Nomeansno – Wrong (1989)

Here we have another west coast band, except it’s the west coast of CANADA bitches. And let me tell you, this fucking band. Holy shit. I’m gonna go ahead and say this is a top 10 album I’ve covered so far, probably top 5 tbh. It’s SO GOOD.

Ok so these guys had been around for a while before this, they had a few other albums dating back to 1982, and they have more after this, much of it looks to be rated pretty highly, but I’m only covering this one, deal with it. Fwiw this album is widely considered the band’s best.

The band was originally formed as a duo by two brothers, Rob Wright (bass) and John Wright (drums). And even though they eventually added a guitarist to make it a trio (Andy Kerr) the origins are clearly reflected in the bass-n-drums focus of the music.

The obvious precursor to this band’s sound is the Minutemen. There’s a similar level of ridiculous technical ability, although Nomeansno is much heavier, but they still have a strong focus on fast tricky musical passages executed super precisely. And the production of the album, also similar to how the Minutemen’s albums sound, is really close sounding, bringing out the clear details of all the instruments while still being heavy af. And even the band’s sense of humor and vocal style is pretty similar to the Minutemen. These guys have that feeling like they’re always half-joking (I tend to like bands like this as you may know). After all there’s a song here called “Big Dick”, lmao. Now I think the two brothers probably trade off lead vocals, but I can’t really tell the difference. But they sound like a cross between the Minutemen guy with a little Jello Biafra thrown in there. (Also, they’re on Alternative Tentacles, Biafra’s record label – coincidence?)

These songs are absolute crushers, literally every single one of them. They absolutely rip through this material with a thrilling intensity. Some of these tracks are shorter & faster and sound more like “hardcore punk” but there’s a lot of metal influence in their sound too. And these guys can groove really fucking hard too. One of my favorite songs here is “Rags and Bones”, which is actually one of the more “jokey” sounding cuts, but there are some ridiculously funky grooves in there, and then that chorus with the vocal harmonies is an absolute A+.

This is one of those situations where it’s really awesome to see all the different things they can do with such a simple trio set-up. Most of the songs don’t really vary much in terms of the sounds/timbres of the instrumentation. Rather, the album’s feeling of variety is due to the actual musical content being so interesting, which I think is fuckin great ftr. But then when you least expect it they put in some weird shit, specifically on the track “The End of All Things” there are acoustic guitar overdubs and female backing vocals – but yet the song remains an absolute heavy crusher, somehow.

Anyway folks I can’t emphasize enough how much of an absolute CRUSHER this album is. I’m not including any more of these guys’ albums but I’m definitely gonna check some more out eventually on my own time.

Does Bang want to listen to this? YES.

Anyway folks this wraps it up for the 80s. 90s are next in a lil while

Bad Religion – No Control (1989)

Coming out the next year, this album is very much Suffer part 2. 15 songs, 26 minutes – do the math, most of these songs are under two minutes, some even less than 1 minute long. And we have basically the exact same tone and feel as the previous album.

As a result I don’t really have much to say about this album that I didn’t already say about Suffer. If you like this band’s sound, this album is every bit as good as the last one ftr. The band has a terrific sense of energy and forward momentum throughout the whole album, with the same sort of “uncanny sadness” in the melodies as we’ve heard before.

Even though almost all these songs are so similar to each other in terms of rhythm/tempo, the album doesn’t wear itself out because it’s so short. They very occasionally change things up, like the song “Sanity” which is slower and at almost 3 minutes long, with two different guitar parts, it’s practically prog rock in comparison to the rest of the album. (Note: it’s not actually prog rock.) With these simple but effective power chord based songs, this band truly feels like they are carrying the torch of the Ramones-philosophy of punk rock (music-wise that is, not in their lyrics).

As before, this band’s relentless political message is that humanity is doomed and we’re a bunch of dumb idiots. Only on a couple of tracks do they get personal at all, such as “Billy” which is about a kid who gets hooked on drugs and is apparently semi-autobiographical by guitarist Brett Gurewitz.

