Is this Real?: Punk art, not art-punk.

Sometimes, great things happen when you judge an album by its cover. One day, my casual browse through the record stacks  was interrupted by a jarring abstraction emblazoned over a field of yellow with black perpendiculars: the spacing of the block letters, the fractured fields of primary colors that to me looked like Speed Racer crashed into Cubist hell. The title Is This Real? posed a question in need of immediate answer.

That I found their debut by accident is rather fitting, since the Wipers were a long-shot band from the start. Playing punk rock in Portland circa 1980 wasn’t the easiest thing to do, given that region’s isolation, and the genre’s inherent outsider slant. Add to that a bum deal that cheated the band out of the royalties to Is This Real? for 20 years, and one starts to wonder how anyone ever heard of the Wipers in the first place. But in spite of all that, the music persevered. One listen to this record, and I guarantee you’ll understand why.

Is This Real? reminds me how artful punk can be while remaining true to form. On vinyl, the sides normally labeled “A” and “B”, were instead marked “+” and “-”, respectively. Although it looks like a gimmick at first, the correlation becomes clear on first listen. The positive side is peppier; the negative side is darker and more dejected. The one exception is the final song on the A-side,  “Alien Boy”, whose dissonant chop foretells the coming storm of the flip side. “D-7″ leads off the second side and leaves no question regarding the album’s direction.

It’s no coincidence that the negative side is where Is This Real? really starts to remind me of fellow Pacific Northwestern (punk) rockers Nirvana. That band’s tribute to the Wipers can be found implicitly in their sound, and explicitly in their covers of the songs “Return of the Rat” and “D-7″ from this album (available on the With the Lights Out box set). Despite the deliberate mood division, Is This Real? is a solid whole. The Wipers’ sound, marked by up-front bass leads, noisy guitar, and strong melodies, is one for the ages, and it’s as strong here in its formative stages as it is anywhere in their discography.

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