Love Comes in Spurts

There's something almost perversely cheerful about the way this song describes emotional irregularity — the title itself sets up a kind of clinical distance that the music then undermines with its own barely-contained urgency. The tempo is fast but not frantic, the guitars jagged and coiled, and Hell's vocal delivery leans into the absurdity of the premise: desire arrives erratically, incomprehensibly, and there's nothing dignified about waiting for it. The song captures a very specific humiliation — wanting something intensely, intermittently, without being able to predict or control the wanting — and wraps that vulnerability in noise and swagger so that it becomes survivable. Quine's guitar is particularly savage here, cutting in at odd angles, harmonically unsettled, as if the instrument itself can't quite resolve what it's feeling. There's a downtown New York seediness to the whole production, the sound of a rehearsal space somewhere below Houston Street in the mid-seventies, heat and ambition and limited resources producing something more alive than expensive studios would have allowed. The Voidoids never became as famous as they deserved, and this song is evidence of that injustice — it's too honest and too strange for mainstream comfort. Listen to it when love has made you feel less than dignified, and let it remind you that's normal.