Circle X

***A reissue of Circle X’s first full-length album. Prehistory was recorded in 1981 and released in 1983 by Index Records, making them, strangely enough, labelmates with Wall of Voodoo. Circle X were formed in 1978 from the remnants of NO FUN and the I-HOLES, Louisville, Kentucky’s first two punk bands. Circle X got the hell out of Dodge quickly enough, settling upon New York, then Dijon, France, and then back to New York again. Prehistory is a tire-burning left turn from the band's earlier EP. The pendulum arc of TONY PINOTTI’s vocals still contain throat-shredding howls, but expands to contain croons, moans, speech. BRUCE WITSIEPE’s lacerating guitar is dumped into a dubbish aquarium of reverb, and RIK and DAVE LETENDRE worry obsessive polyrhythms nearly to death.

The music of these Louisville-NYC art-punk-rockers continues to exist bafflingly outside of time—so when better than 42 years after initial release to reissue their album debut on vinyl? New listeners will find, in addition to the roiling compulsion of its odd, dance-damaged clockwork and synthesis of feral and aestheticized values, a refined understanding of the width and breadth of “post-punk” music, from any era, known or unknown.