13th Chime – The Singles 1981-1983 LP (Sacred Bones)
Sacred Bones, the first label we can thank for slowing underground pop/rock-based progress to a dead halt by participating in the first Blank Dogs onslaught, has now reissued a wildly-inoffensive early-80’s post-punk band that carbon-copied Entertainment! so blatantly that I wouldn’t be surprised if some barristers were put on retainer … if that’s indeed what Brits do with their lawyers. Is the 652nd revival of angular post-punk on the horizon? If Sacred Bones can get over ten people excited about a garage-rocker pulling a Jandek on a lo-fi version of what The Killers and Hot Hot Heat do, then perhaps they’re blazing a trail and have no idea that when Henry Rollins reissued the worthy Gang of Four albums fifteen or so years ago, he was selling great songs by a (very) temporarily-great band whose one-and-a-half album’s worth of amazing material actually broke ground in the late-70’s, and had yet to be trampled to the earth’s core by imitators. The mindset here could be the horribly-wrong good-by-default-of-being-really-obscure way of thinking, as the 13th Chime were unremarkable IN THEIR DAY, which today makes them about as exciting as a 1999 Pontiac Grand Am with high miles. (http://www.sacredbonesrecords.com)
(Andrew Earles)
