X - Wild Gift
#187
By Craig Fitzgerald
X
Wild Gift
Genre: LA Punk
Allen’s Rating: 5 out of 5
Craig’s Rating: 5 out of 5
Highlights:
The Once Over Twice
We’re Desperate
Universal Corner
In This House That I Call Home
Some Other Time
White Girl
Year 1
No band other than the Beatles churned out four records as perfect as X did in this short a span of time.
Not U2.
Not the Rolling Stones.
Not The Who.
Not the Ramones.
Not The Clash.
Maybe the Monkees, and I wouldn’t call those “perfect” records, because there were some forgettable loser tracks on every one of those albums.
This is the second record in that unbroken chain of ideal rock and roll music, and depending on what day you ask, this one is my favorite, making it my favorite record of all 1981 in toto, and maybe my favorite record of the entire 1980s. It’s definitely the one that I play more than anything else.
Los Angeles is a really good record, and it would’ve been easy for this band to fall into a sophomore slump, but there is NO TIME between the release of Los Angeles and Wild Gift. Los Angeles came out in April of 1980 and Wild Gift is recorded in March of ’81, with Ray Manzerek still working away at the knobs in the control room. In Penelope Spheris’s Decline of Western Civilization, which was released in December of 1980, the band plays “We’re Desperate” three months before they ever committed to it acetate.
All of this is to say that you almost need to look at Los Angeles and Wild Gift as a double album. Loads of these songs were in the live catalog before they ever stepped inside a studio. This entire record sounds like a well-rehearsed assault from the opening track to “Year 1,” that unabashedly fun, chorus- and bridge-less 1:18 gasser at the end.
Everything is bigger and louder and fuller on the next album Under the Big Black Sun. That’s a great record, too, with some of my favorite X songs of all time, but it definitely sounds more produced. This one still sounds like it was made by accident, as if someone just happened to have a really good set of mics at a particularly good set at The Masque.
Billy Zoom is as good as he was ever going to be on this album. If you’re a guitar player, try playing the riff on “We’re Desperate.” You’ll BE desperate. Yes, Billy is a great lead player, but his ultimate skills are as a human metronome, and one of the best rhythm players and riff-maker-uppers of all time. It’s all on display here. If there was any guitar player I could play like, it would be him. The way he palm mutes these killer riffs during the lyrics in “Some Other Time,” and then just opens them up to let them ring at full volume in between makes me dizzy.
This is why this band works:
Any of John Doe or Exene Cervenka’s songs could easily slip into singer-songwriter/poetry slam territory:
Beautiful walls are closing in
Looking at you, you're having a nightmare
Stumble over tombstone shoes
I reach to surround you
But it's too soon
But with Billy and DJ Bonebrake at the helm, “In This House That I Call Home” rattles down the tracks like the Yankee Cannonball at Canobie Lake. Yeah, fun, but you might get shot out into the parking lot at any moment, too.
And look at Side 2 here:
In This House That I Call Home
Some Other Time
White Girl
Beyond and Back
Back 2 The Base
When Our Love Passed Out on the Couch
Year 1
That’s a full album for anyone else. Not this band. You have to FLIP THE RECORD OVER to hear those songs. It’s an embarrassment of riches.
But alas, this band is the Freaks and Geeks of 1980s rock and roll. Critics loved it. Fans loved it. Nobody else did. It spent five weeks on the Billboard 200, peaking at 165 on in June. You can see why, though when it’s up against classics like “Mistaken Identity” by Kim Carnes, and “Long Distance Voyager” by the Moody Blues.
What the fuck.
https://open.spotify.com/album/2ECSVdWu5RCvYqIRGA0pyR?si=SdlLhBShT-KyYGm_1Zlh_g
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