The Adverts - Cast of Thousands

Cast of Thousands (1979) ****

That's right, 4 freakin' stars, and don't let nobody tell you different.  The Adverts' one and only followup to their debut was infamously trashed as a betrayal of punk promise when it was initially released, and for years it languished in supposedly deserved obscurity.  In the rock critics' history books, the Adverts remained a one album band - to hear it, you'd suspect this was Cut Out the Crap level bad.  The bad press is explainable, but that doesn't mean that it wasn't parochially narrow-minded and grossly unfair.  Ah, punks (or more specifically, punk-rock raised critics) - has there ever been a more blinker-eyed movement?  Always paranoia-mindedly on the lookout for sellouts?  Like all of the great first-wave UK punk bands, the Adverts swiftly outgrew punk once they'd learned how to play their instruments, and once you get over the shock that this is not in the least bit a punk album ("Male Assault," a holdover from the early days, excepted), what you get is a first-rate pop/rock album.  One can only imagine the shock of safety-pin mohawks in '79 when the needle dropped to the first (and title) track, and realized that someone had slipped the latest Boomtown Rats LP into the sleeve by mistake.  But no, it's the 'Verts, not the Rats.  Truthfully told, the production's faulty - too thin, out of focus, and over-polished, just like the cover artwork - but it's not as if the debut LP was a paragon of rock hi fidelity, either.  One definite advantage over the debut:  there's actual variety, with each song standing out from the others via shifting moods, tempos, angle of musical approach, etc.  With the expected backing off in raw punk excitement and intensity, so there's that tradeoff.  Anyway, like I said, for all their improvement the band still only reach Boomtown Rats pub-rock level of musicianship - musically, it's not setting the world on fire.  So once again it's TV Smith's songwriting that carries 95% of the load, and he's still writing'em with similar quality control, catchy & anthemic & instantly memorable.  And it's not as if he's backed off the intensity one notch - he still sings with feverous desperation, as if he either got these feelings off his chest or the world would explode (or never hear of TV Smith - same difference to him).  The difference is that last time around, he was penning punk anthems for a lost Blank Generation; this go, he's penning pop/rock tunes, and so the focus shifts from the political to the personal.  Not that there weren't plenty of both P's on the debut, and vice versa on the second LP - it's more of a subtle than drastic shift, but that lyrical shift is underlined more noticably because of the shift in musical direction.  Words reinforce music, music reinforces words - it's a symbiotic relationship.  "I Will Walk You Home," which concludes the album on a sinister, gloomy note, wouldn't have worked as anything but a waltz-dirge (musically unimaginable to fit on the debut) and would generational anthems be appropriate lyrically to fit such proto-goth creepiness?

However, neither critics nor the public agreed with this vault into musical maturity, and so the album flopped and the Adverts, never the most self-confident of youths (the raging insecurity clearly audible in TV Smith's voice was a crucial part of their charm), broke up soon after.  A pity.  Three decades later, we can reassess and rehabilitate.

The Adverts - Crossing the Red Sea With The Adverts

 

Crossing The Red Sea With The Adverts (1978)  ****

'Anyone can do it' was one of the founding myths of punk, and yet this band proved that such mythology was not totally invented out of thin cloth.  Self-conscious minimalism was not just an artistic strategy for the Adverts; it was a necessity.  Their first single (re-recorded for this album) was entitled "One Chord Wonders," which might actually possess little more than half a chord if my ears tell me right, and while they improved with practice by the time of this debut long-player, their abilities were still not even up to the level of the Ramones.  To make up for such deficits, the band play as if punk was the meaning of life (and for them, it probably was), streaming by as fast as they can physically muster for all but a couple of token slower ones (which predictably bog down).  Given such limitations, the wonder is that this album isn't merely listenable, it's actually good, and not only good, it rules.  What separates the Adverts from the hundreds of identically incompetent Pistols-inspired bands of the era (and the tens of thousands to come later) is T.V. Smith:  one man with a vision and  (more importantly) the songwriting chops, can make it work even if the hired help are the best you can get at minimum wage.

There's no point in running down a track by track review, since with a couple of exceptions, the band's amateurishness renders all the songs sounding the same.  The bad exception is "Wheels," a juvenile little, "ooo, wouldn't it wickedly suck if you were handicapped," gross-out, but it's not the much that the lyrics offend, but that the band slows the tempo to a doomy drag.  You see, half of what also makes this album work is the speed - if the songs were slowed down even a micro-fraction, you get the sense they would all fall apart.  The Adverts were naive enough to take punk seriously, with T.V. Smith delivering his would-be generational anthems like "Bored Teenagers," "New Church," and "No Time To Be 21," with the straightest of faces and most passionate of yearnings.  Not to mention the anti-New Wave screed "Safety in Numbers," that at once sneers at punk naivety and yet wishes against hope that punk really could change things.  And so the naive flower-power spirit of 1967 arose phoenix-like in 1977, at least among some naive and bored British teenagers (i.e., half the punk bands of the era).  The other half of the winning formula is that Smith constructs all of these songs around instantly memorable choruses:  play this album through only once and you'll already have at least half the songs burned into your skull, like it or not.  He doesn't expend much energy on such extraneous details such as bridges or solos; no, he just dashes off a few hasty verses in an impatient rush to the main chorus, making this is the quintessential punk album in terms of spirited style if not substance.  'Hasty' is the adjective to best sum up this album; everything about this album sounds impatiently rushed, as if they had to get this album out now, before the punk rock scene or the band themselves imploded.  This album and the Adverts themselves could only have come out during a specific time and place; released a few years later, and it would not have captured the zeitgeist, because that zeitgeist was long gone.  If that makes Crossing the Red Sea as much of a sociocultural artifact as an excellent punk album, then so be it - half of how we hear pop music comes down to social and musical context, after all.

Addendum:  depending upon which reissue you get, there are quite a few bonus tracks.  Some are just single versions of album tracks, but there are several non-album A/B-sides as well, such as "Quickstep," "We Who Wait," and "New Day Dawning," that are no different in style or quality from the LP proper.