Consumer Guide Album

Minutemen: Double Nickels on the Dime [SST, 1984]
Maybe by designating a "side chaff" and aiming a boast at their four-sided labelmates ("take that, hüskers") the L.A. (really San Pedro) punk-fusion (really "chump rock"?) trio mean to acknowledge that a forty-six-song double-LP is overdoing things. But I have my faves throughout, topped by a Steely Dan cover that wouldn't have survived first weed, and I'm not sure I'd like them so much at a different pace. Eleven of the titles are over 2:00 and thirteen more over 1:40, but structures are still so abbreviated that the way one riff-song segues into the next changes both. This is poetry-with-jazz as it always should have been, and while D. Boon may be a somewhat limited singer, he's a hell of a reader, with a guitar that rhymes. A-