HALLOWED GROUND
BEYOND (I'M) STRANDED -10 MORE TOP-DRAWER SAINTS AND RELATED TUNES.
BY ANDREW PERRY.
Desolation Row-style symbolism (the narrator’s a “one-eyed midget with a curse”). Could they ever have topped it?
THE SAINTS
Messin’ With The Kid
(from (I’m) Stranded LP, Harvest, 1977)
The Saints’ debut album was a pulse-racing blammo affair nodding to The Stooges, early Stones and Aussie ’60s-garage brutes The Missing Links, except for this spectacularly elegant hymn for the downtrodden, evoking that broken feeling in the Faces’ Debris. “It makes you crawl,” indeed.