![\"\"](\"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/12\/gun_club_miami.jpg\")
I recall sometime in 1982 when a friend attempted to turn me on to The Gun Club\u2019s Miami<\/i>. I wasn\u2019t having it: I got most of the way through \u201cCarry Home,\u201d the album\u2019s opening track, and found myself put off by what I thought of as Jeffrey Lee Pierce\u2019s off-key, tuneless wailing.<\/p>\n
But subsequent years of exposure to music unbound by melodic conventions — plus the appearance of a new and expanded reissue — have necessitated a reconsidering of the album.<\/p>\n
In Pierce’s voice I still hear an an unwillingness (or inability?) to bend to conventional values of melody. But the years have a way of placing art into context. The Gun Club\u2019s minimalist sonic aesthetic \u2013 mostly (but not always) Ward Dotson\u2019s single electric guitar, Terry Graham\u2019s elemental drumming and the kinetic, assertive bass work of Rob Ritter \u2013 is the ideal vehicle for Pierce\u2019s songwriting and vocals.<\/p>\n
That songwriting style falls halfway between cowpunk and Echo and the Bunnymen. There\u2019s a malevolent, minor-key vibe to all of Pierce\u2019s songs, and a twangy punk feel to the tunes. And Pierce\u2019s animalistic howling on a reading of Creedence Clearwater Revival\u2019s \u201cRun Through the Jungle\u201d has antecedence in the Doors\u2019 Jim Morrison, Iggy Pop and Ian McCulloch. His lead guitar on that cover is simple but fiery as well.<\/p>\n
The one-chord, droning approach of tunes like \u201cDevil in the Woods\u201d will either entrance the listener or drive them away. Remarkably, it\u2019s the auxiliary players on Miami<\/em> who help move the music in the direction of accessibility: Mark Tomeo\u2019s pedal steel guitar on \u201cTexas Serenade\u201d and \u201cMother of Earth\u201d lifts the music out of a punk rut, taking the music a place it wouldn\u2019t otherwise go.<\/p>\n And \u201cWatermelon Man\u201d (not<\/i> the Herbie Hancock soul jazz classic) features violinist Walter Steding, though his instrumental work isn\u2019t prominent and ultimately sounds more like a squalling guitar.<\/p>\n Vocalist D.H. Laurence is enlisted throughout the album to add background vocals. And background<\/i> is the operative word here: harmony simply wouldn’t have been possible, not with Pierce\u2019s approach to singing.<\/p>\n Blixa Sounds\u2019 new expanded reissue of Miami<\/i> adds an entire disc\u2019s worth of extras, including demo versions of nearly every song that would appear on the original LP plus some that didn\u2019t make the cut. The demos make plain that most of the band\u2019s arrangement ideas existed fully formed before the band ever went into the studio with producer Chris Stein. Piano \u2013 an instrument buried fairly deeply in Stein\u2019s mix \u2013 shows up more prominently on the demos. In fact, save for bits of studio chatter and a clausttophobic, flat sound, there\u2019s not a world of difference between the demos and Miami<\/i> proper.<\/p>\n In 1982 Miami<\/i> made for an edgy, difficult listen. In 2021 that hasn\u2019t changed, but the album seems less off-putting than it did all those years ago.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I recall sometime in 1982 when a friend attempted to turn me on to The Gun Club\u2019s Miami. I wasn\u2019t having it: I got most of the way through \u201cCarry […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":20299,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[59,64,65],"tags":[4409],"class_list":["post-20298","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-punk","category-reissue","category-review","tag-the-gun-club","cat-59-id","cat-64-id","cat-65-id","has_thumb"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20298","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20298"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20298\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24528,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20298\/revisions\/24528"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20299"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20298"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20298"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20298"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}