Say what you will about Bad Religion but they fucking KNEW exactly what they wanted to do, and they did it. Their musical identity is fully cohesive and consistent. And I’m not gonna lie this shit is just enjoyable to listen to on a basic level.

Does Bang want to listen to this? YES.

Fugazi – 13 Songs (1988 & 1989)

You may be aware (as I vaguely was) that Ian MacKaye of Minor Threat formed a new band called Fugazi later in the 80s. Actually the creative helm of this group seems to be split roughly evenly between MacKaye and another guitarist/vocalist, Guy Picciotto. They alternate lead vocals and, I assume, songwriting, although the writing is not individually credited.

This album is actually a compilation of Fugazi’s first 2 EPs, s/t (1988) and Margin Walker (1989).

Ok well you can’t even begin discussion of this album without talking about “Waiting Room”, the first track here, which is Fugazi’s most famous song – when I first heard it I was like “oh yeah, this song”. Now boys and girls, let me tell you, this song is an absolute fucking MASTERPIECE. No exaggeration, it’s literally perfect. It’s incredibly heavy, and the pacing & momentum of it is just incredible. The heavy brutality of the guitar chords, the powerful vocal performance by MacKaye, the playful accents and transitions throughout – I have been compulsively listening to just this song every so often for the past few weeks. Absolute top recommendation.

Now you better get used to that sort of half-reggae groove they use in that song, because almost all of MacKaye’s songs have basically that exact same rhythm. But tbh I wouldn’t even call that a problem – hey the guy found a fuckin beat that he really likes, and the band plays it so well (and it’s a short album anyway) that it doesn’t wear itself out.

The only problem with the other 12 songs on the album is that they come after “Waiting Room” and they inevitably fall under its shadow. But really everything here is good. I would say probably my 2nd favorite song here is also one of MacKaye’s: “Suggestion”, an explicitly feminist song about male sexual aggression that is surprisingly ~woke~ for the time and zeitgeist in which it came out.

Picciotto’s songs are more diverse but somehow a bit less memorable. His vocals are definitely weaker (MacKaye by this point has matured into an incredibly powerful rock vocalist imo, a big step from his teenage years in Minor Threat). But Picciotto’s songs are all good and feel inventive, with interesting & dissonant riffs. His stuff seems to foreshadow the grunge movement a bit I think.

Folks this is a real good one. Worth mentioning also that the production is really good and raw (especially on the s/t) really bringing out this band’s natural heaviness and locked-in grooves.

Does Bang want to listen to this? YES.

Operation Ivy – s/t (comp. 1987-1989)

Here’s another group, like Minor Threat and Scratch Acid, who were so short-lived that their complete discography can be compiled on a single CD release.

Ok so where do I start with this band. I guess the first thing is that they were extremely influential in terms of developing that “90s punk” sound that I was exposed to in my younger days (but was never really a fan of). In particular, this stuff is considered like the urtext for 90s ska-punk, or what’s sometimes called “third wave ska”. As I understand it (correct me if I’m wrong), the “first wave” is like actual ska from Jamaica, the “second wave” was the British ska stuff from the late 70s like the Specials, and now the third wave is this kind of stuff, which is derived from the California hardcore & skate punk scenes in the late 80s.

This compilation is actually in reverse chronological order, so first it’s the 1989 LP Energy, then the 1988 EP Hectic, then a couple early tracks from 1987 at the end. Now I’m not gonna talk about each release separately, since there is actually not really much stylistic difference – these guys had a distinctive style from the beginning and stuck to it for the few years they were around.

I wouldn’t exactly call this hardcore punk, although it has clear ties to hardcore. Namely, there are a couple (not many, but a couple) tracks that have that super-fast hardcore tempo. And also the vocals are pretty screamy, further tying this to hardcore. Although actually the vocals themselves are sort of symbolic of the transition from hardcore punk to skate or ska-punk – it’s sort of like an aggressive throaty scream, but also heading in the direction of what I will dub the “90s melodic california whine” that you can hear in bands like Blink-182 or countless other generic bands that Kuge has forced me to review.

