Violent Femmes are an American alternative rock band from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. As of 2013, they are active again. The band has performed as a trio, including singer, guitarist and songwriter Gordon Gano, bassist Brian Ritchie, and primarily drummer Victor DeLorenzo. The Violent Femmes found immediate success with the release of their self-titled debut album in early 1983 featuring many of their well-known songs, including “Blister in the Sun”, “Kiss Off”, “Add It Up”, and “Gone Daddy Gone”. Since then, Violent Femmes’ popularity continued to grow, especially in the United States where the songs “Nightmares” and “American Music” cracked the top five on the Modern Rock Tracks chart. (More from Wikipedia)
Violent Femmes could be viewed as the quintessential indie rock band, with its near-acoustic sound and alternative-rock sensibilility. Gordon Gano (guitar and lead vocals) formed the band while he was still in high school in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in the early 1980’s with Brian Ritchie (bass guitar) and Victor DeLorenzo (drums). Their debut album, Violent Femmes (1983) featured angst-ridden crowd-pleasers like “Blister in the Sun”, “Kiss Off”, “Add it Up”, and “Gone Daddy Gone” (including a verse from a Willie Dixon song).
While they never quite reached those heights again, their later albums explored Gordon Gano’s upbringing as the son of a Baptist minister. James Christopher Monger writes in Allmusic of their second album (released in 1984): “After the surprise success of their landmark debut, Violent Femmes could have just released another collection of teen-rage punk songs disguised as folk, and coasted into the modern rock spotlight alongside contemporaries like the Modern Lovers and Talking Heads. Instead they made Hallowed Ground, a hellfire-and-brimstone-beaten exorcism that both enraged and enthralled critics and fans alike. Like Roger Waters purging himself of the memories of his father’s death through [the Pink Floyd albums] The Wall and The Final Cut, bandleader Gordon Gano uses the record to expel his love/hate relationship with religion, and the results are alternately breathtaking and terrifying. . . .
“The album’s centerpiece, a searing indictment of loyalties broken and the snitches that break them, ‘Never Tell’ is the perfect balm for the bloody righteousness of youth; and when Gano screams, ‘I’ll stand right up in the heart of Hell / I never tell’, it’s hard not to stand right beside him. Christian imagery aside, Hallowed Ground is not as polarizing as some make it out to be. The band explores gothic Appalachian folk and child murder on the banjo-fueled ‘Country Death Song’, bawdy and bluesy Lou Reed-inflected infatuation on ‘Sweet Misery Blues’, and nuclear holocaust on the brooding title track [‘Hallowed Ground’], leaving little doubt that this is the same band that penned underground classics like ‘Gone Daddy Gone’ and ‘Add it Up’. Even the decidedly politically uncorrect ‘Black Girls’, with its free jazz mid-section that includes everything from jaw harp to the screaming alto sax of John Zorn and the Horns of Dilemma, is full of the same smirk and swagger that made ‘Blister in the Sun’ the soundtrack to so many people’s halcyon days.”
