Nomeansno: Sex Mad (pink vinyl)

Why you'll love it

Alternative Tentacles has remastered Sex Mad and pressed this record store edition on opaque pink vinyl. It was the band's first album with guitarist Andy Kerr and their first on Jello Biafra's label, and Canadian writers Barclay, Jack and Schneider said it "roared out of the speakers like few Canadian albums had before."

This edition

Opaque pink vinyl, record store edition
New remaster
Alternative Tentacles pressing (cat# VIRUS 56) with the US running order
Sides labelled This Side and Bat Side, as on the original

About the album

Brothers Rob and John Wright started Nomeansno in Victoria, BC, in 1979 as a two-piece with a habit of playing punk like it was jazz. In 1983 Andy Kerr joined on guitar, bringing what everyone describes as a buzz-saw tone, and in 1985 the trio went into Keye Studios with Craig Bougie, who went on to mix their live sound for almost twenty years. The first pressing came out on Psyche Industry Records in Montreal, with cover art by Kerr; the touring that followed caught the ear of Jello Biafra, and Alternative Tentacles put it out in the US and Europe with a reworked running order. That US order is the one here.

It is a record of sharp turns. The title track and "Dad" (the single that got onto college radio) are tight and furious; "Dead Bob" sneaks in a quote from Cream's "Sunshine of Your Love"; the B side stretches out on "Self Pity" and "Metronome" with the tangled rhythms that made the band a formative influence on math rock and post-hardcore. It has been likened to a psychiatrist's notebook on the hostility under the shiny surface of the 1980s, which is a polite way of saying it is properly intense.

The Western Canadian Music Hall of Fame inducted the band in 2015. A pink pressing of this one is the sort of joke Nomeansno would have enjoyed.