The Punch Line by The Minutemen

The Punch Line, the Minutemen's 1981 debut album, crams 18 songs into 15 minutes, which is about as econo as a long-player gets. The San Pedro trio had sold out all 300 copies of Paranoid Time, so Greg Ginn asked them back, and the record became only the fourth release on SST, with Spot producing. D. Boon's guitar and yelp, Mike Watt's bass and George Hurley's drums lunge from hardcore sprints into jerky funk and jazzy twitches, every song over before you've made up your mind about it, "Song for El Salvador" included.

Oddly, Joy, cut later, beat it into the shops by three months. It turned out to be an early landmark for both band and label, and its songs got passed around on compilations: "Search" on the second Rodney on the ROQ collection, the title track and three others on The Future Looks Bright Ahead, and "Boiling" and "Games" on The Blasting Concept.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.