So how does it all sound, after thirty years of waiting?

On one hand, it sounds just as you would expect. The Day The Earth Met The Rocket From The Tombs is essentially the sound of some desperate kids in a dying city translating the Rosetta Stone with a Cap'n Crunch Decoder Ring and a copy of Kick Out The Jams, and just like most first drafts of later greatness, it can be hard to see what's valuable underneath the muck (I feel the same way about The Replacements' debut Sorry Ma, Forgot To Take Out The Trash! and The Flaming Lips' first EP as well, among many others). Since most of the tracks were recorded on one mic the quality is muddy, and the playing is at times ludicrously sloppy. On the other hand, however, all the murkiness and fumbling in the world can't obfuscate the fact that Rocket From The Tombs had incredible songs, great energy, and a stunningly original idea of what rock should be. Fueled by equal parts Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, and the MC5, the band combined swagger, angst, and plain freaky weirdness into a sound far greater than the sum of its garage-band parts. The songs that don't fall apart into messes spill over into feedback, Crocus Behemoth simply can't sing, and the brilliant, funny lyrics are buried under layers of guitar fuzz and drum fills. The same tension between "make art" and "kick ass" that eventually drove the group apart makes The Day The Earth Met... a brilliantly original artifact of punk before its time.

The bulk of the songs on The Day The Earth Met... appear in finished form on Pere Ubu and Dead Boys albums. Particularly interesting to punk completists are early versions of Pere Ubu's strange and chilling "30 Seconds over Tokyo" and "Final Solution" and The Dead Boys' "Down In Flames," "Sonic Reducer" and "Ain't It Fun" (later massacred cruelly by Guns 'n Roses), but the lesser known songs are where the fascination lies. The RFTT originals "Amphetamine," "Never Gonna Kill Myself Again," and "So Cold" are musically tight, hypnotic, and excellent on a par with the songs later made famous. In particular, Peter Laughner's sardonic lyrics deserve a place in the all-time songwriters' hall of fame. Moreover, though the sound quality is rough, the guitar greatness of Laughner and Cheetah Chrome-- one of the only great lead guitarists of the punk era-- shines through loud and clear. If you are a hardcore punk fan, it is hard to deem this collection as anything but essential.