jaded, modern day version of Johnny Cash.  Here Ness and company are simply punk kids with an obvious appreciation for a well-placed hook and the yet-untarnished spark of enthusiasm that kicked an entire music scene into gear once upon a time.  In nine short but memorable bursts of West Coast punk, Social Distortion created a classic album.

From the dizzying opening riffs of "The Creeps (I Just Wanna Give You)" to the ever-shifting tempo of the album's closer, "Moral Threat," the three A's of the genre (alienation, angst and anger) are consistent themes. Solid playing and some surprising twists keep this from being just another by-the-numbers punk rock record, however: the song which lent its title to the previously mentioned documentary, "Another State Of Mind," briefly drops the dangerous punk swagger for a surprisingly uncertain bit of reflection over life on the road; echoes of the sort of American roots rock that would become a hallmark of Ness's later music are already reverberating under the surface on more than a few tracks here.

The centerpiece, naturally, is the title track.  "Mommy's Little Monster" paints two caricatures of go-nowhere punk kids, one male and one female, as society-rejecting, self-destructive wastes -- at least in the (socially distorted?) view of their parents -- and leaves their tales unresolved and without value judgment.  Are they really so bad for having chosen a path away from the conformist norm? ("His brothers and sisters have tasted sweet success/His parents condemn him, say his life's a mess"  and "Her eyes are a deeper blue/She likes her hair that color too...") Maybe, as another Cali band would suggest a few years later, all they wanted was a Pepsi.

Mommy's Little Monster has been reissued several times over the years on a number of different labels, so it's not difficult to find.  If you don't have this one, you should.

Throwback Thursday: Tex & The Horseheads "Life's So Cool" (1985)

Tex & the Horseheads always struck me as if they just came stumbling out of a saloon in some post-apocalyptic future version of the mythical Old West, laughing and slapping each other on the back and falling down sloppy drunk and looking for their next drink, score or fight - whichever they happen to run across first.  They were cowpunks before cowpunk was a subgenre, both in musical style and in lifestyle.

They were led by a pint-sized whirling dervish by the name of Texacala Jones, a female version of Stiv Bators wearing Adam Ant's makeup who sported a sleepy "C'm'ere darrrrlin'" hick drawl worn raspy from an equal mix of whiskey, cigarettes and heartbreak with which she belted bootstompers like "Tumbleweed" and purred bluesy ballads like "Big House Part III."  They were ragged, amphetamine-fueled, and authentic.

The best of their three albums was 1985's Life's So Cool, which contains the two titles mentioned above among its collection of hard hitting redneck punky rock-n-roll. Tales of drunken escapades ("Bartender Sam"), promises of rehabilitation ("I'll Quit Tomorrow") and the inevitable backslide into bleakness ("Jailed Again") combine for a helluva gut punch - you have no doubt at all that they have lived every word of it.  Add to that a 40-second slice of Cream's "Cat's Squirrel" (Texacala's Southern Comfort-slurred "AWWWWrightawrightawrightawrightawright...all ri-i-ight!" is the perfect intro to the album's festivities) and one of the greatest break-up songs ever, "The Slip," and you've got a platter that is damn hard to beat.

Their earlier self-titled debut album is also good, but not nearly as self-assured; the import-only concert album that followed should have been a better document of the band in action but suffers from poor sound quality.  Life's So Cool is the one to look for.

Check out two of my faves from the album, "Lucky Hand" and "Big House Part III."  Enjoy!

Throwback Thursday: Angry Samoans "Back From Samoa" (1982)

The Angry Samoans were abrasive, irreverent, sarcastic, crude and, as often follows, damn funny. On their second album, Back From Samoa, they were absolutely brilliant.

Fronted by the snarling "Metal" Mike Saunders, the Angry Samoans were part of the first wave of L.A. hardcore bands in the late 1970s.  While they played as hard and loud and fast as any of their contemporaries, they stood apart from the crowd in attitude. Other bands may have taken the political route or tried to deliver some sort of message in their music, but not the Samoans. Instead, they reveled in B-movie schlock, class-clown antics, and a devastatingly sharp skewering of the very scene they were a part of. They refused to take themselves too seriously, but they had enough of an edge to make you think that they just might be dangerous.

