Complete Punk Recordings 1977-1978

For those who weren't there or have forgotten, both the visuals and the sound in evidence on this album are a salutary reminder of how confusing the boundaries between punk rock and non-punk rock were in the mid- to late '70s. With their big, feathery hairdos, aviator sunglasses, and embarrassingly tight pants, the members of Ottawa's the Action all look pretty much like adjunct members of Led Zeppelin in most of the band photos, and the songs, though many of them are scrappy and trashy in stereotypically proto-punk ways, also tend prominently to feature slide guitar and to aspire to something a bit more than the three-chord thrash-alongs that came to typify the genre — consider, for example, the eight-minute-long live version of "Midnight Rambler." This comprehensive retrospective includes the four tracks from the band's untitled debut EP, three from another unreleased EP, and nine additional tracks recorded live in Ottawa and Hull in 1977 and 1978. The sound is generally pretty crappy, which is probably the way it should be, though the band's constant rehearsing has clearly paid off — unlike many early punk bands, the Action prided themselves on their tightness. Tracks like "No Applause," "Do the Strangle," and "Success Without College" hide fairly serious chops beneath a pseudo-Ramones simplicity, and that eight-minute version of "Midnight Rambler" is more technically impressive than they probably meant it to sound. There's nothing here that will rewrite the history of punk rock, but this is a seriously interesting document of a little-known outpost in the musical insurgency that was permanently changing the world of pop music at the time.