Doctors Of Madness - Sons Of Survival (Reissue) (1978/1992)

The iceman cometh. If Doctors of Madness did not know they were dying as they recorded their third album, they didn't let their innocence show. Re-emerging over a year after the sophomore Figments of Emancipation, but still far out on a limb of their own devising, the Doctors reflected upon the first 12 months of punk rock with an album that mourned the members' own apparent old age -- "here we are the '50s kids, on collision course with 30" -- then let fly with more fire than rebels almost half their age. It was peculiar, at the time, to realize just how violent an electric violin could sound. Of course, that was always the instrument's role in the Doctors, but on past albums, Urban Blitz couched his psychoses in a chilling darkness -- as though saying, "I'll scare you, but I won't hurt you." Sons stripped away such pretense and pretensions, and the band emerged with an album that is probably still on the run. Catch up with it, and the blood will never wash away. "No Limits," bassist Stoner's solo vocal debut, is nothing short of brutality draped in a succulent melody, one of the finest songs and performances in the band's entire canon; "Bulletin," oddly culled as the band's first ever single -- is the bilious elder brother of Elvis Costello's "Radio Radio"; and the closing "Cool (Live in the Satin Subway)" is stuttering frenzy that progresses rapid-fire into feedback and heart attack, the last sounds the original four-piece Doctors would ever make in a studio and their most intense. If you ever wondered what "Sister Ray" grew up to become, look no further. Elsewhere, "Back from the Dead" is a stately slice of scream-laden apocalypse composed by Strange and the Adverts' TV Smith, but the crowning glory is the penultimate track. The end of the worldly "Kiss Goodbye Tomorrow" sees Strange pull out another of his unexpectedly tender, balladic masterpieces, couched in continental mystery, and strangely, sadly, nostalgic. It is brief -- just two verses offer a mere snatch of the version Strange would subsequently record for a solo B-side, but it is also a masterpiece and, as such, something of a consolation prize for everyone dismayed by the Doctors' dissolution just months later. At the time, Sons of Survival felt like a last will and testament. It was good to discover there'd be some life after death.