VIOLENT FEMMES - KISS OFF (1983)

Musically, the VIOLENT FEMMES were a compound of numerous threads, elements and styles. A marriage of Jonathan Richman & the Modern Lovers, Lou Reed & the Velvets, some early Loudon Wainwright, and a dab of early Talking Heads wouldn’t be far off the mark. Singer, songwriter and guitarist Gordon Gano was an astute chronicler of adolescent frustrations in a new era of teenage psychosis. The combination of Gano’s low-key Velvet-ish guitar, lyrics that combined romantic pathos and black humour, Brian Ritchie’s mariachi bass, and Victor DeLorenzo’s junkyard drumset created a uniquely invigorating sound, drawing on elements of folk, pop, jugband and blues, and tied together by the basic punk minimalist approach. As a whole, Violent Femmes dealt with some of the worst things you can feel - hate, rejection, insecurity and alienation. And yet Gano had taken this negativity, said no to nihilism, put his heart on his sleeve, and moulded it into something that wasn’t ’down’ at all. The video here is KISS OFF, track two