Chris D. (aka Chris Desjardins) was a poet and music critic before he formed
the Flesh Eaters, so it wasn't surprising that he would end up leading one of the most explicitly literary bands on the Los Angeles punk scene in the '80s. The raw beat-influenced visions of Chris' lyrics were strong enough that they often overwhelmed the music on
the Flesh Eaters' earliest recordings, but for the group's second full-length album, 1981's
A Minute to Pray, A Second to Die, he assembled a band that was tough enough to stand up to anything Desjardins could conjure. On
A Minute to Pray,
the Flesh Eaters featured two members of
X (
John Doe on bass and
D.J. Bonebrake on percussion) and three members of
the Blasters (
Dave Alvin on guitar,
Bill Bateman on drums, and
Steve Berlin on sax, the latter of whom would later join
Los Lobos), and if their musical workouts on this album are often minimal in structure, they're executed with a strength and ferocity that make them stand tall like a gunfighter ready to take on the posse gathering down the street. (The band is especially impressive on "Satan's Stomp," a long, feral groove that was cut live to two-track with no edits or overdubs.)
Dave Alvin's taut, fractured guitar lines are a long way from what he usually brought to
the Blasters and cut like a machete through these melodies, while
Doe and
Bateman are a peerless rhythm section, and
Bonebrake's marimba and
Berlin's sax give this album a melodic texture that sets it apart from most punk bands of the day, and easily fits the image-laden, melodramatic venom of Desjardins's lyrics.
A Minute to Pray, A Second to Die isn't subtle by any stretch of the imagination, but it's rugged and artful at the same time, and Desjardins never had a better or more sympathetic set of collaborators than this -- it's the best match of form and content of his career. ~ Mark Deming