Being a pop culture staple now, many album lists cite “Double Nickles on a Dime” as The Minutemen’s number one release with a bullet. And being that it’s a double album chock full of material, it may seem like the only pieces of vinyl by them you would have to pick up to get a feel for who these guys are.
A few better and much more timely reviews are available from rock-write gods Richard Meltzer and Byron Coley on the topic of this full length, “What Makes A Man Start Fires?” – but I’ll tackle it anyway. After “Paranoid Time” and “The Punch Line,” this LP draws the line between the Pedro boys and a lot of the punk-funk material being released across New York and a whole lot of Europe. The songs are longer, change grooves more and more frequently and have a quality many of those groups lacked; combustion.
Yes, The Minutemen were a rock band and not just a West Coast post-punk outfit per se, or at least not in total. Songs, songs not tracks, like “Fake Contest” and “The Anchor” for a start, have undeniable grooves, and they could be extended dance numbers, but their short, punchy lengths and D Boon’s trebly guitar and spouting keeps them right in their very own proper rock context.
Meltzer: “…they told riffs, both unviable and viable, where to get off; used em’ only as suited their fancy, by which I don’t mean they were fancy ass fashioners, I mean they stripmined their musical souls…” and Coley on upping funky post-punkers: “…brings the band one conceptual step closer to the mainstream and demonstrates a firm grasp of (and delight in) the genre that previous demi-funk sorties inferred.”
For borrowed start/stop grooving of R&B and homemade rock, this is their most fleshed-out effort… and it was probably their transition point! How many groups pull that off? -Wade
