Album of the Day 10/4/10

Every day our 1000 best albums of all time countdown continues all the way to #1. Monday’s album is #848:

The Adverts – Crossing the Red Sea with the Adverts

As some of you know by now, the original game plan with this list was to put up a single page of all the obvious choices, especially those we share with the other popular “best albums” lists out there. We were hoping to put up about three hundred and then spend a little less than two years counting down the rest. As it turned out, in our haste to get the whole thing up and running, our “obvious suspects page” lists just a tad under a hundred albums. This is one we should have included on it: iconic in punk circles but largely unknown otherwise, it’s a feast of snarling reverb guitar, catchy melody and aggressively dark, often phantasmagorical songwriting. The big 1978 UK hit was Gary Gilmore’s Eyes, the twisted tale of a transplant recipient getting the eyes of the first American killer to die by firing squad in years. There’s also the caustic, 1:45 Bored Teenagers; the defiantly sarcastic One Chord Wonders; the brooding and bitter cripple’s tale On Wheels; the desperately scurrying Bombsite Boy and On the Roof, and the snidely anti-imperialist Great British Mistake. Guitarist Howard Pickup would die of an aneurysm the following year; the band’s follow-up album Cast of Thousands was a great British mistake. There are also a couple of Adverts albums in the Live at the Roxy series, one excellent, the other not so good. After the band broke up, frontman TV Smith continued on and became one of the world’s great literate acoustic punk performers. Here’s a random torrent.