The Uncut team have dug out their leather jackets and Converse sneakers and compiled a Top 50 of the greatest American punk albums. But what constitutes “American punk” in the first place? After some debate, we decided to avoid the ur-punk groups like The Velvet Underground and The Stooges, or t...
42 ANGRY SAMOANS
Back From Samoa
BAD TRIP, 1982
Clever-dick pop critics Gregg Turner and Metal Mike Saunders had previous before the lightning-fast Blue Öyster Cult assault of the Angry Samoans’ second LP, past works including VOM’s “Electrocute Your Cock” and the Queer Pills’ similarly groin-level “They Saved Hitler’s Cock”. The sardonic intent in the supremely foul-mouthed “Ballad Of Jerry Curlan”, “You Stupid Jerk” and “Lights Out” may have been somewhat lost on the Samoans’ core audience of young, LA meatheads. Turner later became a maths professor while Saunders was an accountant by day; appropriately, given the Samoans’ misanthropic streak, they also now hate each other. JW
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43 FLIPPER
Generic Flipper
SUBTERRANEAN, 1982
It may sound more like Black Sabbath playing through the hangover after one of Ozzy’s three-month benders than anything else calling itself “punk” in 1982, but Generic Flipper is one of punk’s most influential masterpieces. On top of turgid, brackish bass sludge and undermixed, roiling guitar drone, lead singers Bruce Loose and Will Shatter affirm in no uncertain terms that life sucks and then you die (“There are hearts that are no longer beating/And there are entrails
spilled on the floor/That’s the way of the world”). After such an uncompromising reality check, the album ends the only way it could: with the epically dumb “Sex Bomb”. PS
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44 SS DECONTROL
The Kids Will Have Their Say
X-CLAIM!/DISCHORD, 1982
The straight edge philosophy – “don’t drink, don’t smoke, don’t fuck” – evolved in urbane Washington DC but found its most virulent acolytes in tough Boston, with SS Decontrol the macho head honchos of a brutish scene. The lyrics of guitarist Al Barile – who worked in a local aeronautical engineering firm by day – set that supremely ascetic agenda for the fearsomely committed The Kids Will Have Their Say – which, to his immense credit, he has refused to reissue. Singer Springa, oddly, was not straight edge at all, which might explain SSD’s subsequent drift into metal and obscurity. JW
