In the year 1977, a few (albeit obvious) punk rock groups come to mind that brought the genre to the forefront: The Ramones, The Sex Pistols, The Damned, and (more or less) Television. (More or less in the sense that Television was arguably the first band to break free from the conventional punk rock mould and venture into more artistic territory.)
However, Suicide seemed to have taken a step back ten years, copping the garage rock swagger of Iggy Pop, the meandering psychedelic drones of the Doors and the Velvets, while at the same time utilizing a swirling, adventurous musicality one could only find on a Brian Eno record…but with the production cost of a carton of cigarettes. ((And since I’m rolling, I’ll go ahead and proclaim foreshadowing of the shoegaze boom ten years LATER (“Cheree” sounds eerily like the Spacemen 3 doing a version of “Louie Louie.”))
Finally, all of these influences and pre-cursors have been packaged into an album that’s barely half an hour long.
Pinheads, this is a punk rock album like no other. Believe it. —The7thSon
