Stripped down to their basics, can the Femmes find the fire?
Violent Femmes – 3 – 1988 (iTunes – Amazon)
You know what? I think the Violent Femmes are just exhausted. They cut their teeth busking on the streets of Milwaukee and they were hungry and edgy and young.
Look at the cover of 3. It’s that same big, flaccid 80s design that you saw everywhere. As though CDs were cause for more important pictorials. Like anyone actually wanted to see what these guys looked like.
When 3 came out, I hadn’t given up on the Femmes. Yeah, I didn’t care for Blind Leading the Naked but I was willing to give them another chance.
Stripping down to the basics is probably the best thing they could have done. The songs are about as on par with the previous record but at least the come across as that Ol’ Femmes Sound!
In later years Richie would accuse his bandmate as having lost his ability to write songs after Gano sold the use rights of Blister in the Sun to a fast food commercial. (“… you see dubious or in this case disgusting uses of our music you can thank the greed, insensitivity and poor taste of Gordon Gano, it is his karma that he lost his songwriting ability many years ago, probably due to his own lack of self-respect as his willingness to prostitute our songs demonstrates.”)
And you can hear Gano forcing himself to write. Looking at the situation, I don’t doubt that it was frustrating. Gano wrote the bulk of the first two albums when he was in high school. When he WAS that angst ridden teen. As a mature (26!!) man who maybe wasn’t expecting to be the voice of a generation, perhaps he suffered from, well, what I suffer from as a songwriter: I really only wrote anything of any worth when I was in distress. Frustrated. Scared. At the height of emotion. When all that crap was over, the creative burst sort of evaporated. Sure I could put the chords together that I knew and I could pump out a tune or two. But my heart wasn’t in it.
Maybe that’s what happened.
The album actually has some high points, specifically at it’s lowest point. I would love to hear Leonard Cohen or Tom Waits record “Nothing worth Living For”, and while that will never happen, it’s one of the more despondent moments in the Femmes catalog.
“World We’re Living In” is another fine example of Gano tapping into the darkest hippy psyche. And the sparse backing sax is perfectly mournful. And Outside The Palace could’ve been a leftover track from Springsteen’s Tunnel of Love. It has that same “adult contemporary soft rock” feel to it. It’s very comfortable but it has no evident teeth. The real bite lies beneath the surface.
It isn’t until “Mother of a Girl” that the old Femmes come to life. Maybe it’s a holdover, maybe Gano channeled his younger self, but the band is right there. Energized. Explosive. Folk punky as if they invented the form (and they really did!)
For the most part the album is just fine. Perhaps if you’ve never heard any other VF records this might be refreshing. But it will always have to be compared to the earlier work. And it can’t quite hold up.
All that said, 3 is a very listenable spin. It’s obvious they will never be the band of yore. But, who among us are the same people in our 20s as our teens?
Grade B
A Side: Nightmares, Fat, Mother of a Girl, See My Ships
BlindSide: Nothing Worth Living For, World We’re Living In
Downside: Nothing really. It’s all very listenable. I kind of forgot how much I liked it the first time.
I've never warmed up to this album, though I've always adored Nightmares and Fat. They're cute in a way nothing on their previous pop album was cute. I dunno … this one just didn't please my ears, sounded like a band going through the motions to me.
Enjoying this series! I hope you continue through their obscure years. Their song Freak Magnet is my favorite all time later work and just one of my favorite songs. H and H too! And Jana … and her mother!!!