release date: 1983
format: cd (1997 reissue)
[album rate: 3,5 / 5] [3,48]
producer: Mond (aka Ray Cowie)
label: Summit - nationality: England, UK
Track highlights: 1. "Woman in Disguise" - 3. "Waiting, Haiting" - 4. "Reason Why" - 5. "Nobody Was Saved" - 7. "Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner" - 8. "42nd Street" - 10. "Solidarity"
3rd studio album by Angelic Upstarts with guitarist and main musical songwriter Ray Cowie as producer originally released on Anagram. The '97 reissue comes with two bonus tracks.
The band has taken a move away from the initial (primitive) punk rock toward more harmony-founded melodies, which could be described as pop punk, but they still play anarcho-punk songs with strong social commitment.
The album was my first encounter with the band, and it was an immediate favourite for several years in the 80s. However, the music hasn't aged that well, and today many of the songs appear as rather naïve compositions tied closely to the early 1980s Thatcher England. And the album came out at a time when music had moved elsewhere - production-wise and also stylistically. The band continued to play, and as of 2014, they still play live concerts, however after Reason Why? the band sort of vanished from the British clubs and instead focussed on a growing popularity in the Eastern European countries, and especially in the Balkan area Angelic Upstarts aas well as many other punk rock bands faced great support in the mid to late 80s.
In retrospect, the album lives its own life as what could be described as a 'time stamp'.
