Albums of The Year # 42 X - Alphabetland

 

Doughty West Coast Punks stalwarts X are back with a new album Alphabetland (released back in April), and it's really not a bad record at all. In fact quite the opposite. It's always difficult to gauge exactly where to place a record like this in a legendary band's back catalogue, decades after they were considered relevant and hip but this is one that punches considerably above its weight. There's life in the old dogs yet.

It sounds just like X, the band don't really mess with the formula they established at the end of the Seventies and into the early Eighties. Remarkably the release of this record is the first time the four original members of the band Exene Cervenka, John Doe, Billy Zoom and DJ Bonebrake have recorded together for 35 years and it's now over 40 since the band's debut Los Angeles was released.

Cervenka and Doe's classic, urgent call and response at the mic always made me think of X as something of a Punk Jefferson Airplane. They're up to their usual tricks here. Riffing on each other's energy with great abandon they recall all the Blank Generation, something dreadful this way comes atmospherics of their heyday, while Zoom and Bronebrake provide the classic Rockabilly Punk backdrop for Morticia and Gomez to live out every one of their 'every day is Halloween in Hollywood' fantasies.

X should really have been the West Coast Punk band who broke through first time round to  mass and commercial appeal. They always had the best tunes. For some reason it never quite happened and they had to watch Blondie sweep up from the East Coast and LA contemporaries The Go Gos steal their thunder chart wise. Never mind. X are back for what feels very much like a curtain call. It's to their credit that they avoid any cheap sentiment and just bash out the tunes.

There are ten of them here plus a spoken narrative from Cervenka to close the set and nothing sounds remotely out of place. Cervenka comes across more like Debbie Harry's younger sister than she once did but otherwise not much has changed. They sound as wryly cynical about the state of the world as they ever did. Frankly, it's just great! There are any number of bands over half their age who would give their eye teeth to sound half as good and relevant as this.