Review: RSD Picture Disc Edition of 'Violent Femmes'

Violent Femmes managed to find an unexplored nook of punk's potential when they filtered Buzzcocks sexual angst and attitude through a sieve of gauzy acoustic instruments. The sound was invigorating and fierce but also deeply textured and quite beautiful, spectacularly new yet antiqued. Plus bassist Brian Ritchie proved that punk and virtuosity were not mutually exclusive. Few debut albums are better or more fully realized than Violent Femmes, and forty years down the road, I still can't think of too many bands with the audacity to cop its "folk-punk" sound (although you could probably convince me that Belle & Sebastian would never have existed without "Good Feeling"). 

Review: 'Now Is the Time to Invent! Reports from the Indie-Rock Revolution, 1986-2000'

A big part of running Psychobabble involves trawling the Internet in search of cool-looking upcoming books to review. One that interested me when I came across its pre-order page on Amazon was Now Is the Time to Invent! Reports from the Indie-Rock Revolution, 1986-2000, and I immediately put in a review-copy request with Verse Chorus Press. That was October 2012. For whatever reason, the book didn’t come out that year or the year after that or the year after that. It just kept getting put off, but my interest never waned, because I could never find much retrospective coverage of eighties/nineties indie-rock. In fact, I often feel like that whole scene was some weird dream that only I dreamt, a dream that left behind fab recordings by nocturnal phantasms such as Throwing Muses, Pavement, The Breeders, and Belle and Sebastian. While there’s never been a shortage of nostalgia for all things fifties, sixties, seventies, and eighties, the only thing from the nineties anyone seems to remember is Friends, and Friends sucked.