Flipper: Generic Flipper [SUPERIOR VIADUCT]

Why you'll love it

Superior Viaduct's reissue includes a printed lyric and credits insert and a band photo sheet with new liner notes by Simon Reynolds. The album reached No. 27 on the UK Indie chart, and Robert Christgau praised it as immensely good-humoured.

This edition

• Lyric and credits insert
• Band photo sheet with new Simon Reynolds liner notes

About the album

In 1982, when most punk bands were racing to see who could play fastest, Flipper went the other way: slow and sludgy, and oddly cheerful about it. The San Francisco band recorded their debut at Hyde Street Studios between Halloween 1980 and August 1981, producing it themselves with Chris and Garry Creiman, and Subterranean Records put it out the following spring.

"Ever" opens with the immortal count-in, "Life Is Cheap" and "Shed No Tears" grind along with a glorious, lurching weight, and "Way of the World" and "Living for the Depression" pile on the noise. Then there's "Life," a sincere, almost sunny song about being glad to be alive, and "Sex Bomb," seven words stretched over nearly eight minutes, which AllMusic compared to "Louie Louie" with a great beat you just can't dance to.

AllMusic called it a funny, harrowing masterwork, and the Melvins and later Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic, who joined Flipper in 2006, both carried its torch. Christgau summed up the lyrics as existential resignation at its most enthusiastic, which is also a fair description of our stockroom on a Monday morning.

Also at Kops: more Flipper on vinyl · browse Punk

Tracklist

Listen

On Superior Viaduct (cat# SV210), a reissue of the 1982 album.