Monday, October 21, 2024

It Starts With a Birthstone - 200 Albums for 2024 # 65 Uranium Club - Infants Under The Bulb

 

 'My mom threw me out 'til I get some pants that fit. She just won't approve of my strange kind of wit...'

Minneapolis Punk Retrobates. Just what you need on a Sunday morning. Latest album Infants Under The Bulb has them ranting at the top of their lungs and doing the straightjacket fit dance in the rubber room at the sorry state of the world and living existence in general for forty well spent minutes. 

This all comes in a long and noble tradition. Symbolist French poets, the kind of people who inspired Hell and Verlaine and Pere Ubu to throw angry agitated fits in darkened American clubs in the mid-Seventies and in turn inspire others to go angular, quirky and irritable in the following decades.

Of course this has precedents. This doesn't make Infants Under The Bulb any less exciting and urgent. Verlaine didn't write Venus for nothing. He wanted to inspire. The same goes for Laughner and Thomas and the rest with The Modern Dance and Life Stinks . Early Pere Ubu are what I hear most immediately on this record and its always a pleasure to see this example being followed.

An album I'll be coming back to. Wonderful stuff. Punk insurgency of the kind I've always appreciated. The kind that makes others think and act. Punk if it was truly Punk always needed to say something. That was the most interesting stuff to me. Uranium Club sound like a fascinating bunch of truly disturbed souls and this is a truly special record. You even get short stories worthy of Donald Barthelme or Ray Bradbury on The Wall. What more could you want. Get some pants that fit you.

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