Passage, The - Pindrop + Degenerates (40th anniversary reissue)

Release date: 10/9/2020 

42 tracks.

To mark the 40^th anniversary of Pindrop, the lauded first album by cult Manchester postpunk group The Passage, LTM presents a new 2xCD set combining their 1980 debut with their third and most commercially successfully album, Degenerates, from 1982.

Formed by former Hallé Orchestra percussionist Dick Witts and Fall bassist Tony Friel in 1978, the band issued two EPs on esoteric indie label Object Music before fracturing the following year, leaving Witts to record Pindrop virtually solo. A dense, brooding, claustrophobic album, dominated by layered keyboards and incisive vocal texts, contemporary critics put Pindrop on a par with Joy Division and Wire. “A work of disciplined intellectual aggression, frantic emotions and a powerful idiomatic musicality,” wrote Paul Morley in NME. “It's as shocking a beautiful nightmare, as stormy and aware a debut LP as Unknown Pleasures.”

By 1982 the group were a trio, with Witts joined by guitarist Andrew Wilson and drummer Joe McKechnie, as well as an array of emerging digital technology. The third Passage album, Degenerates, appeared on Cherry Red, trailed by near-hit single XoYo. “How on earth XoYo missed the charts must remain forever a mystery,” Q Magazine would note later of an album of skewed technopop, which nevertheless retained the dark truculence of the group’s earlier work.

Both Pindrop and Degenerates are expanded on CD to include companion singles and radio sessions, with archive images and detailed liner notes contained in the 16 page booklet.

Disc 1:

1. Fear
2. Troops Out
3. Carnal
4. Watching You Dance
5. Hunt
6. Anderton’s Hall
7. From the Heart
8. Locust
9. 2711
10. 16 Hours
11. Carmen
12. A Certain Way to Go
13. Prelude
14. Love Song
15. Competition
16. Slit Machine
17. New Kind of Love
18. Taking My Time
19. Clock Paradox
20. 16 Hours
21. Time Delay
22. Mr Terror – Chief of Police
23. My One Request
24. The Beginning, The Dawn
25. A Man Set Out
26. Tangled
27. Shave Your Head

Disc 2:

1. Xoyo
2. Fleck
3. Revelation
4. Love Is As
5. Born Every Minute
6. (Ourselves)
7. Go to Seed
8. Armour
9. Time Will Tell
10. Empty Words
11. Xoyo (7” version)
12. Animal In Me
13. Born Every Minute (flexi version)
14. Taboos
15. Taboodub