Friday, May 11, 2018

These Dreams Are Not Your Own Anymore


The Saints : A Minor Aversion


In May of 1978, The Saints released their second album, Eternally Yours. Swept up in the punk rock craze, The Saints found themselves quickly disillusioned by the London scene. They added brassy horns and played acoustic guitars on this brilliant album. I was lucky enough to find the cassette in the cut out bin at a Woolworths in Reno, a reminder that great albums don't always sell. 


Selected as one of the 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die, the writer notes Chris Bailey's lyrics sounds like the "rantings of a cranky hippie". Never more so than on the deep cut "A Minor Aversion" where Bailey sings "I've taken all I can I'm not gonna stand here /And be walked on no more/ 'Cause I don't need you/ These days your facts/ They don't mean a thing, no".


Robert Christgau didn't care for the album, giving Eternally Yours a C+ and writing:

"Private Affair" is the perfect punk-cum-early-Kinks song, "International Robots" invents a Jonathan Richman clone, and Chris Bailey should dub in the vocals on Seymour Stein's Wild in the Streets remake. But the lyrics are received protest, the tempos have slackened, and if those horns are somebody's idea of a joke I am not amused. The very idea.


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