On  top of all that, they were good. Damn good. Their songs were short and punchy (Back From Samoa's 14 songs fly by in just over 15 minutes!) but solid, and the musicianship matched.  Even at top speed, the riffs are crisp, the rhythm on point, and the energy just crackles through the speakers.

Taken at face value, especially in today's Politically Correct world, the album could be seen as jaw-droppingly offensive; in the context of its time and place on the musical spectrum, the calculated shock factor is so defiantly over-the-top as to go beyond cartoonish and into the realm of self-parody. Songs like "They Saved Hitler's Cock," "Homo-Sexual," and the staggeringly foul "Ballad Of Jerry Curlan" (in which the title character's perverted sins, including incest and bestiality, are listed in specific detail) are so far over the line that only the most purposefully obtuse could possibly take them seriously.  The band isn't actually encouraging you to  "put a fork in your hand/poke your eyes out" (from "Lights Out"), they're just having fun (and poking fun at) being a stoopid punk band. Remember, in those days mainstream America thought punk rock was going to take us all to Hell in a hand basket.  The Angry Samoans played right up to that fear and had a good laugh about it.

There are real gems to be found on the album as well:  "Gas Chamber" is in the running for best hardcore song ever written; the sci-fi drenched "Not Of This Earth" foreshadows the direction the Samoans would go musically as the years went on; their cover of the Chambers Brothers' hit "Time Has Come Today" is not to be missed.

Back From Samoa is a classic punk album through and through.  It has been reissued many times on many labels over the years, so tracking down a copy is not difficult at all.  Obviously, the easily offended should stay away; those who can look past the surface and are willing to wallow in the muck for a bit will have a blast.  To give you a taste, enjoy a clip of the Angry Samoans performing "Gas Chamber" and "Not Of This Earth" on New Wave Theater (with a brief interview that includes Saunders grabbing the microphone for an important message) and the actual video the band made for "Time Has Come Today."  Enjoy!

Throwback Thursday: Devo "Freedom Of Choice" (1980)

Cover via Amazon

"The beginning was the end..."  - Devo, "Gates Of Steel"

Guitarist and founding member of Devo, Bob Casale (a/k/a Bob #2), passed away on Tuesday at the far too young age of 61. In his memory, there's been a lot of the Spudboys' music being played around Ruttville this week.  If you can manage to sidestep 1984's misbegotten Shout and the contemporarily released non-LP single "Theme From Doctor Detroit," it's pretty tough to go wrong anywhere in the Devo catalog (and even Shout has its moments: the title track, "Here To Go" and the wacky re-imagining of Jimi Hendrix's "Are U Experienced?")  Of course, Devotees will tend to lean heavily on the first two albums, and it's tough to argue with the simply classic opening salvo of Devolutionism, Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo or its lesser-known but every bit as wonderful follow-up Duty Now For The Future.  But for me, their third album, 1980's Freedom Of Choice, remains the go-to record when I need a good shot of Devo's unique lunacy.

Part of my affinity for this album lies in the fact that in a collection that now boasts close to 3500 titles, Freedom Of Choice was one of my earliest additions.  The record has been getting airplay in my home for over thirty years!  Beyond that, the album is just flat out excellent from start to finish.  Not a clinker to be found here.  And while it was not an obvious grab at commercial acceptance or mainstream radio airplay, it is Devo at their most "pop," their most accessible, and it does contain their most well-known song, "Whip It."

Jerky, robotic rhythms are still the rule on Freedom, but the sound is less antiseptic than on the first two albums.  The yellow radiation suits were abandoned in favor of the famous flowerpot hats, a more humanized visual to match the more accessible sound.  While traditional guitars are certainly background players here, Devo had not yet gone fully synthesized. (That would happen with the next album, New Traditionalists.) The result is a fuller, tougher sound than is heard on any other album bearing the Devo name.

