Y'know, if only the Trenchcoat Mafia could've discovered The The instead of Marilyn Manson. When I was attending high school in the '80s, all us lonely, depressed potential sociopaths took solace in bands like The The, the Cure and Joy Division. If we merely killed ourselves, well, hey, it was enough. But good old fashioned self-immolation has become outmoded. Nowadays, you've gotta take a few dozen strangers down with you to really get off. And as usual, I attribute all the youth violence in society today not to the proliferation and accessibility of guns, but on the paucity of credible rock stars. Maybe I'm joking, maybe I'm not. But where the hell did all the Joe Strummers go?

Now, I was raised in bible-belt Texas, so rest assured there was no shortage of firearms in our house. But luckily, instead of toting guns, the lost boys and girls of my generation either flocked to bad metal, or video games like "Galaga." Still others, out of desperation for something more substantial, went out and stumbled upon landmark albums like The The's official debut album, 1981's Burning Blue Soul.

As stifling as things could get in Baptist country, The The lead vocalist Matt Johnson seemed to understand our isolation, and was explicit in his indictment of our parents' sham Christian mores. He made it okay to revel in our non-believing misfit gloom. His aetheistic gallows humor and cutting social commentary was delivered with a bracing defiance. His songwriting didn't induce the kind of feeble hopelessness that would normally lead a bored, confused suburban kid to lose it completely.

Inhabiting a shadowy interzone between goth, new wave, and punk, Burning Blue Soul manages to plumb depths that Robert Smith and Peter Murphy could only lightly touch upon. Johnson delivers his kernels of realist wisdom in a flat Gregorian monotone: "100,000 people were burned/ I felt a pang of concern/ What are we waitin' for/ A message of hope/ From the Pope/ I think he got shot as well." And what over-ponderous mope-rocker can't relate to observations like this: "When you hide in your bed/ And look in your head/ You find you've gone deeper than you should/ It could be your shallowness is your strength."

In a sense, the ghostly production values on Burning Blue Soul sound like fairly upstanding (and typical) 4AD fare: the isolated vocals, the guitars wet with reverb, the basslines slithering eerily along the nether regions of a song. Thick guitar hailstorms come and go. Textures vacillate from vaulted cathedrals of sound to barely discernible structures. "The River Flows East in Spring" is built around little more than a deformed keyboard hook and offbeat handclaps. There are no beginnings, middles or ends. Johnson completely shuns verse- chorus- verse predictability, and doesn't even find much need to tie down his songs with conventional drumming or consistent backbeats.

Of course, Johnson eventually lured ex-Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr into the studio for 1989's ground-breaking Mind Bomb. Marr brought a richer and more grounded sound to Johnson's near- formless compositions. The band's sound eventually evolved into the mellow New Order-ish pop of 1993's Dusk, and took a detour with 1995's near-ridiculous batch of Hank Williams cover songs entitled Hanky Panky.

So, here's a novel idea for all you alienated, potentially homicidal youngsters: try trading in those ridiculous Marylin Manson CDs, and pawn whatever artillery your NRA-member father bought you for Christmas. Cleanse your tortured souls in the church of Matt Johnson. Take heed, all ye little doom-obsessed freaks, Manson's music will eventually make you open a vein-- or worse, open fire on your peers. But most of all, realize that Manson's crusade is merely to open your little pocketbooks and swindle you out of those hard-earned weekly allowances. Take a listen to The The's Burning Blue Soul. The lovable folks at 4AD reissued it just for you. Maybe it'll even open a few of your minds to more pacific and productive possibilities of expressing all that pent-up hate.

-Michael Sandlin