*** Haysi Fantayzee

BATTLE HYMNS FOR CHILDREN SINGING

(Razor & Tie)

It wasn't as if punk never happened for the new romantics -- it's just that all they could do was pose in the rubble of 1977, look fabulous, and aim for that Top of the Pops rocket to fame and fortune. And from such an alternately clueless and scheming method of making (or, more precisely, having to make) music came this incorrigible 1983 anti-masterpiece, the most purely impure new-wave nugget extant. Here was an album that sounded the way fashion rival Boy George looked -- awkward and garish, clashing and cluttered. No Motown readymades, lovers' rock riddims, or other pretensions to listenability here. Jeremy Healy delivered his vocals in a grating shout rap, leaving Kate Garner to the hebephrenic nonsense chants that gave each track its primitive structure. The rhythms rarely varied from Haircut 100 lockstep and were probably Moog presets anyway. In short, whereas Boy G became an ambassador for tolerance, these club muffins stretched your tolerance, an effect exacerbated on this reissue by the inclusion of seven even klutzier bonus tracks and remixes. Pull it out for those moments of powerlessness everyone endures, because you gotta feel suaver or more in control after hearing this snarl of dreadlocks and leg warmers.

-- Kevin John