In the musical Little Shop of Horrors, Ellen Greene, singing as Audrey, the long-legged, squeaky-voiced, air-brained chronic victim of domestic abuse at the hands of a sadistic dentist boyfriend, rhapsodizes about making a home - a matchbox of our own, a fence of real chain link - with Seymour, the nerdy kid from the flower shop where she works, who's suddenly made a fortune by lovingly nurturing a man-eating plant from outer space. It's a sweet little song called "Somewhere That's Green", where a girl's wildest dreams of common domesticity poignantly reflect her lowered expectations. She doesn't aspire to a glittering mansion on the sea, but a tiny ranch house in the suburbs where she and Seymour and the kids can eat their TV dinners and watch I Love Lucy, on a "big, enormous 12 inch screen."

On Wild Gift (released in 1981), the second album by the seminal LA punk band X, band leaders and real life then-newlyweds John Doe and Exene Cervenka play out like a real life Audrey and Seymour, two misunderstood social outcasts with "artistic" temperaments singing brutalized love songs on marriage and cohabitation - the stifled crushes ("White Girl") and rejections (the gorgeous opener "The Once Over Twice") and just-post-marital tensions (the hilariously cathartic "Beyond and Back") while toughing it out in the skiddiest skid row imaginable, a place of drunks, cruising gays, junkies, and totally villainous landlords.

"My whole life is a fucking wreck!" they wail, over a jagged little grand mal jitter of a riff and D.J. Bonebreak's precisely chaotic rhythms on the album's lead single: "We're desperate. Get used to it!" If their atomic fireball of a debut album (1980's Los Angeles) presented a dark vision, succinct as a knife wound, of impending urban apocalypse at the first dawning of Reagan's morning in America, Wild Gift is something more modest, more personal, and because of that, more funny and beautiful and depressing as well. Like Audrey and Seymour, John and Exene are trapped in their circumstances; but where Audrey actually has a precise, achingly detailed vision of her own personal paradise, all these two can do is cry out - Landlord! Landlord! Landlord! - that they "need a new address."

In fact, Wild Gift and Little Shop of Horrors, surprisingly, have much in common musically as well - at least conceptually speaking - in that both represent an loving, well-observed excavation of classic 50s-into-early-60s rock n' roll forms that's both nostalgic and disillusioning. But where Little Shop dresses its heartbreaking ironies in comic book colors and high production values to meet the mandates of the musical theater, Wild Gift's tommy gun beats and serrated rockabilly guitar assault (by Billy Zoom, doing his best impression of a coked up Cliff Gallup), not to mention the almost uniformly frantic tempos, are pure punk rock, as violent and dirty as the LA scene the band emerged from, even when the domestic malaise of songs like the super-catchy "In This House That I Call Home" and the sweetly poetic "When Our Love Passed Out on the Couch" (how's that for an image?) might be better suited to old-timey country songs (a direction the band would increasingly explore on later albums) or Carson McCullers novels.

Appropriately, the songs have a stronger melodic focus, but John and Exene's vocals still have a despairingly unpretty quality to them - not so much singing, as wailing and moaning, always just a tad flat on the pitch - which is only heightened by the seeming inadvertence of their not-always-harmonic harmonies. And nearly everything sounds like a battered approximation of something you might hear on the oldies station. On "Adult Books" John Doe comes on like a powder-blue-tuxedo wedding singer in the verses, crooning an unlikely tribute to Valley of the Dolls author Jacqueline Susann over a Latin-tinged rhythm cribbed from a million and one 1950s prom songs (think Ricky Nelson's "Travelin' Man"); while the closing "Year 1" is one minute and 18 seconds of unadulterated, hand-clappin', surf-rockin', end-of-times bliss, whose inexorable drive to destruction and/or violent revolution is interrupted only long enough to lovingly plagiarize a riff by rebel rousing guitar god Duane Eddy.

The end result is another punk rock masterpiece, just as powerful as their debut, and more accessible to boot. In 2001, Rhino Records reissued all of X's Slash and Elektra albums, all augmented by liner notes including commentary by Exene and John, and, of course, bonus tracks, which on this release include the single mixes of "We're Desperate", "White Girl", and "The Once Over Twice" along with a couple of live tracks, which, if nothing else, prove that the band were as tight and intense live as they come across on record - and a fantastic demo of the song "Blue Spark", which would turn up on their next album...

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BECAUSE YOU NEED TO KNOW:

"Wild Gift" by X
Slash / Rhino Records
Originally Released 1981
Reissued 2001

Produced by Ray Manzarek
Original Album: 33 min.
With Bonus Tracks: 50 min.

SONGS: The Once Over Twice - We're Desperate - Adult Books - Universal Corner - I'm Coming Over - It's Who You Know - In This House That I Call Home - Some Other Time - White Girl - Beyond and Back - Back 2 the Base - When Our Love Passed Out on the Couch - Year 1 /BONUS: Beyond and Back (live) - Blue Spark (demo) - We're Desperate (single) - Back 2 the Base (live) - Heater (rehearsal) - White Girl (single) - The Once Over Twice (unissued single)

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MORE BY X:

Los Angeles (1980)



Recommended: Yes