X

WHO: X WHAT: Smoke & Fiction WHY: Let’s round up the week with more X, shall we? It’s easy to point at bands that are still going and overstaying their welcome, but X certainly isn’t that. On Smoke & Fiction, the band shows they can still create inspiring and relevant music even at the end of their career. This album not only sounds like X, strutting and shimmying past rockabilly and punk rock, but it also sounds great: crisp and...

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In Penelope Spheeris’ Decline of Western Civilization Part I, X are depicted as the gatekeepers or elder statesmen of LA 70s punk rock. It’s hard to say whether that label really stuck, but whatever the case, they never asked for it. One thing is for sure, X have been a machine always on the move for the past 40 years, and the creative juices of “leaders” John Doe and Exene Cervenka’s never stopped flowing. X’s influence in music over the...

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into Fat Possum’s vinyl reissue of Wild Gift by X. As good as Los Angeles was and as important as that album would ultimately prove to be in the presentation of X, the band’s debut album will ultimately always play a supporting role to the band’s sophomore long-player, Wild Gift. Now, it’s important to note that Wild Gift would not, could not have happened had the groundwork not been laid by Los Angeles,...

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the Fat Possum reissued pressing of the Los Angeles LP by X. It might not be the first thing that fans think of when they’re looking at punk rock and trying to decode how the genre has evolved, but the fact is that the breed which was borne of Los Angeles in the late Seventies and early Eighties drew from a very deep well of inspiration – arguably a deeper one than...