Squeeze "East Side Story" [1981]

If you're looking for the oldest-sounding new wave album of all time, you've just found it -- these tunes fart dust. White people -- especially the English -- always tend to water down the styles of music they play, but on "East Side Story," the faceless gang of pastey, verbose pub-rock lame-asses named Squeeze (as in "we can only ever get to second base, even though we're in a band") set themselves miles apart from the mild genre-faking of even the second-most boring group in the UK at the time. The Zombies as watery gruel, the Kinks as a tasteless lollipop, George Jones with a bullet through his head, "East Side Story" has everything one needs to know about how someone as rigid and visionless as Margaret Thatcher could come to rule that country. Largely produced by Elvis Costello -- as most sub-par efforts were in the early 80s -- Squeeze sounds like nothing so much as Paul McCartney if he'd had no talent and never made it. And that's before the flat, low-voiced putz gets a crack at singing lead, at which point it becomes pretty clear Squeeze is ultimately a mean-spirited joke band, parodying all the torturous mediocrities of their time and place. Add to the mix arrangement experiments that flop repeatedly, and all you really need to know is that "East Side Story" is one book you'd be wasting your time checking out.