Violent Femmes is the debut album by Violent Femmes. Mostly recorded in July 1982, the album was released by Slash Records on vinyl and on cassette on April 13, 1983, and on CD in 1987 with two extra tracks "Ugly" and "Gimme the Car". In 2002, Rhino Records remastered the album, filled out the disc's length with demos, and added another disc of live tracks and a radio interview for a 20th anniversary special edition, with liner notes by Michael Azerrad. Violent Femmes is the band's most successful album to date and achieved a rare feat by going gold, four years after its release, and later platinum, four years after that, without having yet made an appearance on the Billboard 200 album chart. After achieving platinum certification on February 1, 1991, the album finally entered the Billboard album chart for the first time on August 3, 1991. Since Nielsen Music began electronically tracking sales in 1991, the album has sold 1.8 million copies. Slant Magazine listed the album at #21 on its list of "Best Albums of the 1980s". and was ranked number 974 in All-Time Top 1000 Albums. In 2014, the staff of PopMatters included the album on their list of "12 Essential Alternative Rock Albums from the 1980s".
Content
Most of the songs on both this album and its follow-up were written when the songwriter, Gordon Gano, was 18 years old and still in high school in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Violent Femmes peaked at #171 on Billboard's Top 200 album chart in 1991. The cover model was Billie Jo Campbell, a 3-year-old who was walking down a street in California when she and her mother were approached and offered $100 for the photograph which became the album cover.
Reception
In a contemporary review for Rolling Stone, J. D. Considine wrote that Violent Femmes was precocious yet dynamic, with a good balance between Gano's direct lyrics and the full sound of the music. Robert Christgau of The Village Voice compared Gano and the album as a whole to Jonathan Richman of The Modern Lovers. Gano himself grew tired of comparisons to Richman, as by his own account he was actually trying to sound like Steve Wynn of The Dream Syndicate. In a retrospective write-up for AllMusic, Steve Huey called Violent Femmes "one of the most distinctive records of the early alternative movement and an enduring cult classic", noting that "the music also owes something to the Modern Lovers' minimalism, but powered by Brian Ritchie's busy acoustic bass riffing and the urgency and wild abandon of punk rock, the Femmes forged a sound all their own", while crediting Gano for keeping "the music engaging and compelling without overindulging in his seemingly willful naiveté". The album was also included in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die.
