Music: Limblessly in love.

Been digging through my old records lately.

For my money - and I'll admit that, given the state of my bank accounts, that's not saying much - The Scream, Siouxsie and the Banshee's debut album, is one of the great "missing links" between chaos of punk and the angular post-punk that followed. Because Siouxsie and company later became one of the foundation groups of Goth, The Scream's best qualities are misinterpreted as failings - its thrashing guitars, for example, aren't praised for their energy but criticized as the undeveloped beginnings of a more lush later style. Though that linear historical view doesn't give The Scream enough credit. The LP was the band's debut, but it wasn't really a novice effort. SS&B had been a going concern for years before a label snatched them up. When any shambling gang of lad's with even the slightest chops was getting signed, SS&B was getting passed by. The upside of the benign neglect was that the unit one hears on The Scream was a well-practiced, road-tested outfit with a strong set of fully evolved tunes. The reason it sounds so odd in retrospect is that it was ultimately a sort of evolutionary dead end. The group went Gothic. They ditched the jerky proto-Gang of Four sharp corners and the grimly tangled vision of modern social life that shared more with Elvis Costello's concept of emotional fascism than it did with the Romanticism of Goth.

Anywho, here's some great footage of the band from 1977. The sound quality os atrocious, but the footage is neat if only because it shows everybody looking so damn young.