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FINDING “NEVERLAND”
The best of the rest of The dB’s
THE dB’S
Stands For deciBels
ALBION, 1981
Big Star’s Radio City played at Dead Boys velocity, The dB’s debut does Southern harmonies with a streetsmart New York edge. The re-recorded version of debut single “Black And White” is ever bit as manic as the original, with Holsapple (“Big Brown Eyes”, “Bad Reputation”) and Stamey (“Cycles Per Second”, “I’m In Love”) goading each other to greater songwriting heights. 9/10
JULIA GORTON
THE dB’S
Repercussion
ALBION, 1981
If Positive Touch is the best Undertones LP (NB: it is), then this is The dB’s’ finest, the tension between the two writers’ styles reaching its quasipsychedelic peak. Holsapple may have been the more conventional pop writer (“Amplifier”, the thrilling “Neverland”), but his “Nothing Is Wrong” is every bit as spooky as Stamey’s more unsettling abstract pieces “I Feel Good (Today)” and “Happenstance”. 9/10
THE dB’S
Falling Off The Sky
BAR/NONE, 2012
Holsapple and Stamey have made three albums together, most recently 2020’s reworked greatest hits Our Back Pages, but they don’t sound like The dB’s without Rigby and Holder. The original four remain in touch, and reconvened for this bittersweet LP, Holsapple’s portrait of the artists as old men, “That Time Is Gone”, and Stamey’s “Far Away And Long Ago” setting a suitably elegiac tone. 7/10