Asylum Road

One of the great overlooked groups of the eighties, The Perfect Disaster were the vehicle for the songs of Phil Parfitt. The Perfect Disaster were part of the same milieu as the likes of Spacemen 3 and The Jazz Butcher, with whom they probably shared good chunks of a record collection – like those groups, The Perfect Disaster always came across as quite musically literate, particularly deeply invested in The Velvet Underground and their various tributaries. What makes Asylum Road such a great album is its range, from fiercely mangled road songs to acoustic threnodies; there’s a kind of narcotic hypnotism to the best songs here, like “All The Stars,” that’s so hallucinatory in its power, you wonder why this group aren’t held in the same high esteem as Spacemen 3 or Mazzy Star. Parfitt’s gone on to release some beautiful solo albums, and bass player Jo Wiggs is, again, a member of The Breeders, but Perfect Disaster albums like Asylum Road deserve to be far more than just a footnote in a notional Kim Deal biography.