Continuing my list of best debut albums (with quite a few caveats)…

Violent Femmes – Violent Femmes (1983)

The debut album by the Milwaukee-based folk-punk trio Violent Femmes is one of the record industry’s greatest slow-burning success stories.

Released in 1983, the album failed to make a splash commercially, but it was a college radio success that picked up steam over the years. Buoyed by a compact disc release, it finally reached the Billboard 200 chart in 1991 and to date has sold more than 3 million copies.

It was around the time of that CD release that I first discovered the album, a staple of my early college years. It sounded unlike anything else I’d heard, blending brazen attitude, impressive musicality, and lead singer/songwriter Gordan Gano’s earnest, nasal vocals.

Despite never being released as a single, lead-off track ‘Blister in the Sun’ became the band’s most beloved song, an alternative rock classic that still has the same kick today that it did 43 years ago.

But ‘Blister in the Sun’ is far from the album’s only highlight. I was surprised playing it for the first time in years how vividly every one of its songs had stuck with me. ‘Kiss Off,’ ‘Add it Up,’ ‘Please Do Not Go,’ ‘Prove My Love,’ and ‘Gone Daddy Gone’ all have the same bracing immediacy and melodic inventiveness of ‘Blister,’ while closing ballad ‘Good Feeling’ remains a melancholy delight.

Violent Femmes released nine more albums after this one, but I only ever owned their sophomore effort, 1984’s Hallowed Ground. I remember liking it, but not enough for it to get repeated listens or for me to seek out the rest of the band’s work. Now that doing so doesn’t require a financial commitment, maybe I should.

Revisiting this album was one of the highlights of assembling this theme week’s posts. It made me a little sad about the way time pushes some records out of the rotation to make way for new music. But it made me glad that this blog gives me an excuse to fire them up again.