Gun Club: Miami [BLIXA SOUNDS]

Why you'll love it

This standard LP reissue comes with a printed sleeve of archival photos and the full lyrics. Blondie's Chris Stein produced the album for his own Animal label, Debbie Harry sang backing vocals under a pseudonym, and NME ranked it among the top 50 albums of 1982.

This edition

• Standard single LP, 12 tracks
• Printed sleeve with archival photos
• Full lyrics printed

About the album

Not many punk bands from L.A. got a Blondie guitarist to produce their second album and the singer of Blondie to sing backup on it, but the Gun Club were never much like other bands. Chris Stein had his own Animal imprint by 1982, and he brought the Gun Club into Blank Tape in New York that June to make the follow-up to Fire of Love, with Debbie Harry dropping in on backing vocals under the cheeky credit "D.H. Laurence, Jr." and fiddle and steel guitar adding a dusty, gothic Americana edge to the band's swampy punk.

The songs are where it really lives: "Carry Home," "Bad Indian," "Like Calling Up Thunder" and "Mother Earth" (which, the story goes, left a mark on Billy Idol's "White Wedding"), plus a fevered run at John Fogerty's "Run Through the Jungle." NME put it in its top 50 of 1982, Q called it "perhaps their most coherent" album, and its long shadow falls across just about every band since that has tried to marry the Cramps, Robert Johnson and a cheap motel neon sign. Pierce's voice is the main event, wild and haunted, and on a plain old LP with the lyrics in front of you it sounds every bit as strange and wonderful as it did 40-odd years ago.

"perhaps their most coherent"
Q

On Blixa Sounds/Manifesto (cat# ETA898), a reissue of the 1982 album.