For years, the conventional wisdom on
Hüsker Dü was that the great Minnesota punk band started out sloppy and monolithic but in time grew into one of the finest and most imaginative acts to emerge from the hardcore movement. After all, a comparison of their debut album, the muddy 1981 live document Land Speed Record, and their first EP for SST Records, 1983's
Metal Circus, would suggest that their skills as performers and songwriters grew by leaps and bounds in two years. While there is a certain degree of truth to that, Numero Group's 2017 box set
Savage Young Dü offers a valuable corrective to this narrative: yes,
Hüsker Dü went through a remarkable evolution in their early years, but they were honestly remarkable right out of the box. Assembled with the cooperation of the band and featuring plentiful rare and unreleased recordings from the archives of superfans Paul Hilcoff and Terry Katzman,
Savage Young Dü delivers the secret history of
Hüsker Dü's formative years, including their very first demo tape (recorded in May 1979, the same month they played their first show) and early rehearsal recordings, live tracks from their early Minneapolis performances and first national tours, soundcheck tapes where they worked out material new to their sets, and the lion's share of their pre-SST releases. (SST opted not to license material for this set.) While early tracks like "Do You Remember?," "Picture of You," and "The Truth Hurts" lack the grace of their best material, they reveal this band already had a knack for songwriting that was not shared by many of its peers, and rarities such as "Insects Rule the World" and "You're Too Obtuse" document a playful sense of humor. With their debut single, "Statues" b/w "Amusement," the psychedelic side of their personality begins to emerge, even as the tunes gain speed and muscle. While nothing from Land Speed Record makes the cut, a live set that includes most of the same material recorded just a few weeks later does appear here, and in terms of fidelity and performance it's a major improvement on their debut. The "In a Free Land" single and first studio LP Everything Falls Apart find
Hüsker Dü learning how to make their music work in the recording studio, and the live stuff from 1981 and 1982 is breathlessly tight, furious, and exciting. At this time,
Hüsker Dü were not yet the band that would record the touchstone albums
Zen Arcade and
New Day Rising, but
Savage Young Dü leaves no doubt that all the ingredients that made those albums great were there; they simply needed time to ferment. And even if they had collapsed before signing with SST and breaking out of the hardcore underground, these tapes are proof they were among the finest and most original groups to come from that very fertile scene. Even for longtime fans,
Savage Young Dü is revelatory, charting a young band's progress as it achieved its potential for greatness. ~ Mark Deming