Jeffrey Lee Pierce- Wildweed (1985) MP3 & FLAC

"With your mind on fire and raving the end, you open the gates and welcome the men."

One look at the cover of Jeffrey Lee Pierce's solo debut--in which he is seen standing casually, maybe even reflectively, in a sparsely populated desert-scape with a shotgun propped on his shoulder--and the subject matter of the songs comprising the album becomes undeniably evident: tales of self-destruction and murder. While anyone familiar with Pierce's incomparable work with his influential noir-punk band The Gun Club will know that these topics are nothing new for him, what is distinctive about Wildweed is the significantly more polished (perhaps too polished) sound of the album and its emphasis on alt-pop structures over his usual Blues-derived fare. Recorded in London, Wildweed  is, among other things, a great place to hear some of Pierce's Television-inspired guitar work and some of his most accomplished songs. Wildweed begins with "Love and Desperation," a strange, almost Ska-like concoction, which features some great tongue-in-cheek vocals from Pierce and a guitar solo dripping with histrionics. This is followed by "Sex Killer," one of the poppier songs on the album, and though it suffers from over-produced eighties-style percussion, Pierce's grimy vocals ultimately take the song over. One of Wildweed's absolute gems is "Hey Juana," which features lyrics that mention Nick Cave and a catchy walking bass line that keeps the song moving at a torrid pace. While not as consistently great as the better Gun Club albums, Wildweed is, nevertheless, a worthy representation of Pierce's singular talents.

Paisley Underground Series, #12: The Gun Club- Fire of Love (1981) MP3 & FLAC

"Gonna get me religion. Gonna join the Baptist church. Gonna be a Baptist preacher, 
so I don't have to work."

While The Gun Club weren't the only band effectively mining the strange but fertile intersection between Punk and the American country-blues tradition (The Birthday Party are an obvious parallel here), no one was doing it with quite as much raw immediacy (and for that matter, authenticity) as Jeffrey Lee Pierce and co. Pierce's formative years were spent in the city of El Monte in Southern California, and as a teenager, he became immersed in the underground Punk scene that was burgeoning in and around L.A. during the late seventies. One characteristic that differentiated this scene from other Punk scenes at the time was the integration of roots music into the Punk aesthetic by bands such as The Blasters, X, and The Flesh Eaters. What set The Gun Club apart from their contemporaries was Pierce's overriding interest in the Delta-Blues, which provided him with a wealth of dark themes and imagery with which to construct his "fire & brimstone" tales of sex, excess, and death. Given an appropriately bare-bones production by Chris D. (of The Flesh Eaters), The Gun Club's debut, Fire of Love is a heady concoction of Swampy Blues, Country-Goth, Rockabilly, and Punk. Pierce's singular voice, equals parts cow-punk twang and hardcore rant, lends emotional weight to these howling testimonials and wailing confessionals, simultaneously grounding these songs in well-worn traditions and recasting them in radically new contexts. An obvious example of this is the cover of Robert Johnson's "Preaching the Blues," which, while thoroughly re-imagining this apocalyptic Delta-Blues chestnut as a psycho-billy epic, manages to do justice to the creepy fatalism of the original. One of Pierce's most brilliant Country-Punk amalgamations is "She's Like Heroin to Me," which features some wonderfully dark electric slide-guitar work from Ward Dotson, relentless drumming from Terry Graham, and one of Pierce's most manic vocal performances. While legends of the L.A. underground, The Gun Club were not technically affiliated with The Paisley Underground scene; however, it is hard to overestimate the influence Fire of Love had on many of the roots-oriented Paisley bands such as Blood on the Saddle, True West, The Long Ryders and Green on Red.