Wire "Pink Flag" [1977]

So it turns out that in the original movement now referred to as "punk rock," there were plenty of musical flavors from which to sample; no surprise they're all horrible. English arch-garage wherever-the-hell-they-came-from band Wire brought to their debut "Pink Flag" slow, grinding, ugly, turgid turds and put them next to noisy, jumpy punk-rock abortions that are abandoned in mere seconds. The overall effect is nothing so much as an incohesive and largely incoherent band rehearsal tape of song ideas that simply got put out as-is. Damn, if only it were this easy for everyone to release a "classic." The album's 150 or so fucking tracks went on to influence plenty of other unkempt rockers with a paint brush up their ass, like the Minutemen, but nobody bought their albums either. What this vast amount of spiky-haired insolence did manage to do was populate the vomitous pool of punkdom, artificially inflating the catalog of the overall genre. So much for integrity; then again, that's too much to have asked from anybody in 1977, let alone guys who looked and sounded like Wire.