The Affectionate Punch

For their first full album together in 1980, Billy Mackenzie and Alan Rankine created a striking debut that, even if later work showed them in much fuller flower, conveyed the dramatic and at once dark and playful combination of the former’s singing and lyrics and the latter’s music. Songs like the wired kick of the title track, the sweeping tale of fraught romance in “A Matter of Gender,” and the stories of alphabetic doings in “A” go up against sometimes stark production, but the killer rhythm section of Michael Dempsey and John Murphy add to the overall impact.