| Last Plane readers, run away when you hear me speaking, for I will make messes of your houses and encourage you to fill every empty space with CDs that you could probably afford to get rid of and never even miss a bit. Nevertheless I have got to say it: I’m happy as hell that I carted this record around with me for close to seven years, because today it sounds like a complete masterpiece. It was recorded in 1976 and 1977 in Bloomington, Indiana, and was audibly made with the burning raw white heat of all the change then going on in rock music writhing its way through the young brains of its makers. Twenty-five years later, it doesn’t sound like a “time capsule,” or a God-damned “harbinger of things to come”; nor does it sound “prescient,” or even “ahead of its time,” which is how people usually describe things that influenced this or that band or style which, unlike its inspiration, is actually getting played and listened to. No, Big Hits/Hard Attack sounds absolutely fresh and new and great, as incandescently creative as if it’d just been recorded yesterday in Detroit, or in 1919 at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, Switzerland. What you hear in its twenty songs of alternate-universe rock songs (which, incidentally, are quite irritatingly almost all mislabeled; which may well be a reproduction of the original sleeves’ track listing; I sure hope so) is a bunch of guys who’ve listened to a lot of Captain Beefheart, whose acolytes at the time are far fewer in number than they are today; who are aware of Pere Ubu, who are themselves at that very same moment changing lives out there in Ohio; who’ve been buying the punk rock 7”s that are surfacing like weeds in New York and L.A.; and who are merrily determined to leave some mark on rock history that says “We made a hell of a big noise back in Bloomington, too, you coastal snobs, you.” |