Quote:
Originally Posted by Engine
. The Damned album, like all of their early stuff, is fun, has a fun sound, and makes me feel like the band members would have been fun to hang out with. So very fun. Good album, but fun gets dull especially when punk rock was in its awkward late-70s/early-80s stage.
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I can agree with part of that, especially when one thinks about the one-trick bands that were a major part of the "Fun Punk" that was from that time (Spizz whatever his name changed for that year, Max Splodge, Tenpole Tudor, a lot of the California bands that were more comfortable with New Wave than Punk and so on - although I actually kind of liked Tudor's stuff, blame The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle for that), but there was something different and better about the Damned's style of fun that stood above from the rest in my opinion. The Damned did it right, especially with Machine Gun Etiquette and The Black Album.
SLF were (Still are?) a great band, especially when it came to being topical, honest, and powerful, and I will stand on a very unpopular opinion that they were great with the ...Now Then era. If this were a war between debut albums, I would have voted for SLF for being the stronger of the two, but as this was paired with what's arguably The Damned's most accomplished album, it's a bit of a unfair war in my opinion. The Damned's debut was great, but SLF's was more direct and better than the shambolic but still essential 1976 model Damned.
MGE has everything that makes The Damned one of the best of the Late 70's UK Punk era, and to me that puts it slightly higher than Inflammable Material by a pinch.
If the SLF album was Nobody's Heroes, then it would be a time to seriously re-evaluate each album (possibly with SLF being the winner for me).