Repercussions: Meet the dB's
Sep 23, 2024 by Daniel de Visé
From time to time, over on AllMusic, I have shined a spotlight on overlooked albums in the catalog of a major artist.In the case of the star-crossed dB's, that pretty much means their entire catalog.
The first and second dB's records, released in 1981, existed only as foreign imports. The band finally found an American label for its third album, but that imprint lost its distribution deal just as the LP dropped.
R.E.M. invited the group to join its beloved I.R.S. Records for a fourth album, only to ditch the label themselves, whereupon the label "didn't quite know what to do with the band and the album," said Peter Holsapple, one of the two principal dB's songwriters.
Despite it all, the dB's made a mark on the college radio movement of the 1980s. The band's debut, Stands for deciBels, endures as a landmark release of the new wave era. That album and the next three all landed on Robert Christgau's influential Pazz & Jop Critics Poll: Repercussion in 1982, Like This in 1984, and The Sound of Music in 1987.
Four decades later, the dB's catalog remains in disrepair.
Read on:
https://www.allmusic.com/blog/post/repercussions-meet-the-dbs-the-big-star-of-college-radio
