Whatever version of the album you listen to, it’s guaranteed your ears will be ringing. It’s likely your eyes will start watering. And there’s a fair chance paint will start peeling from the walls. Even if you don’t have paint on your walls. It is, put simply, a cacophony of guitar-led noise; seven blistering tracks featuring fuzz, feedback, full tilt grinding guitar, with pulsating and frequently chaotic rhythms underpinning everything. All topped off with punky vocals of varying degrees of clarity and adequacy. Don’t ask me what the songs are about. I probably won’t be able to hear you. And who even knew a three-piece could create this much of a racket?
There was nothing else quite like this album when it was first unleashed upon an unsuspecting local record-buying public back in 1981. Other than perhaps the band’s three-track EP released a year prior. Sure, there was punk and post-punk, both local stuff and releases from overseas, but this album defied all attempts at labelling, and it somehow managed to create a genre all of its own. It was territory nobody else occupied, although the similarly inspired Skeptics would give things a fair old crack later in the decade.
The Gordons – Alister Parker, Brent McLachlan, and John Halvorsen – would eventually morph into Bailter Space (aka Bailterspace), a band with a much wider commercial flavour and appeal, even if the trio’s basic modus operandi didn’t really change all that dramatically.
The album was belatedly but deservedly honoured with the inaugural Taite Music Prize ‘Independent Music NZ Classic Record’ award in 2013.
(The Vinyl Files is a short series of posts covering the best items in your blogger’s not very extensive vinyl collection)
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