"Whip It"  is only the centerpiece of the album because history painted it that way.  It's buried in the middle of side one, just another track on album full of hook-laden, energetic, synth-heavy tunes.  If "Whip It" scored so big, it remains a puzzle why similarly styled tracks like "Girl U Want," "Freedom Of Choice" or "Gates Of Steel" weren't every bit as big.  For those looking for the expected Devo goofiness, "Ton O' Luv" and "That's Pep!" fit the bill nicely; the surprisingly touching "Snowball" shows that the previously emotionless Spuds know heartbreak as well as any of us.  Even apparent throwaways "Cold War" and "Don't You Know" are good enough to be lead tracks on virtually any other New Wave bands' albums.  And the final one-two punch of "Mr. B's Ballroom" (with its hiccuppy "whoa-whoa-oh-oh" chorus) and "Planet Earth" (not the same song as the identically titled Duran Duran single) is simply excellent.

Unlike many other New Wave albums of its time, Freedom Of Choice really doesn't sound terribly dated today.  Well worth adding to your own collection if you don't already own it.

R.I.P., Bob #2.

Throwback Thursday: The Fleshtones "Hexbreaker!" (1983)

Yesterday, the mighty Fleshtones released their newest album, Wheel Of Talent, on Yep-Roc records. This is the 22nd album for the boys from Queens, and the first track from it to reach the light of day is a bit of a nostalgia/tribute in honor of another pretty damn good NY band:



Haven't picked up the new LP myself yet (soon...soon), but I have been giving some airtime to my favorite from their vast catalog, 1983's magnificent Hexbreaker! 

The Fleshtones' brand of garage rock has always been about the party.  They're having fun singing and playing and they want to make sure you're having fun, too.  You can't not smile while listening to the Fleshtones, and you better not try and sit still in the corner - this is get up and dance around like no one is watching music, and it never shang-a-langed so brightly as on this, their second full length album for I.R.S. Records (a debut album was recorded circa 1979 for Marty Thau's New York-based Red Star Records, but only the "Amercian Beat" single saw release before that label collapsed. I.R.S. snapped the band up; those original Red Star masters were later released as Blast Off!)

With echoes of sixties nuggets like The Blues Magoos, The Standells and The Animals (Peter Zaremba's voice at times does sound a bit like Eric Burdon's) yet still reflecting the sounds of contemporaries such as New York Dolls, Suicide and, yes, The Ramones, The Fleshtones carved out their own sound, dubbed "Super-Rock!" That sound is immeditaely defined by the jarring guitar crash leading up to Zaremba's shout of "CHA!" that kicks off the opening track, "Deep In My Heart." Launching into a reedy farfisa-driven rocker that shakes you awake and culminating in actual crashes of thunder, the opener seems tough to beat.  But there are plenty of party tricks up these guys' sleeves.

Care for some bubblegum? "What's So New (About You)?" is stick-to-your-teeth sugary.  A fuzz guitar, a clap-along melody and that ever-present farfisa will leave you wanting more of this gooey sugary confection, but instead you're being whisked downtown on an ambulance ride: "Screamin' Skull" is a mildly harrowing account of a drug trip gone bad, but damn if you can't sing along with it.  After a wailing-sax instrumental break ("Legend (Of A Wheelman)"), you're hit with the punk rave-up "New Scene" and then the absolutely excellent title track. In another, more perfect world, "Hexbreaker" could have been "Louie, Louie."  A basic, repetitive guitar line, a bit of a soulful strut, and a recording that sounds like it's taking place at an actual party - it's wonderful stuff, and by the end of side one, you'll wonder if they can top what they've done so far.

The answer is immediate, as side two opens with the incredible "Right Side Of A Good Thing," perhaps the most Fleshtones-sounding song The Fleshtones ever did (and that is saying something, my friends!)  With its hysterical falsetto chorus and bubbling bass, it's a nearly perfect distillation of everything The 'Shtones stand for: fun, positivity, and damn good music.  "Brainstorm"  and "New Scene" keeps the party going, while "This House Is Empty" slows things down about a half step between them.  The album ends with the only non-original, John Lee Hooker's "Burning Hell," which is given the full Super-Rock! treatment and as a result is the perfect way to close out the album.

