The Wanderers - Only Lovers Left Alive
#186
May 18 1981 LISTENING POST DISCOVERY
The Wanderers
Only Lovers Left Alive
Genre: GarageRockPunk
4.5 out of 5
Highlights:
No Dreams
Take Them and Break Them
Ready to Snap
Sold Your Soul for Fame
There’ll Be No Tomorrow
Requisite 80s cover: “The Times They Are a Changin’”. In the context here, of dystopia and governmental oppression it’s stellar. It’s like the double A Side of My Chemical Romance’s “Desolation Row”. Unlike others who cover Dylan, it’s when the punks get their hands on his anger that they really get to the core. This is a dynamite track, right where it belongs. In the middle of this record.
Before American Idiot foisted it’s thematically conceptual punk opus on the world, Stiv Bators and the guys from Sham 69 got together and made this laser focused punk concept album about a kid who discovers that who really controls the world and it’s everything his solo album wasn’t. It’s a punk Quadrophenia. I can’t imagine that any punks wanted to hear…um…string and synth-horn arrangements…but man is it dynamite. It’s a garage record with an eye on theatricality. Like his solo album it exposes Bators’ more pop impulses. He wanted to make music that people wanted to buy, not just be a punk relic. But is there anything more “punk” than being against authority, writing an album about it and blowing apart the expectations of what “punk” is or was? The Wanderers sound like they could stand on the same stage as The Ramones and, at first glance you would think, yeah, that’s what they sound like. But, there’s so much more in here.
The production is way too much, too compressed and too much effects on…everything, but, this album delivers. There are so many other sounds in here from Love and Rockets to Graham Parker, Bators mixed punk tropes and kicked them into the 80s. He was way ahead of the curve and I’m pretty sure he doesn’t get any of the respect he deserves.
But he does deserve it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWcQli8zHcI
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