AMG Review of Early Warning

Patrick Kennedy
All Music Guide

Just like a classic noir crime novel, L.A.'s Gun Club absorbed and spit out the glitz, glamour, filth, and blood of the city's underbelly, and crafted it into something beautiful and haunting. Early Warning, a double-disc set comprising demo tracks, live cuts, and Jeffrey Lee Pierce's home acoustic recordings, is a magnificently assembled bound, riveted, limited edition booklet (with jackets for both discs) filled with extensive liner notes and photos. In their heyday -- as represented on this collection, the Gun Club were an amalgam of Delta blues, rockabilly, and punk sung with degenerate earnestness by the late Jeffrey Lee Pierce, who died in 1996 from a stroke, the final effect of decades of hard, reckless living. As evidenced on disc one, the Gun Club read the blues in a raw, visceral, twisted punk rock manner, but still maintained the integrity of the original form. Disc two is a portrait of Pierce alone with his guitar, stitching together a quilt of desperation, loneliness, drug addiction, sex, death, and life on the American road.