As
@BlueHammer85 pointed out, this record still sounds reasonably fresh after nearly 40 years.
Violent Femmes, as I mentioned before, was once an utter staple, blasting out of every white kid’s dorm room when I was a freshman in college on any weekend with decent weather. “I hope you know that this will go down on your permanent record” was a verbal meme before the internet invented photographic memes 25 years or whatever later.
But this record reminds me a lot of
Breakfast in America by Supertramp. And you’re saying to yourself, “Errrrrr . . . what?”
By this I mean that song for song, the record is pretty strong, with a couple of great big winners, some fairly right tunes representative of the band . . . and then one absolutely god-awful piece of crap that nearly ruins the record and is instantly skipped over by nearly all halfway-normal listeners In this case, it’s “Confessions”. On BiA, it’s “Casual Conversations”.
Both bands also have a barely tolerable lead vocalist (one of the two of them in Supertramp’s case), sonically and attitudinally. And if you want to stretch the comparison farther, both were hits in the States, both had a unique sound, both didn’t produce anything better, and both effectively disappeared off the face of the earth after their big records were through ear-worming their way into the popular consciousness.
Back to the vocals here: Gordon Gano’s voice is so whiny (I’m using the American spelling, cuz he’s American) it really stretches your tolerance and patience to the breaking point, but it doesn’t quite break mine at least. He’s pretty angry and pretty anxious that girls don’t care for him (and this is no way to win them back). But the whining is part of the point, I think. You can’t really scream busker punk -- the authorities in the subway stations where you play it would shut you down -- but you can whine it effectively. That aside, his guitar is fast and loose, the acoustic bass walks are super groovy, and the snare is snappy throughout. There are enough pace changes and true singalongs that this record never gets boring. To the extent busker punk can have anthems, “Blister In The Sun”, “Add It Up”, and “Gone Daddy Gone” (dig the xylophone) all qualify. I’ve always liked “Kiss Off” and “Promise” a lot too.
The issue with these guys is that they shot their wad, and their wad was definitionally small in the very tight, thin configuration they played in. Thematically, I think they pretty much exhausted all they had in the these ten songs too. But that’s as maybe. This record is a fairly indelible alternative classic, another example of the creativity that exploded in the wake of punk ripping up the playbook in the late 70s and early 80s.
7/10.