1981@40: DB'S STANDS FOR DECIBELS

Straight in with b right guitar riffs and acoustic splashes under a high and loud vocal in Black and White and the dB's announce they're here. And then pretty much bungle it. The dissonant harmonies of Dynamite are intentional and difficult to get through. And so on. Really, and so on. It's either power pop with a self-imposed limp or carefully recreated influences like the Pet Sounds Beach Boys on She's Not Worried or the odd rewrite of While My Guitar Gently Weeps in Bad Reputation. The other side is post punk quirk like Wire or XTC. And there's a mass of bratty anti-pop that decades later seems puzzling and pointless.

It's not as though the band has no strength, they're clearly a unit bound with some serious songcraft. It's just that they subvert every track as though they didn't want it too pretty. And the problem with that is that they just don't that far to show this but too far to realise their own riches. Aside from all the clear influences on show here the most profound is that of career contrarian Alex Chilton who never seemed so happy as when he was crapping on his own achievements and daring you to ask for an agenda. The problem with that is that I don't care about this record the same way that I never cared about anything Chilton did outside of a few moments of objectively brilliant inspiration.

So, why don't I just chill and let the guys have their way: it was 1981, fer god's sake? Because it's now 2021 and even only a year or so later I would judge this one harshly on the strength of the follow up Repercussion which is a masterpiece. If I'm still doing this stuff next year, I'll be covering that one and mentioning that I still happily listen to the whole thing without any nostalgia at all. I tried again to leave Stands for Decibels on for an album-length walk this morning and winced for about forty minutes.

The nostalgia on board here is a weird one. I'm not recalling fun times with the record but the attitude of subverting the hooky pop song formula by having only one chorus or making the middle eight go for almost all the song. And so on. When I'd take something like that to any of the bands I was in it might have been tried but every single one done in that spirit was either dropped without further mention or scrapped for parts. In the dB's debut you get a whole two sides of that with the most frustrating glimpses of the power that's being smothered by adolescence. Might have sounded tough live, lads, but in the studio it comes across as petulance rather than exuberance. No, it's not The Records but it ain't Foetus either.

To me it's the sound of a band who are pleasing their friends and is yet another testimony of the addage: good taste is the chief enemy of creativity. It's always important to recall that bands like this are part of a scene and theirs was the cooler traps of ol' Manhattan. Were they trying not to sound like The Cars? Hard to know with Americans. It did take a while for the darker threads to show (though they were already gigging as No Wavers) so maybe this one had to happen if only to exorcise the sydrome. And then they created a durable wonder. Must have heard this one once too often.