In fact, the lyrics and subject matter are somewhat transitional too in a similar way, now that I think about it. Many of these songs cover topics that wouldn’t be unfamiliar to say, Black Flag or Minor Threat, such as anti-authority, anti-police, anti-war, anti-conformity. There are songs about the shitty inequality in the city, and the grind of capitalism. But at the same time there’s shit like “Gonna Find You” which is about getting in trouble at school, lmao. So similar to some other California punk we’ve seen in the past few years (e.g. Bad Religion, the Descendents) we can see that the audience for this music, increasingly, is explicitly suburban teenagers.

There’s something I just have to come out and say though, which is that on a basic level, the “90s ska-punk sound” (yes I know technically late 80s) is just something that doesn’t appeal to me at all, and it never did. When they do those uptempo ska beats with that distinctive rapid-fire vocal delivery, I know this was an iconic and influential style, and was ripped off by countless bands (for example early Sublime is VERY obviously derivative of this). So this gets high points for historical value. But I just don’t fucking like listening to it at all, lmao.

The most well known Operation Ivy song (and probably the best imo) is the very first track here, “Knowledge”. Many other songs here are filled with simple major-key power chords, riffs, melodies, and chant-along choruses. One funny curiosity is an Ironic Cover of a Song from the Sixties (ICOASFTS™) which is Nancy Sinatra’s “One of These Days” (you know, “these boots are made for walkin”). But the funny thing is that none other than MEGADETH already did an ironic cover of this song in 1985, and it was way better ffs. Do you think these guys really didn’t know about that? Were the punk and metal cultures so completely separated that these guys wouldn’t be aware that this exact idea had already been done by a major band? Who knows

Does Bang want to listen to this? Not really if I’m being honest

The Cure – Disintegration (1989)

Here it is boys, the MOST popular and acclaimed Cure album.

Now coming off the previous double album, this one may just be a “single” album but it’s quite long. In fact the original “LP version” is nearly a full hour (I didn’t think LPs could hold that much? Idk, maybe by the late 80s they had more capacity?) and the CD version is even longer, nearly a maxed out CD length. So really this is just as ambitious a project as the previous one.

The band’s sound is more cohesive and focused than ever here, despite losing a longtime member (Lol Tolhurst – replaced on keyboards by Roger O’Donnell). The familiar sound of Robert Smith’s echoey clean picked guitar patterns blend with the synth sounds to create some gloomy ass atmospheres as you might expect.

At this point the Cure had pretty much worked out both of the major elements that define them – catchy/memorable pop tunes, as well as more musically ambitious atmospheric instrumental stuff. And there’s no better microcosm of both of these attitudes combined than the track “Pictures of You” which has a super catchy melody but is also over 7 minutes long and has lots of space to develop its instrumental groove.

On the most extreme “pop” end of the spectrum we have “Lovesong” which became the most famous Cure song ever, even I recognized it ffs. It even hit #2 on the mainstream US charts, meaning this is officially normie music. It’s actually an uncharacteristically straightforward love song, no the title is not meant to be ironic as far as I can tell. It’s ok

But then on the other extreme you have some real whoppers that are upwards of 7, 8, or even 9 minutes that take their sweet time and build some real rich atmospheres. Actually I think my favorite track of all here is “Prayers for Rain” – that low arpeggio guitar pattern is DARK as fuck. Some real heavy shit if you ask me. And there’s some other weird dark shit here like the song “Lullaby” where Robert Smith sings the whole thing in a weird whisper voice, and it’s about a nightmarish story of a “spiderman” coming to get you in the night, apparently something his awful grandfather used to tell him to scare him lmao.

All throughout the album I gotta give props to the drummer Boris Williams who brings different approaches to basically every track, like there’s one track where he’s just doing like tom rolls the whole time, no “rock” beat at all. Other times he’s doing various syncopated rhythms and shit. He’s good

Anyway listen folks the Cure are never gonna be my favorite band. I’ve liked a few of their albums, and been lukewarm on others. This one is definitely one of the best however.

