Crispy Ambulance, Live on a Hot August Night (12" EP)

Neil Diamond jokes aside, 1981's Live on a Hot August Night is a studio recording, with one track on each side.  Side A begins sounding somewhat comparable to Joy Division, with a similarly dark and simplistic rendering of rock music.  Halfway through "The Presence", though, it takes a radical turn into ambient music, and sounds more like Harold Budd.  There are vague similarities in the palette, but it almost feels like two totally discrete tracks glued together.  "Concorde Square" on side B, changes less through the track, and falls somewhere in the middle.  Its structure is even simpler and more repetitive than the song part of "The Presence", and it's built on top of a cheap side-car drum machine — even the drums follow this weird-sounding rhythm.  Many effects that were then cutting-edge are audibly positioned, and often hard-panned, in the mix.  The 45 RPM record cut sounds quite good, especially the low and high frequencies.  The pattern of bright and blurry images, surrounded by simple type, on the front and back of the cover looks great.