(GI) - The Germs (1979)
A week of one-album wonders
I suppose the concept of labels and producers and photo shoots and press tours and A&R guys is enough to be dauntingly close to “selling out.” Maybe that’s why I basically had my pick of punk bands who only made a single album. I’ve written about Operation Ivy before, but there’s also Minor Threat and Rites of Spring.
I have to count the Sex Pistols, I suppose, but I don’t say much about the Pistols because I hear them as a bunch of talentless hacks who are mostly famous for pioneering the art of making talentless hacks famous. Fight me.
The Germs were one of the earliest and most formational LA punk bands. Taking the spooky apocalypticism of Bowie’s 70s albums and marrying it with the emerging edginess of hardcore, and a particularly nihilistic bent to their own lyrics.
While this solid slab would be all we’d hear from The Germs, guitarist and founder Pat Smear did alright for himself by becoming an unofficial fourth member of Nirvana and subsequently a mainstay for Dave Grohl’s Foo Fighters.
