NB: I’ve been thinking about ways of diversifying the content outside of writing promo for other events and album reviews. This was the best one that I could come up with outside of doing hard hitting journalism. Let’s be real. Are you going to come to Mission Creek for your hard-hitting cultural pieces? Nope. You come here to read a bunch of articles about music and maybe–every once in a while–we prove that we are things that can talk about stuff other than music. It happens rarely, but it can. Iowa City already has an arts beat mag. Plus, I don’t have time to be doing real journalism. That’s another job on top of the one that I already have.

In the beginning of a new series here at Mission Creek, I–hopefully we–will put up some essays about albums that we like and that have might be passed over by time. They’ll happen sporadically. I’ve actually already written one about Mobb Deep’s The Infamous. If you click on the link, you’ll see that it’s from almost eight months ago. An update was due.

My new submission is the above album: The Gun Club’s Miami from 1982. I first found this album at my old radio station WOBC when I was going through the stacks for a radio show. It was a dingy old thing and looked like it hadn’t been listened to in a really long time. So, I took the record out of its sleeve and put it on. I remember skipping through the first few tracks because they didn’t fit with the theme of my show at all. I got to the fourth track “Texas Serenade,” and I remember that moment when it clicked. The song isn’t particularly complicated or anything. It’s a very basic song. It starts off with a couple of hard guitar strums that sound like they are attacking you from the horizon. The drums kick in forcefully and are followed by the howl of the slide guitar. After a quick intro, the warble of lead singer Jeffrey Lee Pierce hits your ears, and you are immediately transported to the vacant wastelands of Midland and Odessa out in West Texas.

A song about a veteran in bad straights, “Texas Serenade” is a song that perpetually stuck with me. The wailing slide guitar never left my mind. I listened to only that one track almost every time I was in the station looking for records for the next two months or so. I was perpetually haunted by the pained wailing and pleading of Pierce at the end of the track. It would return to me during night bike rides and daytime lectures. There came a day during my office hours when I decided that I should maybe attempt to listen to the entire album from beginning to end. I do remember enjoying the album, but this was an album that I didn’t gain a full appreciation of until I got a little bit older.

Maybe it was the switch from slight isolation to complete isolation, but the tribal/psycho-punk sound of the album stuck with me. I would drive with this CD at full blast as I would drive through cow pastures and corn fields on my way home. It just has this extreme rawness to its sound and matched them. This might have been because the mix of the album is really flat. Pierce is maybe a touch too high and the instruments lack emphasis. Because of this, much of the album must rest on the quality of the songs.

From the hippie-ish “Watermelon Man” with its bongos and campfire chanting to the stomp of “John Hardy,” every song on Miami stands out as a good song in its own right. The lyrics, which deals with ideas that obsessed Southern Gothics like the swamp, death and voodoo, are profoundly interesting and stand as a testament to the fact that Pierce was a brilliant talent that was lost far too young. In addition to the lyrics, the songs are highly creative. They mixed delta blues, country, rockabilly, and punk into a sound that was distinctly theirs. It is always urgent, interesting, and vaguely haunting. You can hear that these core parts go into their sound, but they were never derivative. This could be a testament to their upbringing in the LA Punk Scene with bands like X that were willing to take other forms of rock and roll and re-purpose them into their own blend of punk rock.

As I listen to the album again while writing this, the thing that continually gets me about this album is the way that it has this quality which demands attention. You don’t zone out and listen to Miami. You can’t. It’s physically impossible. You listen to the words of Pierce, the guitar that twangs in the background, the slide guitar that haunts the land like a ghost, the simple, country-timed drum patterns. The pictures of haunted, isolated Southern spaces are painted anew every time. In the end, you are only left with one question: “why in the hell is this album called Miami?” There are no other mysteries here, only a beautifully made album.