Violent Femmes (1983)
12 tracks, 44 minutes (1987 CD version)
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If you prefer your punk to be high-brow, intelligent and insightful, the Violent Femmes’ is not the album for you.
The songs on Violent Femmes are immature dipping into childish. They whinge and whine about trivial stuff and get unreasonably angry about general facts of life. Listening to it as a not-17-year-old-boy, when I listen to these lyrics, I think ‘wow this guy sounds like a tedious, dangerous loser.’ I mean, the highlight of the set, ‘Add It Up’ could literally be the incel anthem, if incels had any notion of art or culture or beauty. But guess what? I was actually a 17-year-old boy once, for my sins. And although I didn’t agree with a lot of what frontman Gordon Gano is singing about, I definitely understood the emotional core of it, and I still do, really. The words are basically silly teenage edginess but performed in a really relatable way – there’s a real catharsis in listening to this album that makes that 17-year-old inside me feel spoken to at least a little bit. Everyone’s inner 17-year-old deserves a bit of understanding now and again.
But before I make myself sound like an unforgivable dickhead, let’s talk about the sonic element of the album as well as just the poetic. When it comes to cathartic music, punk has got to be one of the best styles for it, and so it is here. The music is played with much more emotion than perfection, the scruffiness of it all only adding to its charm. But where the majority of punk uses electronic noise to aid in the sonic chaos, the Violent Femmes take it in a different direction. Nowadays they call themselves ‘acoustic punk,’ and while that was less true of their first album (there are electric guitars and basses for one thing) it still undoubtedly has an acoustic feel to it. The jangly strumming of the acoustic guitar is central to their sound, and the earthy tones of the xylophone and violin make it hit home. It’s interesting because it allows for a different side of punk to be heard – it hints at a vulnerability behind the bluster, and the aggression just shows itself as the flip-side of fragility. Gano’s voice helps with this too – slightly androgynous and not-quite-post-pubescent, he certainly sounds like the immature lad he portrays through the lyrics, even though he was 20 years old when the album was recorded.
While there are echoes of all the expected punk influences at play – the Sex Pistols, the Clash, Dead Kennedies – I also hear connections from other artists from either side of this album, whether out of genuine musical connection or just some indefinable quality. I hear Doors, Kinks, White Stripes, There Might Be Giants, even Beefheart on occasion. This is why the album still has so much depth despite its immaturity. It speaks on so many levels, from inventive musical settings to angsty, emotional performances to, yes, teenage bluster. There is something to be gained by listening from each angle, and I reckon that’s why this unsubtle, flawed but incredibly ‘real’-sounding album is still regarded as a classic.
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