The Gun Club's debut is the watermark for all
post-punk roots music. This features the late
Jeffrey Lee Pierce's swamped-out brand of roiling
rock, swaggerific hell-bound
blues, and gothic
country. With
Pierce's wailing high lonesome slide guitar twinned with
Ward Dotson's spine-shaking riffs and the solid yet off-the-rails rhythm section of bassist
Rob Ritter and drummer
Terry Graham,
the Gun Club burst out of L.A. in the early '80s with a bone to pick and a mountain to move -- and they accomplished both on their debut album. With awesome, stripped to the frame production by
the Flesh Eaters'
Chris D.,
Fire of Love blew away all expectations -- and with good reason. Nobody has heard music like this before or since.
Pierce's songs were rooted in his land of Texas. On
"Sex Beat," a razor-sharp
country one-two shuffle becomes a howling wind as
Pierce's wasted, half-sung half-howled vocals relate a tale of voodoo, sex, dope, and death. The song choogles like a freight train coming undone in a twister. Here
Black Flag,
the Sex Pistols,
Son House, and the coughing, hacking rambling ghost of
Hank Williams all converge in a reckless mass of seething energy and nearly evil intent. As if the opener weren't enough of a jolt,
the Gun Club follow this with a careening version of
House's
"Preachin the Blues," full of staccato phrasing and blazing slide. But it isn't until the anthemic, opiate-addled
country of
"She's Like Heroin to Me" and the truly frightening
punk-blues of
"Ghost on the Highway" that the listener comes to grip with the awesome terror that is
the Gun Club. The songs become
rock & roll ciphers, erasing themselves as soon as they speak, heading off into the whirlwind of a storm that is so big, so black, and so awful one cannot meditate on anything but its power.
Fire of Love may be just what the doctor ordered, but to cure or kill is anybody's guess. [
Blixa Sounds reissued the album in remastered and expanded form in 2021. Along with the original album, they add some priceless rarities, including alternate versions of many of the tracks from the album that sound very similar to the final product, but are still fun to hear. More exciting are the handful of four-track demos that captutre the band in loose, lo-fi glory laying down primal versions of songs like "Preaching the Blues" and "Goodbye Johnny". Even more fun, though even more lo-fi, is the full concert from 1981 that captures the band goofing around between songs while delivering a blistering, almost unhinged performance. Of special note is
Pierce talking about how he had just written the group's classic "She's Like Heroin to Me" just the week before.] ~ Thom Jurek & Tim Sendra
![Fire of Love [Deluxe]](http://prodimage.images-bn.com/pimages/0850947008740_p0_v1_s90x140.jpg)
![Fire of Love [Deluxe]](http://img.images-bn.com/static/redesign/srcs/images/grey-box.png?v11.10.4)
![Fire of Love [Deluxe]](http://prodimage.images-bn.com/pimages/0850947008740_p0_v1_s600x595.jpg)
![Best of the Psychedelic Furs [Edsel]](http://prodimage.images-bn.com/pimages/0740155728533_p0_v1_s90x140.jpg "Best of the Psychedelic Furs [Edsel]")
