Violent Femmes – Violent Femmes [40th Anniversary Deluxe Edition] (2023)
Review:
One of the most distinctive records from the first days of alternative rock and an enduring cult classic, Violent Femmes brought the tense, jittery, hyperactive feel of new wave to a then unlikely context: raw, amateurish acoustic instrumentation. The music also owes something to both the urgency and straightforwardness of punk, but with minimalistic drums, Brian Ritchie's busy acoustic bass riffing and simplistic, to-the-point songwriting, the Femmes forged a sound all their own. Still, one of the main reasons Violent Femmes became the musical embodiment of young adult angst is lead singer and songwriter Gordon Gano. Naïve and childish one minute, bitterly frustrated and rebellious the next, Gano's vocals perfectly captured the contradictions of adolescence and the torment of making the transition to adulthood. Clever lyrical flourishes didn't hurt either; while "Blister in the Sun" has deservedly become a standard, "Kiss Off"'s chant-along "count-up" section, "Add It Up"'s escalating "Why can't I get just one..." couplets, and "Gimme the Car"'s profanity-obscuring guitar bends ensured that Gano's intensely vulnerable confessions of despair and maladjustment came off as catchy and humorous as well. The songwriting throughout is no-frills but effective, with straight pop structures like "Please Do Not Go" remaining uncluttered enough for every minute detail to be immediately apparent, and fragile closer "Good Feeling" tender and spacious in the same way the best Velvet Underground ballads were. Arriving right when punk rock was mutating into hardcore, Violent Femmes offered a contrarian counterpoint to the overt aggression of the band's more distorted peers. These incomplex songs played on unamplified wooden instruments carried as much bile as the most ear-shattering punk band, and conveyed it all in a toxic mutter that was all the more intense for its relative quiet. The album helped create what became the template for college rock and subsequent movements in alternative music, and the Violent Femmes would refine and revise the formula that arrived here in its perfect, acerbic form for decades to come. [This expanded deluxe 40th anniversary edition includes remastered versions of the original album, along with early demos for tunes that both made it and were left off of the album, as well as live recordings from early concerts the band performed in 1981 and 1983.] — by Fred Thomas on allmusic.com
Track List:
01 Blister in the Sun
02 Kiss Off
03 Please Do Not Go
04 Add It Up
05 Confessions
06 Prove My Love
07 Promise
08 To the Kill
09 Gone Daddy Gone / I Just Want to Make Love to You
10 Good Feeling
11 Ugly
12 Gimme the Car
13 Girl Trouble (Demo)
14 Breakin’ Up (Demo)
15 Waiting for the Bus (Demo)
16 Blister in the Sun (Demo)
17 Kiss Off (Demo)
18 Please Do Not Go (Demo)
19 Add It Up (Demo)
20 Confessions (Demo)
21 Prove My Love (Demo)
22 Special (Live at Beneath-It-All Café / 1981)
23 Country Death Song (Live at Beneath-It-All Café / 1981)
24 To the Kill (Live at Beneath-It-All Café / 1981)
25 Never Tell (Live at Beneath-It-All Café / 1981)
26 Break Song (Live at the Jazz Gallery / 1981)
27 Her Television (Live at the Jazz Gallery / 1981)
28 How Do You Say Goodbye (Live at the Jazz Gallery / 1981)
29 Theme and Variations (Live at the Jazz Gallery / 1981)
30 Prove My Love (Live at Folk City / 1983)
31 Gone Daddy Gone / I Just Want to Make Love to You (Live at Folk City / 1983)
32 Promise (Live at Folk City / 1983)
33 In Style (Live at Folk City / 1983)
34 Add It Up (Live at Folk City / 1983)
Media Report:
Genre: alternative rock, indie-folk
Country: Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits
Compression mode: Lossless
Writing library: libFLAC 1.2.1 (UTC 2007-09-17)
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