Agent Orange
Living In Darkness

THE REVIEW

Agent Orange is a hardcore band that recorded their masterpiece in '81, the peak year of the entire movement. They came from Fullerton, Orange County, one of the punk epicenters of the Californian province. Among the founding members, they boast none other than Steve Soto, who later went on to found the Adolescents, a name now carved in history. Why, then, for example, in the book-bible "American Hardcore: A Tribal History", despite the encyclopedic nature of the latter, are they given just a few lines? As Steven Blush himself tells us: "they never worked hard, and were soon forgotten".

Those were years of ideological orthodoxy, of incessant workaholism; years that Agent Orange instead spent surfing or skating in the delightful Californian province. They have recorded, in almost thirty years of activity, just three albums (compare that with the publishing average of Black Flag, for example). They didn't hand-number their vinyls or design their concert posters. They never toured the States in an old van but, rather, rarely ventured out of their beloved Orange County. They never entered the orbit of the nascent indie-labels but, instead, recorded their first album in the studio of Madonna’s future producer. Of heroism - a quip: neo-romantic? - and the sweat of the early kids of American hardcore, Agent Orange of Fullerton - in the century Mike Palm, Scott Miller, and James Lavesque - had little use.

"Living in Darkness" is, therefore, the black sheep of 1981. "Bloodstains", their first single, with its anthemic gait, is the most diplomatically hardcore piece of the lot, one of the Californian anthems of the year. For the rest, it is an album that reshuffles the deck to the point of difficulty in placing them in the genre in which the three moved, starting with the influences. Agent Orange did not look to the Ramones, but to Dick Dale, of whom they remade the classic "Miserlou". The class with which they combined certain sixties sounds with the very dark mood of the Reagan era is their greatness. This pre-apocalyptic tension and a certain sonic minimalism are the aspects they shared with their contemporary punks, who were, however - as already mentioned - completely astonished by their hard'n'heavy influenced riffs, by the surf/twangy sounds of Mike Palm's guitar, by the songs with an average length of nearly three minutes. The authoritative Trouser Press, one of the most important magazines to cover the "new rock" of the seventies, described them as a hybrid between Sex Pistols, Ventures, and Blue Öyster Cult, a definition more effective than any of my review acrobatics.

In clear antithesis to the ethic of action of American hardcore (anti-nihilist from its inception), the scowling pessimism and resigned despair of anthems like "Everything Turns Grey", "A Cry for Help in a World Gone Mad" (the album's peak), "The Last Goodbye", among the best ever written by Reagan’s youth, went far beyond the no future of Albion and was the last element that contributed to erasing them from rock history which, as you know, can be very cruel. So put "Living in Darkness" next to "Damaged", "Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables", "Rock for Light", "Adolescents", "Group Sex", and "Back From Samoa", before the ghost of Lester Bangs haunts your nights and, above all, before a pearl of this caliber is permanently forgotten.