Album review: X – Smoke & Fiction

Few bands understand the pulse of a city as well as X. Formed in 1977 amid sunshine and smog, the quartet’s debut album, the claustrophobic and unflinching Los Angeles, released in 1980, bypassed the apparent glitz and glam of the City of Angels and, instead, without blinking, stared hard at its listless and troubled underbelly.

Theirs was a world of emotional dislocation, sex offenders and friends with moral compasses blunted by racism. As the American music critic Greil Marcus so memorably put it, "X’s vision isn’t fragmented, it’s not second-hand, and its ambition is to discredit any vision that says there’s more to life than X says there is."

Forty-four years later, at last, we’ve reached the end of the line. But while Smoke & Fiction, the group’s ninth album, is advertised as being their last, at least the ability to speak of what most other LA bands choose to ignore remains present and correct. On the propulsive Big Black X, the sight is of 'The Hollywood letters falling down'. As ever, vocalists Exene Cervenka and John Doe sing in a strange and unique harmony. 'Stay awake and don’t get taken,' is their warning, 'we knew the gutter, and also the future.'

Bet your life they did, and do, because in their world, lives depend on it. X earned their wings in the earliest days of the Southern Californian punk scene, a place of violence but also of a wide variety of bands who each sounded different from the other. You pays your money, you takes your choice. But with albums such as Los Angeles, Wild Gift and Hey Zeus, they were, and remained, the best of the early-day riders and runners; on the live LP Unclogged, their songs easily withstood being reduced to a sparse acoustic format. On Smoke & Fiction, however, the template is similar to that of their youngest selves. The knockout rock and roll riffs of guitarist Billy Zoom almost shrug at the lyrical company they’re required to keep.

X have never tried to show their listener the difference between right and wrong, merely to tell stories in which chaos and bloodshed, or even just common-or-garden wrong turns, are embedded with clues all the same. Of course, this philosophy is rather neatly summed up on Smoke & Fiction. 'That’s just the way it is,' they sing, 'the way it’s gonna be.'

Verdict: 5/5

For fans of: Bad Religion, The Distillers, Social Distortion

Smoke & Fiction is out now via Fat Possum