Arriving to the world for the first time, really—beyond the ears of the deep-digging few—Dale Jenkins’ Undesirable Elements, issued privately in the Washington, D.C. area circa 1985, is a homespun effort deserving of the audience and attention it never received upon initial release.
Undesirable Elements—here expanded as Undesirable Element with appended bonus tracks—is a desolate and deconstructed album that touches on the subtleties and extremes of the human condition, and the nuances in between, across gnarled bits of proto-punk via abrasive, fuzzed guitars and refracted mutant strains of British post-punk through a distinctly American underbelly sensibility.
Drum-led and in-the-red, Undesirable Elements is a loose concept album of sorts, from the sympathetic pen of an innately skilled commentator. The album displays polemical disdain for the behavior of humans, insular views, and blindly moving forward on simple suggestions while carrying a keen eye into the many textures of the mindscape of man. While you may hear occasional tears aiming at the trends of the times, Jenkins’ direct, intensely personal, and lyrically sophisticated material, combined with his charged attack, is in a realm all its own. Jenkins’ lyrics are nearly cinematic, like bite-sized scripts, or character vignettes, filled with wizened, introspective, and radicalized perspectives. The self-contained home-recording maverick was searching, sensitive, subversive, topical, yet several steps from the soapbox. guerssenrecords.bandcamp.com
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