Acoustic aggression and a warped perspective add up to magic for Violent Femmes

Violent Femmes’ self-titled debut album should be compulsory listening for every knuckleheaded adolescent male. I was a frustrated Midwestern teen when I found it, and I couldn’t imagine it any other way. 

Violent Femmes could come packaged with the rite-of-passage razor samples sent to hormone-addled beings on the cusp of manhood across the country. When hot hands tear into their Gillette-branded envelope, they would also see an album cover adorned by a small girl in a white dress peering into a rustic window and past their freebie razor — a specter of childhood trailing in the wake newfound maturity. It’d be an appropriate bundle of a multi-bladed tool that might last a couple of weeks and an even sharper album capable of insinuating its way into their psyches for much longer. 

Finding Violent Femmes at the right time is imperative for a couple of reasons. For one, it’s an album that, thanks to its background, radiates barely post-pubescent energy in a way that’s rare and resonates. Gordon Gano, Violent Femmes’ lead singer and songwriter, penned the 1983 album’s tunes as an 18-year-old student in Wisconsin and they were recorded in self-funded sessions in 1982 before the Femmes had a label. These weren’t early songs reworked with executive input or glossy writers-room creations handed to a former child star or ingenue. Violent Femmes’ songs are the barely adulterated brain drippings of real-life emotional teenagers. They’re tunes that, despite long odds, found their way to deserved radio play, sales and acclaim through the force of undeniable melody, atypical charisma, and often uncomfortably earnest emotion. 

The anxiety, angst, and libidinal longing that give this album its nervy energy are always relatable and enjoyable to a degree, but they make the most sense during the season of life one is most likely to want to tell the world off — maybe the only time when the drama of yearning with voice-cracking intensity for romantic love while cynically dismissing throngs of other people makes sense. The pained isolation and desperation Gano describes on “Kiss Off” — “I need someone, a person to talk to / Someone who’d care to love / Could it be you?”— while simultaneously dismissing the people who actually populate the singer’s life — “You can all just kiss off into the air” is an authentic distillation of a certain teenage experience.

Violent Femmes’ carnality — both implicit and explicit — further tie it to the teenage years. “Add It Up,” with its proto-incel blend of impotent fury and desire for sexual contact, is an uncomfortable purge of an overactive id. It’s relatable and repulsive in a way that can prompt self-interrogation of some of the grosser trains of thought that run through an almost-man’s mind. (“If he sounds like a half-crazed desperate creep, then what do I sound like?”)  Its toxicity is also leavened by a series of stammering, oedipal setups for its later verses and how goofy it is to hear Gano squeak out “I would love to love you lover.” That ability to portray and parody the ugliness and melodrama of male loneliness is another reason Violent Femmes should be freely distributed to teens. It shines a bright light on something dark and sets up a clinically accurate mirror to reflect it back. For a lot of people, that clarity can be a first step toward a more empathetic existence. 

The album also presents a lesson on how saying things like, “Why can’t I get just one screw,” can warp and worsen how you’re perceived. Gano has been clear over the years that despite popular opinion, “Blister in the Sun,” is not about masturbation. But in the context of Violent Femmes, with its halting, sometimes breathless lyrics about staining sheets delivered in Gano’s adenoidal, youthful voice and a title that conjures oozing swollen skin, it’s easy to understand why people came to that conclusion. Despite the songwriter’s protestations, it scans as a song written by someone who spends a fair bit of time behind a locked bedroom door. Relatable at the time. Gross to dwell on. Another prompt for self-analysis. 

Roiling tension, sexual and otherwise, is communicated through the music, too. That’s also eye-opening and a point in favor of conscripted listening. In the streaming era, the concept of folk-punk — a genre tag sometimes misapplied to the Femmes — is fairly accessible, but it’s still something that requires some active searching. It’s absolutely possible to go 13, 16, even 18 years without hearing acoustic aggression like “Prove My Love.” It’s a forceful statement written in cursive and totally in line with the band’s hard-meets-soft name. Realizing acoustic guitar, upright bass, and instruments only recognizable from music class could make something edgy and raw is a perspective-widening milestone in a music lover’s life. It’s an epiphany Violent Femmes delivers over and over and over again. 

It’s most blatant on the album’s faster songs. Hearing a xylophone and guitar trading ominous notes on the unlikely single “Gone Daddy Gone” is a particularly thrilling standout. However, even the album’s more mellow tracks rock thanks in large part to Brian Ritchie’s work on the bass. The reggae-adjacent “Please Do Not Go” moves at a brisk, head-bobbing pace thanks entirely to Ritchie’s kinetic playing, which gets time to shine during an extended solo that’s punctuated by Victor DeLorenzo’s choppy drums. That same instrumentation also gives an edge to Violent Femmes’ biggest song, “Blister in the Sun,” that helps explain why a song widely believed to be about masturbation remains a staple in commercials and ballparks to this day.

Despite its bright and insouciant guitar hook, “Blister in the Sun” comes off as a tightly wound bundle that could detonate at any moment. It’s a threat repeatedly implied by the gunshot rapport of DeLorenzo’s snares and Ritchie’s wonderfully hyperactive bass. It’s catchy, loopy, and could either fall in on itself or explode outwardly at any second. It’s an earworm paired with uncertainty that makes the simple song difficult to tire of. In a canny bit of misdirect, when the wildest take on the chorus does arrive, it’s on the heels of a barely audible verse. That coil-and-release sensation is a current that runs through the album and a major part of what makes it the kind of enduring LP that a band can still tour on 40-odd years later. 

Violent Femmes is an album that unreservedly exorcises teenage demons while simultaneously recognizing their inherent darkness. This quality was heightened to new extremes by a 1987 CD reissue that added both “Ugly” and “Gimme the Car.” The latter is a bracingly bitter and pitiable lamentation that focuses on the ultimate totem of teenage escapism: the car. It’s an album that twists soft sounds around hard feelings and sets them to the sort of melodies fast food chains want to co-opt. It’s an oddball album bristling with barely checked aggression that’s still somehow approachable. It’s a potent paradox that makes Violent Femmes easy to admire but difficult to internalize in adulthood. The songs are bulletproof enough that it’s always a worthwhile listen and one of the best debut albums of its decade. However, if it crosses your path at the right time, it’s the kind of album that can change your understanding of how music and the world work for the better.