Crazy. Pylon. DB Recs. 1983.
Put simply, new wave was pop mass marketing geared to excite our tribal instinct for social integration. Post punk was the struggle to share cultural evidence of what remained of humanity, as Neil Young once put it, after the gold rush. Musical groups with the creative power to bring both styles together typically did so because of aesthetic inspiration; you hear in their spirited material the suggestion of spontaneity under direct pressure of an intensely held concentration. You may hear little in the way of overtly commercial considerations but for an organic detonation of feeling that emerges from the admixture, broadening the scope of the material and, if luck holds, finding a larger audience for it. Pylon’s Crazy, from 1983, was released at a time when the post punk music making apparatus—musicians, studio techs, listenership—began taking seriously the role of college radio in determining the course of what was fast becoming a consolidated, viable...