Few albums are as strong start to finish as this one, and while The Fleshtones can sometimes be guilty of retreading the same sounds, there's a reason why you stick with what works.  On Hexbreaker!, everything works.  Toss it on the turntable and you've got yourself an instant party - what more could you ask for?

(Hexbreaker! was issued on CD as a 2-for-1 with Speed Connection - Live In Paris '85 in 2010.)

Throwback Thursday: The Dead Boys "Young, Loud And Snotty" (1977)

Young Loud and Snotty (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

If you had to chose only one record to play for someone so that they understand what Punk Rock was all about, which do you choose?  The Pistols? Ramones? The Clash or The Damned? Dead Kennedys or Black Flag? All solid, head of the class picks for sure, but if it were my decision to make I wouldn't think twice.  I'd immediately reach for The Dead Boys' Young, Loud And Snotty.  And I'd crank the stereo up to eleven.

The title is pitch-perfect: five sneering, snarling, unkempt and uncompromising punks who landed in New York City via Cleveland bathed in the fallout from the explosion of protopunks Rocket From The Tombs, stripped of any of that band's artier pretensions (that piece became Pere Ubu) and dunked in the spilled beer and slosh of CBGB's.   They played sloppy rock-n-roll of the heavy, loud and fast variety, like an amphetamine-fueled hybrid of The Stooges and The New York Dolls jamming in a garage at 2:00 AM and pissing off the neighbors on purpose.  The frontal attack of Stiv Bators, Cheetah Chrome and Jimmy Zero seethed and slashed, propelled by the driving power of Jeff Magnum's bass and Johnny Blitz's drumming.

The Dead Boys were swept up in Sire Records' campaign to pluck the best of the burgeoning scene (Ramones, Talking Heads and Richard Hell were other CBGB's regulars who also landed on Seymour Stein's suddenly-hip label), and in 1977 delivered their debut album. Stiv starts the album by spitting out the opening lyric, "I don't need anyone!," and closes it with a strangled scream of "Down in flames!" In between those moments is a little under a half an hour of frenetic, puerile, vulgar yet undeniably catchy and fun Punk Rawk. Young, Loud And Snotty is utterly without pretense.  There's no political agenda, no social commentary, no deep message here - and certainly no silly love songs (unless your idea of romantic crooning includes lines like "I don't really want to dance/I just want to get in your pants.")

The album opens with the band's finest track, the searing "Sonic Reducer," an aural stun-gun that leaps at you like a caged beast.  I daresay "Sonic Reducer" would be a strong contender for best punk rock song ever; it certainly sets the bar extremely high for the rest of the album.  While not every track reaches the dizzying heights of the opener, everything ranges from very good to excellent.  The album is definitely front-loaded however: side one also gives us the anthemic "All This And More," the straightforward rocker "What Love Is," and a perfect bored-youth celebration in "Ain't Nothin' To Do," all of which are five-star efforts.  Only the occasionally draggy gloominess of "Not Anymore" offers any reprieve from the head-thunking assault.

Side two pales slightly, suffering from some same-y sounding material and a decidedly immature and misogynistic streak (see "Caught With The Meat In Your Mouth" and "I Need Lunch," the latter supposedly written about/directed at Lydia Lunch), but by this point in the proceedings you know what you're in for.  You can either snicker along like a fourth-grader just discovering dirty jokes, or move along to the next track.  A cover of The Syndicate Of Sound's 1960s garage-band hit "Hey Little Girl" is a pleasant surprise, foreshadowing Stiv's later solo efforts in that genre, and the two songs that close the album, "High Tension Wire" and "Down In Flames," bring us full circle back to where we started, if considerably more exhausted than when we began.

