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| org. cover |
release date: Aug. 31, 1981
format: cd (2000 remaster)
[album rate: 3 / 5] [3,22]
producer: Chris Desjardins, Tito Larriva
label: Last Call Records (re-issue) - nationality: USA
Track highlights: 1. "Sex Beat" (3,5 / 5) - 2. "Preaching the Blues" (3,5 / 5) - 3. "Promise Me" - 4. "She's Like Heroin to Me" - 5. "For The Love of Ivy" - 7. "Ghost on the Highway" - 11. "Goodbye Johnny"
Studio debut album by L.A. post-punk band The Gun Club consisting of songwriter, lead vocalist and guitarist, Jeffrey Lee Pierce, Rob Ritter on bass, Ward Dotson on guitars and slide, and with Terry Graham on drums. The band changed members throughout its 16 year lifespan. Lee Pierce is almost synonymous with The Gun Club, as he was the only lasting member through various formations of the band, however, these were the four members at the time of the recordings for this album. The Gun Club plays an energetic form of post-punk with a clear garage rock influence, which comes out as rockabilly, psychobilly, and what some would call punk blues. I guess, at the time of the release another label would have been art punk. The mix of styles puts the band in family with another legendary band, New York-based The Cramps. The album has aged, but it really was something else in 1981, when most bands of the punk scene, either played post-punk as art punk, no wave, gothic rock, or psychobilly, but this is quite original with its inclusion of blues rock and garage rock in an up-tempo and melodic way, although Pierce was influenced by the relatively new style of no wave. The band and Jeffrey Lee Pierce has been source of inspiration for many artists including Danish Sods / Sort Sol, Thin White Rope, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, and in modern days: The White Stripes. From the early 1980s, I recall, a rather well-known record store in mid-town Copenhagen, who had taken its name from this album's first track: Sex Beat Records.
It's not all great but I really like the singing voice of Jeffrey Lee Pierce, which consists of both an uncertain craziness and a disturbing fragility, and then I'm quite pleased with the garage rock sound on most of the tracks - an element they [or: he] maintained on all albums by the band. Sometimes, however, the band tend to play with too much psychobilly, at least on this album, which make me think of The Cramps. The album is somehow the only by The Gun Club to be included in "1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die". Personally, I don't find it among the band's 3 best.
[ allmusic.com 4,5 / 5, Uncut Magazine 4 / 5 stars ]
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| 2000 remaster |
