Marine Girls - Beach Party (1981)

The debut album by the Marine Girls is one of the most willfully amateurish releases of its era, which is not necessarily a bad thing. When it was first released on Daniel Treacy's Whaam! label in 1981, it undoubtedly sounded impossibly shoddy and nearly inept, filled with deliberately out-of-tune vocals, extremely minimal guitar and bass, and almost no percussion. However, its place as one of the pillars of the twee pop scene, along with the Young Marble Giants' "Colossal Youth", is now incontestable, and what once might have seemed haphazard instead sounds refreshingly artless and slyly provocative. 

Tracey Thorn, whose vocals would gain much more technical polish during her years in Everything But the Girl, sings with a sort of offhand grace, while Alice Fox' more tuneless yelp sounds like a precursor to Kathleen Hanna or Sleater-Kinney. The songs are monochromatic, though a few, particularly the opening "In Love," manage to marry memorable tunes to the group's deliberate minimalism. This is not an album for anyone who requires a lot of studio polish, but "Beach Party" is far from the grating tunelessness that some early reviewers labeled it.

"Beach Party" was named as one of Kurt Cobain's 50 favourite albums in his diaries.

Tracklist:

A1 In Love
A2 Fridays
A3 Tonight?
A4 Times We Used To Spend
A5 Flying Over Russia
A6 Tutti Lo Sanno
A7 All Dressed Up
A8 Honey
B1 Holiday Song
B2 He Got The Girl
B3 Day/Night Dreams
B4 Promises
B5 Silent Red
B6 Dishonesty
B7 20,000 Leagues
B8 Marine Girls

Marine Girls - Beach Party (1981)

(192 kbps, cover art included)