I would rather be sorry than safe. But the price is going up, up, up, up.
Lost pioneers. Consuming new frontiers.

The fields of punk and its equally wild little step-brother, post-punk, were rich and woolly for a short period of time. London, Paris, Munich and the twin coasts of America, just to name a few key places. California was particularly ripe and out of the sun-soaked section known as Long Beach hailed a band both so quintessentially American and beautifully weird that their sonic imprint remains virtually untouched thirty plus years later. Formed by two Cal-Arts students, Su Tissue and Vix Billingsgate, Suburban Lawns were an outfit that seemed to be spawned out of the awkwardness of human relations, 70’s static-laden pop culture via a dodgy, foil-covered TV antenna and a keen knowing of how absurd such an existence truly is.

With members Frankie Ennui, Chuck Roast and John McBurney filling out the ranks, Suburban Lawns made their first impression with their 1979 song, “Gidget Goes to Hell,” which was used by now famed director Jonathan Demme for a suitably demented short film of the same name for Saturday Night Live. Couple that with a classic appearance on Peter Ivers’ groundbreaking New Wave Theater and the band already had insta-built cult status.
 

 
Flashing white teeth snap
Bloody bikini
Ohhhhhhh, Gidget goes to hell! Ohhh!
 

 
Luckily for us, the band didn’t rest on their quirky single laurels for too long and in 1981, released their self titled debut in 1981 via IRS Records. The album begins with the opening track, “Flying Saucer Safari.” There is no track stronger than this to fire off the proceedings, between Billingsgate’s galloping bass, Su’s otherworldly voice and lyrics like “Taco Bell and filter kings, Correctol and onion rings,” which reek of pure Americana-pop-culture-trash. If you’re making the modern day equivalent of a road trip playlist, then it is a near moral-imperative to have “Flying Saucer Safari” on it. (It would be roadtrip heresy otherwise.)

“Pioneers” follows, featuring some good and jagged-with-a-purpose guitar work that borders on funky and the sentiment, “I would rather be sorry than safe.” Indeed. Things get progressively more strange with the valium-drowned vocals of “Not Allowed” and then Su’s languid-languor intonations with “Gossip.” As the album progresses, her vocals take on a form of a mutated Zarah Leander, the Nazis-era chanteuse. This is a good thing. Tonally, the album switches gears to the paranoid with the moody “Protection.”
 
More after the jump…