Death In June – The Guilty Have No Pride (1983)

September 7, 2020

Listening all the way back to The Guilty Have No Pride, the first thing I notice is how different this album sounds from the rest of the band’s discography. The only hint of this being Death In June is Douglas P’s unmistakable British delivery, and of course, maybe the odd synthesizer sparkle here or there that calls forward to some of the stuff that would appear in Nada! But that’s it, and for the most part, The Guilty Have No Pride is a concise march of busy drums and post punk precision; barked vocals are bathed in washes of affected guitars, carried by a rigid backbone of thumping percussion and prominent bass guitar.

As a side note, I thought a lot about whether I should ever include another DIJ review on Lines In Wax (especially considering that cover art), but I’ve had Burzum posts up for like 8 years so I would be hypocritical if I excluded this. I don’t condone racism / fascism in any form, but there’s waaay more offensive record sleeves already present on this site than this flirtatious Nazi imagery edgelord shit.