Urinals: Negative Capability... Check It Out!

When they formed the band in 1979, the three members of Urinals shared the idea of making the simplest music possible—stuff anybody would be able to play, with nothing in the lyrics, instrumentation or playing that didn't make the songs better. It was a punk idea, but this isn't punk music, not really. One simple riff is pretty much it for most songs, and the anger and bluster isn't there; the Urinals' terse, emotionally varied, guitar-led three-piece gems weren't punk songs, or pop songs, or art-school band songs. The Urinals just wrote Urinals songs, and ended up influencing everyone from The Minutemen to Mission of Burma to Yo La Tengo. Now that there's a whopping 31-track greatest-hits retrospective, interested people don't have to dig around in musty piles of 45s or buy mediocre compilations just to get at that one Urinals nugget. Lovers of the simple, frenetic and energetic in their music should eat this right up.