The Shirts - The Shirts (1978)

When most people recall the dawning days of New York punk and the early CBGB scene, they think in terms of bands like the Ramones, Blondie, and the Dead Boys, but the sound of what Hilly Kristal first called "street rock" was significantly more eclectic than that, and the arty pop of the Shirts was as much a part of the scene as the more aggressive stuff that would in time become punk's hallmark. The Shirts were certainly capable of doing the fast-and-loud thing on tunes like "Lonely Android," "Poe," and "Teenage Crutch," but the tricky chord changes and melodic shifts that pop up in these songs (and the moody keyboards and massed vocals of "Android"'s coda) set them apart from the three-chord thrash that was all the rage on the Bowery, and the smart, angular push and pull of "Reduced to a Whisper" and "Empty Ever After" isn't especially far removed from what their pals the Talking Heads did on their first album, with the artier stuff aided considerably by Mike Thorne's crisp but unobtrusive production. There's a confident professionalism to the Shirts' debut that few CBGB bands managed on their first visit to the studio; Annie Golden's vocals were more Mary Weiss or Ronnie Spector than Patti Smith, while "Tell Me Your Plans," "10th Floor Clown," and "The Story Goes" play more like mainstream pop with the slightest dollop of progressive rock around the edges than anything most folks would consider new wave. The Shirts is an album that rests somewhere between the old and new waves of the year it was recorded (1978), but the band's intelligence and skill invariably shine through and it deserves its place in the pantheon of notable albums of the first new wave.