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The Undertones: Hypnotised LP (Sire, 1980)
After my foray into the literary for last week’s staff pick, let’s swing way in the other direction and talk about a classic punk record everyone should know. Saturday was Record Store Day, and as I usually do on Record Store Day, once things calmed down in the shop I went out to buy lunch for the staff. I suggested this spot I like called Vegan Community Kitchen, whose food I love but rarely get to eat because they’re way out in the burbs, completely on the other side of Raleigh from where I live. I figured it would be a good treat for Record Store Day, and that their hearty food—their specialty is vegan kebab—would be satisfying after an intense day of work. The weather on Saturday was great in Raleigh. It had been almost 90 degrees on Friday, but Saturday was cooler, and while the sun wasn’t out, it felt like a relief after the premature heat of the past few days. So as I hit the highway to pick up lunch, I rolled the windows down and dialed up an old favorite to listen to.
I’m sure I don’t have you tell you how great the Undertones are. Everyone knows “Teenage Kicks,” but if you know little beyond that, I strongly urge you to check out their first two albums and all the surrounding singles and b-sides. I’ve always had a particular fondness for Hypnotised, their second album. While the Undertones’ first album has a unique youthful charm that makes it many people’s favorite, I love the slightly more mature version of the Undertones you get on Hypnotised. The band members are still very young, but they play with such confidence and power here, the excellent recording accentuating how precise yet alive their playing is. They were just a great fucking band at this point, and while I’m sure they could have pulled off more complex music, they kept things pretty straightforward. Never ones to show off, the songs on Hypnotised are still the unpretentious pop the Undertones had been writing up to that point, but the Undertones weren’t rubes. The opening track, “More Songs About Chocolate and Girls,” is totally self-aware about where the band was in their career. The chorus articulates exactly why so many bands struggle with their second album: the songs need “a lot less time but a lot more care.” The Undertones crammed Hypnotised full of hits… the title track with its all-time classic chorus, the brilliant slice of life of “My Perfect Cousin,” the gentle psychedelic pop of “Wednesday Week.” Aside from the cover of “Under the Boardwalk,” which I always skip, it’s pretty much nothing but bangers.
That the Undertones become such seasoned and capable musicians feels like a validation of punk’s promise that anyone could do it. Aside from their natural talent, the Undertones didn’t appear to have anything going for them. They were really young, not particularly attractive (apologies to them), and about as far from the cultural center of the British isles as you could be, in a city beset by poverty and brutal political violence. But they made great fucking music, and it took them far. And while fame exposes cracks in many bands, success only seemed to hone the Undertones’ songwriting and performance chops. The band would move away from punk on their third and fourth albums, but Hypnotised captures them at this perfect moment when they were still a punk band, but also just a great band full stop. In that respect, Hypnotised reminds me of the Ruts’ The Crack and the Stranglers’ No More Heroes, smart and aggressive punk records made by bands with big-league playing chops captured in good studios with major label recording budgets.
So yeah, if it’s springtime where you live, break out your copy of Hypnotised, take a big breath of fresh air, and blast it as loud as you can.