A Trip To Marineville

Sound DNA

• Punk
• Punk Rock

• abrasive
• chaotic
• art school

About

England’s Swell Maps released but two studio albums in their brief career, and their 1979 debut, <i>A Trip to Marineville</i>, immediately set them apart from other post-punk progenitors. While artists like Wire and PiL were becoming the standard-bearers for the massively creative period following the first wave of original punk, brothers Nikki Sudden (guitar/vocals) and Epic Soundtracks (drums/piano/”mumbling”) and their bandmates were more experimental, and their erratic, often unsettling music later influenced the likes of Sonic Youth, Nirvana and Pavement. From the starting gate, “H.S. Art” bubbles and roils with saloon-style piano, of all things, while a swollen bass throbs beneath a sheet of guitar that glints like crushed glass. Prickly punk (like “Another Song” and “Vertical Slum”) nudges up against grimy, pre-grunge punk (“Spitfire Parade”) and pre-goth slabs of guitar bleakness (“Gunboats”). Where sublime, Krautrock-influenced pulses of energy (“Full Moon In My Pocket,” “Midget Submarine,” “Blam!!”) delighted, Swell Maps’ mad, kinetic, sound pastiches (“Bridge Head, Pt. 9” “Don’t Throw Astrays At Me!”) confounded.

via Apple Music

Tracklist

Credits