Editorial Reviews
Music Review:
Music Review
Schumann: Symphonies No. 1 "Spring" & No. 3 "Rhenish"
Ravel: Works for Piano, Violin & Cello
Amazon.com
Sinewy, trashed and poetic, Richard Hell was the apotheosis of New York punk, as this double-disc release shows; it's a suitably ragged catalog of his work beyond Television and 1977's marvelous Voidoids LP, Blank Generation. Disc 1 begins in 1975, with four tracks from Hell's short stint in the Heartbreakers alongside Johnny Thunders. There's a first attempt at the seminal "Love Comes in Spurts" and a grizzled, heartfelt version of Dee Dee Ramone's junkie prayer, "Chinese Rocks." But Thunders's guitar playing sounds trad and clumsy next to the wiry garage art of Robert Quine, who drives some pretty spunky Voidoids tracks. It's these that prove the Voidoids, of the CBGB generation, sound most like the Strokes. Four from 1984, with Meters drummer Ziggy Modeliste and a skronky sax player on board, act as a curious epilogue to this brief, incendiary career. Hell dispassionately abandoned rock & roll for writing and left his legend to grow largely untainted by bad records. A 1977 London gig provides the bulk of Disc 2. The sound quality is shockingly bad, but it's clear the Voidoids had, fleetingly, a wild, mercurial genius most bands only dream of, even when ritually massacring "I Wanna Be Your Dog." A year later in New York, Elvis Costello turns up to bellow "You Gotta Lose." Like most things here, it's a phenomenal mess. But a mess that's lost none of its potency to inspire and provoke. --John Mulvey
Album Description
Collection containing 2 fearsome concerts never before released, one from London in 1977 and the other at CBGB in 1978. The second disc consists of an expanded version of ROIR 's cassette-only R.I.P. collection, featuring never before heard studio material. Matador.