“Los Angeles is a powerful, upsetting work that concludes with a confrontation of the band's own rampaging bitterness and confusion. In "The World's a Mess, It's in My Kiss," Exene and John Doe – coworkers, wife and husband, outcasts – chant the title phrase over and over, and the non sequitur yields a terrifying, moving, urgent puzzle: what's in their kiss? The source of the world's mess? Or its solution? The singers don't know – uncertainty is certainly one of X's themes – and neither can we.”
/ Ken Tucker reviewing Los Angeles in Rolling Stone magazine, 1980 /
“Musically, Los Angeles is almost infallible. “Your Phone’s Off the Hook, But You’re Not” kicks off with relentless immediacy as if you’ve jumped into a speeding car on a midnight tour. [John] Doe and [Exene] Cervenka trade lead vocals and occasionally Cervenka veers stunningly off course in vivid and blistering wails, a Siouxsie Sioux in Southern California. On top of Bonebrake’s motoring drums, the songs are dark and doom-laden, fiery and mordant. X sings about drugs and violence and cruising and ennui, conjuring a mood that prefigures Hüsker Dü’s “Diane” and Sonic Youth’s Bad Moon Rising. They stick it to the upper class with “Sex and Dying in High Society”, and they finish with one of the best punk love songs of all time, “The World’s a Mess, It’s in My Kiss.” “Go to hell, see if you like it / Then come home with me”- the musical equivalent of cigarette ashes and red lipstick - the end to a wild ride through Los Angeles’ underworld.”
/ Rebecca Bengal reviewing Los Angles for Pitchfork website, 2019 /
Released on this day (26 April 1980): Los Angeles, the ferocious debut album (produced by Ray Manzarek of The Doors) by LA punk royalty X. Pictured: portrait of X’s witchy twisted bride frontwoman Exene Cervenka by Edward Colver, 1979.
