Crime & the City Solution Room of Lights LP (Yellow Vinyl)

Mute is excited to present Crime & the City Solution's debut full-length album, Room of Lights, reissued on limited edition yellow vinyl limited to 1,000 copies worldwide.

Following their The Dangling Man EP and Just South of Heaven mini-LP, the album was originally released in 1986 and featured the "London line up" of Simon Bonney, former Birthday Party stalwarts Mick Harvey and Rowland S. Howard, Rowland's bassist brother Harry Howard, and drummer Epic Soundtracks (formerly of Swell Maps and Jacobites). The album includes the remarkable "Six Bells Chime," which caught the attention of acclaimed German filmmaker Wim Wenders who invited the band to perform the song live in his 1988 masterpiece Wings of Desire. The album showcases great creativity filled with tension and marks the last release featuring Crime's "London line up."

With violinist Bronwyn Adams added to the camp, the band acted as dynamically jagged counterparts to their peers; the music they now embraced was a rough and ready rock that slotted itself nicely under a gothic canvas -- they were and remain post-punk's forgotten kings. And although fans may cite some of the band's later work as better, it really isn't. It may be smoother, more refined, but nothing had the vibrant impact of the sound slammed home on this album. Its urgency jangles, its cacophony is dichotomous, and, at times, the underlying energy is breathtaking as the band storms through a great set... Their sound was grungy in a different time and space, long before the term was coined.