Does Bang want to listen to this? Aight

Cardiacs – On Land and in the Sea (1989)

Just a year after A Little Man, the Cardiacs put this one out, another ambitious and complex album – these guys were impressively prolific. This one seems to have the highest reputation of any Cardiacs album ftr, although in terms of stylistic development this is very similar to the previous album. Perhaps it’s more about ~refinement~ than innovation.

If anything the songs on this album are even a bit more manic and spastic sounding, with faster tempos, it’s like they doubled down on their weirdness. But at the same time there aren’t too many surprises. Tim Smith continues to yammer out indecipherable lyric after lyric over musical phrases that are unpredictable and complex. The Zappa-worship continues just as strongly as before (just listen to that instrumental part at the end of “Baby Heart Dirt” – pure Zappa) and the album even ends with another Genesis-esque symphonic finale, just like the previous album did.

The most notable difference in production is that the sound seems to be limited here to just the 6 band members (guitar/bass/drums/saxophone/keyboard/percussion) without the additional instrumental help like strings etc that they had last time. So the sound is a little less dense but it’s still got a lot going on.

If there’s one thing I’m not super in love with it’s Tim Smith’s vocals, like it’s not a deal breaker but you gotta admit the guy’s voice is kind of abrasive and ~wacky~ sounding which is probably not for everyone lol. Anyway there’s not much I can say about this that I didn’t already say about A Little Man. It’s good

Does Bang want to listen to this? Ok

New Order – Technique (1989)

Well if you’ve been following along with New Order you won’t be terribly surprised with this one, it’s another solid album by this band, in a similar style to before. If anything the electronic stuff on this album is even more “electronic-y” than ever before, which is immediately clear from the very first track (which is a pretty hot beat iyam). Sometimes this gets pretty extreme with the 80s electronic cheese sound, like just listen to those synths on “Round & Round”, lmao, it’s that ridiculous “fake orchestra hit” sound that you gotta love (or hate). Now let it be known that I skipped a New Order album, Brotherhood (1986) so idk exactly where that falls in the development of their sound, but somehow I think you guys will forgive me for that omission.

Now these guys always sort of included some more natural instrument sounds in contrast to the electronic experiments, and if anything the division is more clear here than ever before – the songs on the album seem to alternate between the more clearly “electronic” tracks and the clearly “natural” sounding tracks with real (sometimes acoustic) guitars, more natural sounding drums and bass, etc. So that keeps things interesting although I find myself preferring the more electronic stuff at this point.

One interesting bit of trivia on this album is that the song “Run” is credited to “New Order/John Denver”, lmao, that’s because John Denver sued them for ripping off his song “Leaving on a Jet Plane” (jd he wrote that). Now in my professional opinion this is officially NOT a ripoff, it’s just one short melodic phrase that is similar, and the chords are different, and it’s a pretty simple phrase anyway. This is definitely a case of John Denver being an overly litigious asshole :down:

Anyway I recently realized that when I was originally compiling this list, I overlooked THE most popular and acclaimed New Order album, which is the singles compilation Substance. Oopsies! Some of you might be relieved to know that I’m perfectly fine just letting that one slide. Anyway New Order continued to make albums every few years after this, in fact they’re still together to this day but I’m gonna say goodbye to them here. Obviously this stuff diverged pretty far from what’s normally considered “punk rock” but I just had to make fully sure I was giving the whole Joy Division phenomenon a fair shake, and I’m glad I did. I ~learned something~

Does Bang want to listen to this? Sure, I guess.

Bad Religion – Suffer (1988)

All right folks it’s about time we got around to this band. Now I have had some limited exposure to these guys when I was younger, enough to be familiar with their extremely distinctive sound, but I never really listened to them very much.

Since Gloob and Madchef excoriated me for omitting the first Bad Religion album, I’m including it here as well, so you can consider this a ~2-in-1~ review. Both of these albums are super short anyway (under 30 minutes) so it’s simple enough just to do them together.

