Album Details

• Artist: The Lucy Show
• Album: ....undone
• Label: A&M
• Year of Release: 1985
• ME Rating:
• Reviewed by: charlesmartel on 2012-11-11

Now, don't expect anything startlingly original with ...Undone. You are not going to find some long lost album which has been deviously kept from your ears in an effort to deny the world the opportunity to hear some startlingly innovative and ground breaking music. The Lucy Show are firmly in the post-punk contingent. But what they do, they do very well indeed. Like a lot of albums I have purchased in recent months, this is another classic from the eighties which has been forgotten now. However, as those of us who were there, and largely penniless, in the early eighties, have now matured and become financially stable, it is perhaps not surprising that we should seek out those sounds which we heard in our youth. So all credit to obscure American label Words on Music who have joined the ranks of Cherry Red, Rhino, Renascent and others to dig up these lost classics and reissue them.

It takes a while for some of the tracks to hit you, but when they do, you will be in for a treat. However, there is no such waiting around for the opener to reel your attention in. "Ephemeral (This Is No Heaven)" is the album's stand out track. Perhaps that is because the only one apart from "Undone" where the band's influences are not as clearly on display as on other tracks. For instance, "Resistance" brings to mind memories of the early Cure stuff while "Come Back to the Living" is reminiscent of the Cure's three miserable albums of the early eighties. As you pass through the album, you can pick out influences ranging from Bauhaus to A Teardrop Explodes and see the neo-psychedelic threads which ran through so much of the music of the times.

And yet, the whole thing fits together superbly well and at no time comes across as wholly derivative. The band just about manages to retain enough distinctiveness to give them an edge and to make them worth giving more than a single spin. Now that this has finally been re-released on CD for the first time it is perhaps the right time to check the Lucy Show out.

Listening to the album is a fine experience to those of us who were around when this sort of music had its heyday. I am not sure if the same feeling could be experienced by those who come to it without the direct nostalgia for those days. Yet, like so many other post punk outfits of the past, indeed for post punk as a whole, the Lucy Show deserved a better fate and more recognition, even if it is somewhat belated. Perhaps if you listened to more of this you would not find Interpol, Editors or Bloc Party so engaging.

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