GORDON GANO
Hitting The Ground
Instinct
VIOLENT FEMMES
Violent Femmes
Slash/Rhino
· Hot on the heels of a deluxe reissue of the Violent Femmes’ debut, lead singer Gordon Gano finally makes another record worth listening to.
Isn't it amazing that, 20 years on, the Violent Femmes' first record is still a high school rite of passage? That it has maintained its influence after so many years is a testament to its simplistic perfection. With a healthy Lou Reed obsession and an attempt to play punk on acoustic instruments (or perhaps just a lack of funds to pay for amplifiers), Gordon Gano, Brian Ritchie and Victor J. DeLorenzo stumbled into notebooks and road-trip mix tapes everywhere with 10 three-chord tunes and a $10,000 recording loan from DeLorenzo’s father, Victor Sr.
While each Femmes record afterwards pales in comparison – the de facto greatest hits compilation Add It Up collects just about everything else you’d ever really need – Violent Femmes fully deserves the deluxe double disc treatment it receives here. Accompanied by a suitcase full of previously unheard demos ("Girl Trouble" and "Breakin’ Up" are particularly worthwhile), and rare live tapes from the group’s earliest shows in 1981, Rhino’s Violent Femmes should be gift-wrapped for each of your pubescent cousins sometime soon.
Stepping out on his own (but only sort of), head Femme Gano was drafted to compose the music for Hitting The Ground, an incomplete film project that has since been forgotten and buried. Rather than throw his newest batch of tunes out the window, Gano conscripted others to help complete the record.
Despite the near absence of his voice, Hitting The Ground is unmistakably Gano’s show. PJ Harvey does her best Rock Gordo impression with the snarling title track, while "Oh Wonder" shows off Gano’s oft-neglected knack for the prettiest of ballads (Mary Lou Lord literally sighs her way through it). Living the dream of any Velvet Underground fanatic, Gano has not only managed to snag both John Cale and Lou Reed, but places them side-by-side – Cale’s moody piano run-through of "Don’t Pretend" followed by Reed’s guitar jumble "Catch ’Em In The Act." The juxtapositioning shows just how far apart they’ve grown (no wonder, then, that tensions between the two chopped up VU's 1993 reunion with no further chance of reconciliation).
Granted, Frank Black doesn’t earn any extra points with his dog calls on "Run," and Linda Perry should be grounded for the way she saps "So It Goes" of all subtlety, but in creating what essentially amounts to a self-chosen fantasy tribute album to himself, Gano lives up to the pressures of enlisting his personal favourites to come out and play. When calling on your heroes, you’d better make damn sure you’ve got something good to show them.
VIOLENT FEMMES 5/5
HITTING THE GROUND 4/5
MARK HAMILTON
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