So anyway their first album was How Could Hell Be Any Worse? (1982). These guys were a good example of how “skate punk” grew out of the L.A. hardcore scene, along with their contemporaries like the Descendents. Even more so than on their later stuff, you can hear the hardcore origins, especially in the vocals (which are a bit screamier/raspier) and their use of sudden tempo changes, also something that is related to hardcore afaik. But famously these guys had a distinctive sense of melody that set them apart, and even here on this early album you can hear those minor-key melodies that paradoxically give the energetic music a sort of melancholy feel.

So this album is interesting to hear the origins of the band, and the development of their distinctive style, but I’m gonna be honest folks I wasn’t wrong to leave this one out, it’s not THAT good ffs. The biggest problem with it is that the first song is by FAR the best song on the album, and the album gets a little boring after that due to inconsistent songwriting. Now it is true that this album was super influential (apparently it was one of Zack de la Rocha’s favorite albums as a teenager), and I can understand how the relentlessly pessimistic political messages of these songs could resonate with ~disaffected youths~ in suburban California. And the numerous songs criticizing religion and televangelists are charmingly dated. But lbh this band got way better in the later 80s.

Interestingly there are some things they do here that they would abandon later as they refined their sound. Actually that first song “We’re Only Gonna Die” has a nice middle section where they slow it down and bring in acoustic guitars and even piano. Also throughout the album there’s a leaning toward a sort of hard rock influence in some of the guitar work, which you can hear in a riff here, a lick there, etc. There’s also way more emphasis on lead guitar/soloing than I’m used to hearing from Bad Religion.

Apparently the following year these guys did a bizarre 180 and released a fucking PROG ROCK album called Into the Unknown which features a space scene/planets on the front cover and has a pretty terrible reputation, lmao actually I’m kinda curious about it but I’m gonna skip it for now. Anyway the band broke up soon after and fans thought Bad Religion was done for good.

But in the later 80s these guys reunited, all the same guys actually (with the addition of a 2nd guitarist), and they put out Suffer. Let me tell you, listening to these two albums back to back, the difference is as clear as night and day. This album absolutely WHIPS ass. This is the sound of a band finally “finding their sound” and single-mindedly refining it. The various musical frills that they had experimented with in the past are GONE, and here we have 15 short and powerful songs that just hit you BAM one after the other. Every song here is better than every song on the first album. Right away on the first track “You Are (The Government)” you can tell this is gonna be something special. First of all the production is obviously better, but more importantly the music is better too. The riffs are more powerful and distinctive, and especially the melodies are absolutely terrific, catchy, and with a bit of an uncanny darkness to them.

Now sure you could say this album feels a little “samey” but when the songs are this good (and the album is this short) it doesn’t matter. In the title track when he says “the masses of humanity have always had to suffer,” man, you believe it.

One thing I think is kinda funny is that compared to the first album, the lyrics here mostly cover the same topics (humanity is doomed and it’s all our own dumbass fault), but this time around they are heavily “thesaurusized”, so you get gems like “phantasmal myriads of sane bucolic birth” and “you’re a sidewalk cipher speaking prionic jive”, lmao.

It’s also worth pointing out that the cover art places this album explicitly in suburbia – increasingly the primary audience for punk rock heading into the 90s, rather than cities. (Also I think Green Day spent their entire career ripping off the song “What Can You Do?”)

Does Bang want to listen to this? YES.

Cardiacs – A Little Man and a House and the Whole World Window (1988)

All right Prowler here’s the fuckin Cardiacs. Now these guys apparently had a bunch of stuff before this on self-released cassette tapes, but this is kinda their first “real” album I guess. (Correct me if I’m wrong prow)

The frontman and brains behind the operation is singer/guitarist Tim Smith, and the band also includes his brother, his wife, and some other guys too, making a 6-piece band. Not only that but there are additional musicians credited here, and the result is a ridiculously dense and lush sound, with layers upon layers of guitars, synths, horns, woodwinds, strings, percussion, you name it.

