I just don't know how well the music of The Gun Club works anymore. What seemed so powerful and raw back in the early Eighties, might seem to some affected now. The group's second album, Miami, has recently been reissued by Blixa Sounds and it's worth a re-visit to answer that question, certainly.
Produced by Chris Stein of Blondie, this album, like Iggy Pop's Zombie Birdhouse, also produced by Stein, marries a New Wave sheen with something far more primitive. The tracks here, blues-inspired, are brighter and more direct than those of era contemporaries The Birthday Party, but the concerns are the same. Jeffrey Lee Pierce wails like a madman on "Like Calling Up Thunder" and a fevered cover of "Run Through The Jungle" by CCR. Those numbers, along with the simple opener "Carry Home", are the highlights of Miami. This is, admittedly an album that's never quite sounded right and, thankfully, this reissue has a nice, crisp sound. The problem remains that the sound, not entirely producer Chris Stein's fault, never quite fit The Gun Club. The band'd later be produced by Robin Guthrie of Cocteau Twins so clearly they were prone to this sort of mis-match. And the late Jeffrey Lee Pierce's apocalyptic crooning really needed a producer who'd stand band and just hit "record", not producers who insisted on taming it.
Still, Miami has a nice energy about it, and it sounds fairly distinctive given how many other things we've heard since 1982 that have pursued this kind of holy madness-vibe. Pierce sounds fully committed to the material here, and if "Watermelon Man" rattles with a nice throwback POV, "Bad Indian" is even better. This is cow-punk of the first order, and an indication of just how much juice was left in The Gun Club even after the departure of guitarist Kid Congo Powers.
This edition of Miami is supplemented with an additional disc of demos from the era. And while there's value in these, they sound like crap. I wasn't exactly expecting stat-of-the-art sound for demos, but these are pitched at such a level that you've got to crank up the volume dramatically on them. One other criticism is on the CD packaging of this set. I rarely mention that sort of thing but the color scheme renders it impossible to actually read the song titles on the back of the case, and the liner notes, printed onto the foldout case itself, are so tiny that they're hard to read. For most of us old enough to even remember this band, that's a big problem. Otherwise, this is a good set and well worth seeking out.
Miami by The Gun Club is out now via Blixa Sounds.
[Photo: Blixa Sounds]