vinylfanatics.com

**Agent Orange - Living In Darkness**
★★★★☆

In the grand pantheon of Southern California punk, where Black Flag's aggression and X's rockabilly swagger carved out distinct territories, Agent Orange emerged as something altogether more peculiar: surf punks who could thrash with the best of them whilst maintaining an almost psychotic devotion to Dick Dale's reverb-drenched legacy. Their 1981 debut *Living In Darkness* stands as both a crystalline snapshot of Orange County's hardcore scene and a gloriously demented love letter to the Beach Boys' darker impulses.

The trio—Mike Palm on guitar and vocals, Steve Soto on bass, and Scott Miller behind the kit—had been kicking around the Fullerton punk scene since 1979, initially calling themselves The Outsiders before discovering another band had claimed the name. Their transformation into Agent Orange coincided with a musical epiphany: why choose between the Ramones and The Ventures when you could marry both in unholy matrimony? This wasn't mere novelty; it was punk rock archaeology, digging up the primal scream that connected Link Wray's "Rumble" to "Blitzkrieg Bop."

*Living In Darkness* opens with its title track, a two-minute blast of paranoid energy that sets the template perfectly. Palm's guitar work is the star throughout—his tone simultaneously crisp and corroded, like a vintage Fender Reverb Tank dropped in battery acid. The rhythm section of Soto and Miller provides a concrete foundation, but it's Palm's ability to switch between blistering punk chords and fluid surf leads that gives Agent Orange their distinctive identity.

"Bloodstains" remains the album's undisputed masterpiece, a song so perfectly constructed it feels less written than excavated from some cosmic jukebox. The track builds from an almost delicate surf intro into a full-bore punk assault, with Palm's vocals alternating between deadpan cool and genuine menace. It's a song about violence that never glorifies it, instead presenting brutality as mundane as spilled coffee—which somehow makes it more disturbing. The guitar solo is pure liquid mercury, flowing between notes with an ease that belies the song's underlying tension.

Elsewhere, "Everything Turns Grey" showcases the band's more melodic sensibilities without sacrificing any intensity. The interplay between the surf-influenced guitar work and the relentless rhythm section creates a hypnotic effect, like being caught in a riptide of sound. "No Such Thing" strips things down to their most basic elements—three chords, a cloud of reverb, and Palm's sneering vocals—yet achieves a kind of minimalist perfection that would make the Ramones proud.

The album's production, handled by Thom Wilson, deserves special mention. Wilson, who would later work with Social Distortion and The Offspring, captures Agent Orange's sound with remarkable clarity whilst preserving the raw energy of their live performances. Every guitar stab cuts through the mix like a switchblade, every drum hit lands with satisfying thud, and Palm's vocals sit perfectly in the pocket between intelligible and threatening.

What makes *Living In Darkness* particularly fascinating is how it predicted punk's future whilst honoring its past. The album's marriage of hardcore intensity with surf rock's instrumental prowess would prove hugely influential on later bands, from The Misfits' horror-surf experiments to the entire skate punk movement of the 1990s. Agent Orange didn't just play fast; they played smart, understanding that punk's power came not from mere speed but from the tension between control and chaos.

The band's subsequent career would be marked by lineup changes and diminishing returns, with Steve Soto eventually departing to join Social Distortion (and later forming The Adolescents). Mike Palm carried on the Agent Orange name through various incarnations, but never quite recaptured the lightning-in-a-bottle magic of this debut. Perhaps that's appropriate—*Living In Darkness* feels like the product of a very specific moment when California's punk scene was still small enough for genuine innovation to flourish.

Today, the album stands as an essential document of American punk's first wave, a reminder that the genre's greatest strength lay not in rigid orthodoxy but in its capacity for mutation and surprise. Agent Orange proved that punk could be simultaneously brutal and beautiful, that three-chord songs could contain multitudes, and that sometimes the best way forward is to surf backwards into the past. In our current era of genre-fluid music making, *Living In