I get a new turntable and dust off some old records. Vinyl Tap #34:

What goes between the eyes downtown Blue Spark Loudspeakers and search lights ...Blue Spark…

As energized and punk-raw as X’s first two albums, Los Angeles, and Wild Gift were, the bracing vigor and varied approach of 1982’s Under the Big Black Sun, their major label debut on Elektra, strikes with a major leap forward in sonic rock spark. The songs and vocals of John Doe and Exene Cervenka indeed ignites in an intensity of blare and glare that seems to hit you “between the eyes,” as the insistent shock and shudder of “Blue Spark” plays it out.

But it is in the predatory voraciousness of the lead-off track, “The Hungry Wolf," wherein X unleashes a mission statement of sorts. "I roam ready to tear up the world / I roam, I roam,” the group announces in the resolute and robust song, generously and assertively punctuated by D.J. Bonebrake’s front-and-center drums.

Part two of Black Sun’s opening one-two punch, “Motel Room In My Bed,” features the rockabilly-flavored rush of Billy Zoom’s guitar work, a force that comes in tinges or tumult -- such as in the hard-charging “Because I Do” -- throughout the album. Whatever the case, his solos and rhythmic drive somehow visually evoke Zoom in live performance, with his perpetual grin and splayed stance in perfect complement to his pompadour and circumstance, so to speak.

Moving on, “Riding With Mary” and “Come Back To Me” touch upon the death of Exene’s sister, killed by a drunk driver before the recording of the album. The ‘50s-style sound of the grieving “Come Back To Me” makes it — along with the Spanish-spiced infectiousness of a Tin Pan Alley cover, “Dancing With Tears In My Eyes” — one of the most distinctive, and affecting, tracks on LP. Exene laments:

I built a shrine
For you on the kitchen wall
With flowers and Florida souvenirs
You were walking through the house last night
I knew it was you
From the space in your steps.

Please, please
Come back to me...

From woe to wit, Black Sun displays as much lyrical range as it does musical. The hook-heavy “How I (Learned My Lesson)” features a spousal back-and-forth between Doe and Cervenka, the latter going on to amusingly convey a little petulant ambivalence on the domestic front: “Absence makes the heart grow fonder / So I never want to see you again / I'm wrecking the kitchen carefully / But I'm keeping your dinner warm.”

The final song on Under the Big Black Sun, “The Have Nots,” shares the same trace of twang as the country-ish title song. But while celebrating “another hard earned day” at the “hardcore blue collar bar,” “The Have Nots” also bemoans a life that “is the game / that moves as you play,” and a stalled social mobility that is part and parcel of trying to climb on “the bottom step of the ladder [as] it keeps getting higher and higher.”

Leaving one ready once again "to tear up the world / I roam, I roam..."