Young, Loud And Snotty is everything a Punk Rock album should be: loud, fast, abrasive fun.  The Dead Boys would follow this with a second album before finally burning out, and many years later alternate takes of the debut's tracks would be issued as Younger, Louder And Snottier.  The second LP, We Have Come For Your Children, is worth seeking out; the cash-in on the debut is best left on the shelf.

Related articles

• New Wave for the New Week #157
• Punk Rock Weekend, Part Two

Throwback Thursday: Violent Femmes (1982)

Violent Femmes (album) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

"I wrote this song about Stefanie Jackson at Rufus King High School. There. I said it." 

- Gordon Gano, explaining "Gone Daddy Gone" in the liner notes of the 20th anniversary reissue of Violent Femmes, 2002

Nearly a dozen more years have passed since Gano's revelation/confession, yet it remains the perfect explanation for one of the most unique and entrancing three minute (and three seconds) singles of the 1980s. With its shuffling drum-brush beat, adenoidal vocals, faux-ambivalence swagger, nagging xylophone (!) line and mid-song hat-tip to Howlin' Wolf, "Gone Daddy Gone" remains one of the finest descriptions of a high school crush rejection ever written.  We've all had our Stefanie Jacksons...

Thirty plus years on, though, many people forget - or never realized - that "Gone Daddy Gone" was the single from the Violent Femmes' self-titled debut album.  The assumption often is that "Blister In The Sun" must have been the single; it's the better-remembered and more often chosen cut to be spun by the "classic alternative" stations these days.  Even "Add It Up" seems a more likely candidate looking back, if only the lyrics hadn't crossed that line and guaranteed no early-80s radio airplay at all by bluntly asking the question on every teenage boy's mind since time began, "Why can't I get just one fuck?"

But that's what makes Violent Femmes such a remarkable debut: of the ten songs found in its grooves, at least eight could have been singles.  From the sha-la-la "what have I got to do?" sing-along on the chorus of "Prove My Love" to the obsessive enumeration of reasons for taking pills in "Kiss Off" ("I forget what eight was for...") to the pseudo-reggae despair of "Please Do Not Go" ("what can I do?/I fall down dead/she never see the tears I cry") and on, each song has its own character, its own personality, its own reasons for being memorable enough to stick in your head.  Taken as a whole, no album has better captured what life is like when you're a 16 - 20 year old male who doesn't feel like he fits in, and yet been hook-filled enough for the 16 - 20 year old females to dance to.

It's somewhat amazing to me that today Violent Femmes is looked back upon as one of the essential albums of its time.  When it was issued in late 1982, the reaction wasn't so kind.  While radio was playing Rush and Journey and Def Leppard and Quiet Riot, Violent Femmes just didn't fit.  The sparse, minimalist, acoustic sounds that occasionally veered off into angular shards of guitar ("To The Kill") or collapsed into chaotic crumbles ("Confessions") wasn't the kind of thing the stoner kids could absent-mindedly strum along with on out-of-tune guitars in their black-lighted bedrooms.  The angst-ridden lyrics might have been just a tad too hip for that room as well, not to mention the fact that the guy singing sounds like a nerd.  Those of us who "got it" also got laughed at for listening to it.  Yet nowadays those same folks who laughed then are often among the first to shout "Yes!" when the opening da-da-de-dum-dum of "Blister In The Sun" pours out of a speaker somewhere.  Go figure.

For those of us who were there from the beginning, the album is an old friend.  My original copies of both the "Gone Daddy Gone" single and the album itself were nearly worn smooth from constant play; I know every lyric and every note by heart.  They remain my all-time favorite song and album, respectively.  The Femmes went on to release several more albums over the years of varying quality, but even the best of their later output pales compared to the debut LP.  The post-album UK single "Ugly"/"Gimme The Car" probably comes closest.  (In fact, another common misconception is that those two tracks were on the album originally as well, as they have been appended to every CD issue of the LP.)

The album stands up well three decades later.  If you don't own it, there is a gaping hole in your music collection which needs to be repaired immediately!

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