Rediscover: Holly Beth Vincent: Holly and the Italians

The punk-new wave cycle in the late ‘70s was the stuff of ferocious youthful anthems and thwarted dreams. Hot off the deceptively bright single “Tell That Girl to Shut Up,” released at the tail end of 1979, Chicago-born L.A. punk Holly Beth Vincent seemed on her way to be a darling of the UK music press. Her band Holly and the Italians had a high-profile gig opening up for The Clash. But the debut album, The Right to Be Italian, took a year to complete, and it’s hard to say what was the worse result: being dropped from her label, or being deported back to the US. Yet there was a melancholy undercurrent behind that pop punk debut, and that despair and frustration came to the foreground in Vincent’s 1982 solo debut, titled Holly and the Italians. Such a generic title reflected a kind of aesthetic identity crisis—am I the group or am I me, she seemed to ask? The answer, in an atmospheric album well in tune with early ‘80s trends but also strangely apart from them, was a bleak and personal new wave vision that Vincent never equaled.

Opener “Honalu” was the obvious single, a mood cross between jangle-rock and Pepper-pomp. Vincent at first appears to be addressing a muse/lover: “What do you think you are doing here?/ How did you arrive?/ Did you come up through the ocean floor/ Or fall from the sky/ Did you come via the Orient/ On a steam boat built for you?/ Did you think of all your friends behind/ While you dance in Honalu?/ What it’s doing to me/ I cannot follow you.” By the chorus, it’s clear she’s talking to herself: “Did it cross your mind/ You can’t run away?/ Little girls caught crying/ Never get their way.”

The music is gorgeous, dense, a brass fanfare joining with Vincent’s ringing guitar chords for a sound that marries some ancient court ritual with what something like what the kids were listening to. Complementary guitar lines emphasize the (self-) accusatory lyrics and carry the melody through rabbit holes that vaguely echo some misremembered Hollywood musical, and the slightly muddy mix and fantastical Far East milieu suggests an opium den vision. This murky but rich sound, sustained even through various genre shifts throughout the album, has come a long way from The Right to Be Italian, and she’s just getting started.

Where she goes varies greatly depending on which version of the album you’re hearing. The UK edition, as well as other European issues, segues to Vincent’s radically reimagined cover of Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth.” That UK sequence does not make much emotional sense, and one wonders if that’s a continent’s revenge on whatever they think Vincent did to them during her volatile stay in England. But the US sequence offers a more coherent narrative—one more introverted and desperate.

Following the US sequence, “Dangerously,” maybe the strongest track on the album, comes next. As was the style at the time, it blends funk and new wave and jazz, but if that post-punk funk seems very slightly dated today, it’s somehow held up over the years, the sinuous rhythm (and Kevin Wilkinson’s propulsive, circular groove on drums) suits the mysterious mood. The chorus, “Dangerously/ I always want to,” indicates the standard-bearing self-destructiveness of youth, but on the bridge, you hear hints of the nervous breakdown Vincent has admitted got her kicked out of a nation: “Just like a wild one tamed/ Somebody calls my name/ And I look/ Today I start to go/ Into a place they know as madness.”

The downtempo self-examination continues with “Uptown,” probably the most depressing song ever made with that word in the title. The girl-group trappings of The Right to Be Italian are there in her soulful, multitracked vocals, but the music (thank Mike Thorne for fully developing this dense aesthetic) is both soaring and sobbing, as if The Ronettes somehow found themselves being backed by some suicidal band from Leeds. Lyrics like, “She paints her eyes, paints her blue eyes/ She comes down, she moves underground” would ordinarily be paired with some vibrant going-out-on-the-town dancefloor-friendly vamp, but here it’s like she’s getting ready in an asylum: “Uptown she’d rather be/ Pretending like she used to.”

In this context, the more conventional “Cool Love (Is Spreading Around),” the closest thing here to The Right to Be Italian’s ‘60s homage, comes off as part of Vincent’s reminiscence of better times, and Thorne’s production turns its Wall of Sound pretensions on their wistful head, ambitions flying to the heavens but stopped short by a layer of muck. Similarly, side-closer “Just Like Me” is another throwback to more innocent times, but its sentiment, like “Honalu” is one of self-examination, the martial drumbeat evoking, of all things, a firing squad, right in the middle of what seems like another sweet retro ballad.

The second side drops the vague concept a bit, but then again, the revamped “For What It’s Worth” may well be her way of looking askance at the decade that had so influenced Holly and the Italians. But what makes Holly and the Italians run in the end is its downtempo numbers, and it closes with two songs whose impact was lost in the indifferent UK track sequence. “Unoriginal Sin” and “Samurai and Courtesan,” (the latter of which neatly rhymes with the “Did you curtsey to the governor” line in “Honalu”) round out Vincent’s slow, lush journey. “This is the one that’ll follow you everywhere,” she repeats as the song ends, and some four decades after its release, though she has continued to make music, this is the one Vincent album that will follow you everywhere.