THE GUN CLUB: FIRE OF LOVE (RUBY, 1981)

I was going to make a post about some shoegaze bands I've been listening to lately, but I decided to go more along the lines of Dan's last post.

I attribute my entire musical development to two people: my aunt Susan and my cousin Chris (Susan is Chris' aunt as well, not his mother). Susan tells a lot of stories about me dancing around her kitchen as a baby to David Bowie and Depeche Mode records, and whenever we have family get-togethers at her house we force everyone to listen to shit like the Smiths.

I didn't have tons of contact with my cousin Chris when I was a lot younger, as he is almost 20 years older than me, but for some reason we started hanging out a lot right before I entered high school. In seventh and eighth grade I started listening to stuff like the Sex Pistols, sort of groping around in the dark, trying to learn about music. When this became clear to Chris, who has a pretty encyclopedic knowledge of music, he burned me a big stack of CDs. This specific stack of CDs has greatly informed what I've listened to in the past 7 years and what I continue to listen to. Included were Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds' Kicking Against The Pricks, New York Dolls' New York Dolls, Alice Cooper's Love It To Death, Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures, Kraftwerk's The Man Machine, and The Gun Club's Fire Of Love. Now, I could talk ad nauseam about any of those records but it has come to my attention recently that a number of people I know have never heard Fire Of Love.

When I first heard this record, I thought, "What the fuck is this?" Frontman Jeffrey Lee Pierce speaks, sings, and wails with questionable skill but it doesn't matter; when he says things like, "Gonna buy me a gun just as long as my arm and kill everyone who ever done me harm," over messy blues-punk guitar, I totally believe it. Every raw, aggressive moment seems to suggest something dark, something evil.

I can see where this album fits within the 1980's LA punk scene, and many bands (eg, the White Stripes) have since cited it as a serious influence, but I don't necessarily associate it with any of that in my head; there is definitely something singular about this record that makes it special. To me, there isn't really anything else like it.

To download (via MediaFire):

The Gun Club: Fire Of Love (1981) (Link Fixed: 5 March 2009)