Romeo Void - It's A Condition
#326
July 1981
Romeo Void
It’s a Condition
Genre: New Wave
5 out of 5
Highlights:
Myself to Myself
Nothing for Me
Talk Dirty to Me
White Sweater
Fear to Fear
Another one I took for myself. Sorry, peeps. I just had to.
I’m 16 years old and I keep reading about this album in Trouser Press and elsewhere I think.
And I love that name.
Romeo Void. Is there ever a more descriptive and poignant name for loneliness? Well, I’m sure there is but I’m prone to hyperbole and you know that by now.
I’m at a record store I have never been to before. It’s a few blocks from my parents’ store in Union, NJ.
The bins are full of stuff I’ve heard of but didn’t tempt me. Bands like Misfits who I think I should want to know as they are from Jersey and that logo is spectacular but, instead, there in the used record bin are two items that will help define me for the next immediate future: group:xex by xex and this one.
I get home and play xex first. It takes me weeks to get to the Romeo Void as xex occupies all my attention for what seems like forever.
But, then I get to it.
The incessant percussion of “Myself to Myself” is a rapid fire adrenalin shot and it’s followed by what I can only compare to X if X was a post-rock joint and not a west coast punk band. Yes, Deborah Iyall sounds eerily like Exene Cervenka, except that she can sing. Come to think of it, she doesn’t really sound at all like Exene but what she does have is that pseudo-beat poet aesthetic.
And her lyrics are evocative and sexually provocative but not seduction. Iyall isn’t a temptress. She’s lonely. She’s alienated. And she peels herself like an onion so you can weep with her.
“White Sweater” is the single that was advertised in the back of TP and, upon listening to it today I’m struck by how much the music evokes what Suzanne Vega would be doing but it’s a head fake. Cuz it’s about to become The Feelies but fronted by an art student from San Francisco. And it’s kind of magical. “I went on a blind date….he shoved my face down…I gave him my left knee.” I don’t think Iyall gets the credit for pioneering women’s empowerment the way we give to, say, Ani Difranco. Deborah helped pave the way.
The heroes on this album go beyond Deborah and her plaintive singing. It’s John Haines’ percussion and Benjamin Bossi’s saxophone working in speed junkie rhythm, like a car trying to get out of New York at 4 AM. In many ways this is what you get if Talking Heads was fronted by a woman who is willing to put her emotions on acetate.
The Post-Punk interpolation of “Peter Gunn’s Theme” that merges it with what I can only describe as sounding like REM on “Charred Remains” backed with the post-punk weirdo dance backbeats of “Confrontation” are a two-for that I completely forgot. “I’m too big for a girl, when I smell, I reek” is really…something.
Like any New Wave/Punk record worth it’s salt in the early 80s, there’s a touch of faux-reggae in “Drop Your Eyes” and I can forgive that cuz I find her so charming.
I gave this record 5 stars when I listened to it in 2015. I can’t be unbiased. I think it’s perfect. I think it’s a brilliant representation of the beginning of the 80s while also having a post-rock timelessness that could be released in the last decade.
