4 out of 5

Label: Alternative Tentacles

Produced by: Nomeansno

What were you doing in 1987? I was… not listening to Nomeansno, something I continued not doing for, like, 30 years after that as well. I’m not sure what kind of blinders I can claim here; I never vibed much with Alternative Tentacles, but NMN are such a touchpoint for so much of the noise rockers I listen to, it seems insane that I somehow passed them over until that 30-years-on mark, and now I’m making up for lost time.

1987: I’m not going to pitch you on Sex Mad, NMN’s 2nd album (but like 90th release including singles) and first as a trio being necessarily impossible to conceive of during the late 80s, as it feints towards exactly the kind of stuff you were finding on Alternative Tentacles at the time, e.g. Lard, Dead Kennedys. And, if anything, maybe that’s how the band flew under my radar, because it’s something “extra” in the group’s style that ends up elevating their punk rock dirges into weirder, brain-worming stratospheres of sound, but at a pass – you know this talk / shout over bumping bass and shredding guitar sound. Backing up that narrative, minor hit “Dad” is actually one of the less remarkable tracks on the album (lyrics aside) for that reason: its riffy, rollicking pace and emo’d lyrics are on a Minor Threat wavelength of simple-sounding chords and angry epithets. But… if you give the track more than a surface level listen, Rob Wright’s bouncing bass is, typical, all over the place, with brother John Wright’s drums adding jazz-like free-form energy; the addition of Andrew Kerr’s guitar – which guides Dad and some other tunes – absolutely gave the Wrights more to play off of (and gave vocal duties over to the obsessive, passionate Kerr), but the album’s strengths are when they’re falling back on the initial formula of letting the low-end and beat lead the way, with the guitar adding flavor. Check the wild Self Pity for the most intense version of this, in which the Wrights wrangle a mean beat together, that Kerr assaults with the noisiest non-solo scrawl I’ve heard in quite some time. Ultimately, the balance of these approaches makes for a fantastic sequence of tunes, but the guitar-forward tracks are a little less distinct at a high level.

Kerr’s lyrics also aren’t quite there yet. While some songs – like opener Sex Mad – nail balancing a nervy, Arab on Radar-esque crassness with some clever wordplay, the tracks more often veer into youthy, obsessive rants that just kind of circle the drain of exactly what you’d expect Sex Mad to be about. It’s not without depth: closers Metronome and Revenge show how Kerr was trying to pull apart and role play with these obsessive thoughts to get more nuance out of them, but the limited focus and use of looping phrasing limits how much nuance we can get.

But all this stuff is also that “extra” of Nomeansno: you can get on board for its late 80s noise punk aesthetic, stay for what turn out to be some pretty funky and intense melodies, then slowly recognize how far off into the impressively wooly wild the group manages to wander, while consistently steering it back to solid, searing punk rock.