Tell Me Your Plans

As one of the less celebrated bands to emerge from the first wave of New York punk, the Shirts didn't win much more than a small cult following outside their hometown, but apparently someone felt there were enough fans who'd worn out their copies of the group's 1978 debut to merit the release of this compilation. Tell Me Your Plans features all ten songs from The Shirts (though not in their original sequence) along with three tracks from their second LP, 1979's Street Light Shine, and a pair from 1980's swan song Inner Sleeve (though the group would reunite in 2006 without original vocalist Annie Golden to record Only the Dead Know Brooklyn). Since The Shirts was easily the band's best album, Tell Me Your Plans has a strong foundation, and the material shows off the band's arty, angular pop songwriting (from bandmembers Art LaMonica, Robert Racioppo, and Ronnie Ardito), Golden's strong and flexible vocals and the group's potent musicianship, which was generally a few steps ahead of their peers on the New York scene. And while the other two albums aren't as well represented, the selections from Street Light Shine and Inner Sleeve at least show those LPs to their advantage (with the exception of the pretentious "Triangulum"). With The Shirts out of print after a blink-and-you-missed-it CD reissue, Tell Me Your Plans is a worthy substitute and a welcome overview of a band that deserves to be remembered as more than a minor footnote on the CBGB family tree. ~ Mark Deming|