Remarkable longplayers from the past

‘The Las Vegas Story’
THE GUN CLUB
Released: 15 June 1984
Third album

ALL MUSIC wrote: “Late frontman /guitarist Jeffrey Lee Pierce was writing feverish rock & roll songs that took their inspiration from Southern blues and West Texas country music all framed by an angular, jagged post-punk energy. The screaming rawness at the heart of the band’s debut, Fire of Love, had been replaced by a dry, moaning lonesome, percussion heavy desert sound, space and echo float through the mix like a ghost through Pierce’s slide guitar playing. Bass drum and tom-toms fuel the attack with a basic, primitive nocturnal energy. Topics ranged from personal disintegration in “Walkin’ with the Beast,” and the country-blues-drenched “Eternally Is Here,” and the shambolic, two-step country confusion of “My Dreams” that quotes directly from Television’s “Marquee Moon” to the disappearance of the nation in “Bad America”‘s edgy guitar wrangle. There are a couple of covers on the set tossed right in the center of the album: “The Master Plan,” a spooky, brooding, rock read of Pharoah Sanders’ and Leon Thomas’ “The Creator Has a Master Plan,” and a slovenly, funereal version of “My Man’s Gone Now,” by George and Ira Gershwin from Porgy and Bess. The Las Vegas Story is a provocative record that reveals the Gun Club was pulled in many directions at once, and though the tension is in evidence on every track, it nonetheless holds together. After ‘Fire of Love’, ‘The Las Vegas
Story’ is their most satisfying album and is, perhaps, the band’s most visionary offering.”

TURN UP THE VOLUME‘s favorite track: My Dreams

Album in full (original track list: #1 – #10)…

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The late, great Jeffrey Lee Pierce…