The Gun Club

Miami BLIXA SOUNDS

Revelatory restoration of Chris Stein-produced second album, plus full demos.

Released on Chris Stein’s Animal Records in 1982, Miami attracted flak for softening the Gun Club’s ferocious blues-punk onslaught, although the Blondie guitarist insisted its country flavours were part of Jeffrey Lee Pierce’s evolving artistic master plan.

Demos provided by Pierce’s estate confirm Stein’s assertion that Jeffrey “had the whole thing worked out in his head”, the producer’s main move reworking the impact-dulling doubletracked vocals to highlight the singer’s supernatural hell-howl.

“I wanted to encompass a general feeling of doom,” said Pierce, whose behaviour as he fought alcoholism and depression with heroin worried Stein and Debbie Harry (on backing vocals as D.H. Laurence Jr.) during recording in New York.

Robust remastering heightens every nuance of the band’s feral onslaught, and Pierce’s most evocative lyrics yet conjuring ominous bad America hoodoo, on titles like Like Calling Up Thunder, Bad Indian, Sleeping In Blood City, Creedence’s Run Through The Jungle and Jody Reynolds’s Fire Of Love, its smouldering despair couched in sheet-metal grind. Pedal steel enhances the lonesome darkness of Carry Home and Mother Of Earth, Pierce’s chilling acknowledgement of his fatal self-destruction.

Two-CD and vinyl packages add demos of the Death Party EP, working titles including Vampires (coruscating title track), Prune Dick From Mars (The Lie) and Pig Boys (The House On Highland Avenue), plus Walking With The Beast’s blues-infused first steps.

Maybe now Miami can be seen as one of the last century’s most shape-shifting works. ■■■■■■■■■■