The style of this music is pretty much impossible to pin down. Notoriously these guys are alternately called a prog-rock band, and a punk/post-punk band. Tbh to my ears a lot of this stuff really is just straight prog-rock. These compositions are intricate, detailed, and filled with incredibly precise and note-perfect flights of fancy, reminding me a lot of Frank Zappa, who is obviously a huge influence on these guys. One minute they’ll be doing one thing, and the next they’ll launch into something completely different sounding (but if you listen closely there are often musical themes that tie the different sections together). The basic sound is “rock” but they have a pretty hilarious tendency to lapse into like goofy circus-music, which guarantees this album a score of F-minus on the Fizz Party Test™. However there is some stuff a little more toward the “normal” end of the scale, in particular the single “Is This the Life?” which is apparently their most famous song and was a “minor hit”, although idk exactly what that means.

Anyway to make the prog-rock connection even clearer, the final track on the album is a slow, climactic, almost symphonic track that could easily be confused for Gabriel-era Genesis.

Now I know punk is a broad umbrella, but tbh it’s definitely a reach to call these guys punk (I’m still glad I included them because I’ve always meant to check them out). I guess there’s a basic level on which Tim Smith often falls back on a basic punk-derived rhythm guitar vocabulary, but it’s never very emphasized. probably the most obvious example of this is the opening to the song “Dive” which starts with some very Ramones-esque power chords but then quickly winds up somewhere completely different.

It’s worth mentioning that this is extremely lyrics-heavy music. Nearly every song contains lengthy verse after verse of lyrics, almost all of which are seemingly intentionally cryptic and opaque, and I can’t even begin to try to decipher them, nor do I particularly want to. They seem to convey a general sense of post-punk alienation (hey, there’s another connection). The only song which seems to make any literal sense is the first one: “I don’t really want to go in tomorrow / The man will tell me off for leaving early yesterday.” Hey now there’s a working-class gripe I can identify with.

But for the most part when I listen to this I’m not even attempting to follow the lyrics. But the good news is that the music itself is interesting enough that it tells its own story. A lot of these tracks seem ~random~ at first but if you re-listen you’ll hear the connections you may have missed the first time. I have to say this band is really cool, I can see why people might get totally obsessed with them because they’re weird enough to sort of build their own unique music-world in a Zappa-esque way (not to mention the actual musical debt to Zappa).

Does Bang want to listen to this? YES.

Big Black – Songs About Fucking (1987)

Big Black’s 2nd and final LP is their most famous and popular. I have to suspect that the iconic title and cover art are at least partially responsible for the album’s notoriety, and it’s a certified attention-grabber that’s for sure.

Musically this contains approximately zero surprises however. It’s basically just Atomizer part 2. If anything it’s actually not quite as good imo – some of those grooves on Atomizer were truly savage, and there isn’t anything on SAF quite as good as the best of the first album. But if you enjoy this sound this is certainly a consistent and enjoyable album.

As before, this consists of aggressive, riff-based songs and industrial/electronic drum beats. Everything is distorted and noisy, including guitars, bass, and vocals. Fsr I’ve always felt that when you run bass guitar through distortion, it dulls the deep bass frequencies of it, and for that reason I usually find it to be a bad choice. But I suppose these guys are willing to sacrifice that for the sake of sheer noisiness and aggression.

Also as before the lyrics are intentionally provocative and sure to offend parents all over America (well, the lyrics would offend them if they could understand them), covering sex, violent, and violent sex. (Indeed many of these songs are about fucking, but then again that was true of the previous album as well.) I had to look up what a “Colombian necktie” is, apparently it’s when the Colombian mafia slits your throat and then pulls your tongue out of the opening so that it hangs down your chest like a necktie :ughstrosity: So that gives you a sense of the tone of these lyrics.

Overall I think I expected to like this album more than I actually did, due to the notoriety of the cover, which – let’s be honest – is pretty much a masterpiece. Musically I appreciate these guys influence maybe more than I actually enjoy listening to the music. Certainly I prefer Atomizer if I’m ever gonna listen to Big Black again.

Does Bang want to listen to this? Sure.