ocket From The Tombs was always doomed. Everything from Cleveland was doomed. Rocket From The Tombs is totally inconsequential and irrelevant...That is the power of Cleveland. Embrace, my brothers, the utter futility of ambition and desire. Your only reward is a genuine shot at being the best. The caveat is that no one but your brothers will ever know it.” – David Thomas


Rocket from the Tombs is a rock critic’s wet dream. After all, this is a band that lasted less than a year, whose lineup contained core members of Pere Ubu and the Dead Boys, and whose total recorded output consists of a few sludgy live performances. I’m sure that the attention given this release has more than a few of the rock cognoscenti up in arms, committing the cardinal sin of pulling Rocket from the Tombs from the sanctity of name-dropped obscurity. For the rest of us, however, it provides a welcome glimpse into the early days of American punk.


The musical touchstones are clear from the start: the arty propulsion of ‘White Light\White Heat’-era Velvets married to the free-noise nihilism of the Stooges. Calling only the rhythm section thuggish does a disservice to the rest of the band; snarling guitars smash into each other with abandon whilst one of the singers barks and yelps over the low-end avalanche of bass and drums. This is music on the very edge of chaos, and music unafraid to jump over that edge. Half the songs dissolve into noise without ever approaching anything resembling a conventional ending.


Lyrically, the outlook...well, it can’t really be called an outlook. This is music full of loathing, both for itself and for the audience. ‘Life Stinks’, ‘Never Gonna Kill Myself Again’, ‘Final Solution’, ‘Down in Flames’: these are not the song titles of a band that sees a future in anything, much less itself. Iggy’s dead-end romanticism is purged of any romance; the songs here are determined to immolate themselves in despair.


Highlights include the nascent versions of songs that would become classics for the longer lived descendants of Rocket from the Tombs, particularly the Dead Boys; in almost every version, the songs here more than equal their later incarnations. Credit for this is largely due to the presence of Peter Laughner, about whom much ink has been spilled elsewhere. One of the most distinctive guitarists of the punk generation, his searing, choking guitar lines lift the songs above the thrash punk anthems they would later become. Pere Ubu’s '30 Seconds Over Tokyo' is born here as a masterful piece of apocalyptica, recreating the Doolittle raid in a burst of horrific surrealism. Laughner is also responsible for one of the most affecting songs, the uncharacteristically restrained ‘Amphetamine’, which aspires to (if not quite reaching) a ‘Heroin’-like lyricism.


Admittedly, this will appeal primarily to completists, and many will be put off by the murky quality of the recordings. For those with the patience to push through the sludge, however, this is a valuable document of the birth of punk, and its self-destruction.