Discography

In addition to one of the greatest band names ever, Lydia Lunch’s first group, formed when she was still a teenager herself, had a bracing and unique sound, impossible to ignore even when she wasn’t hectoring the listener with atonal, rage-soaked howls and piercing shrieks. Many of their compositions (“songs” would be a stretch) are short instrumentals with titles like “Red Alert” and “Race Mixing,” but “Orphans,” probably the band’s most compelling composition, features vivid lyrical imagery (“little orphans running through the bloody snow”) and a fierce sense of dynamics, with Gordon Stevenson’s one-note bass line and Bradley Field’s metronomic snare drum — prefiguring the Jesus & Mary Chain’s Psychocandy — supporting Lunch’s surprisingly powerful, untutored guitar, which almost echoes the Clash’s “London Calling.” The “Orphans” B-side “Less Of Me” is just as frenetic, but the group had more than one mood, as displayed on “The Closet,” a desperate pre-Goth ballad on which James Chance blows sax.