“I just heard this sad song/by another band/Sung by another man/he gave me the once over twice.”

So begins the first song of X’s sophomore release Wild Gift. Many bands experience a curse known as the sophomore slump with their second album, the bulk of their good ideas exhausted with the first album. True to their contrarian nature, X seemed to do this the other way around, and that isn’t to throw any shade on debut LP Los Angeles.

But this time, the songs are shorter, with seven tracks until two-and-a-half minutes (and four of those under two). There are also more of them, the total of thirteen being four more than on their debut. They don’t do any covers this time around, unlike the surprise inclusion of The Doors’s “Soul Kitchen” on the debut. I would have thought that happened because that group’s keyboardist, Ray Manzarek, produced, yet he was in the chair again for this outing.

The core dynamics of the group are the same as before, the songwriting and vocals shared by real-life married couple John Doe and Excene Cervenka. Their voices twist around each other over the rockabilly guitar flights of Billy Zoom. Drummer D.J. Bonebreak lives up to the moniker, pounding the holy hell out of his kit, especially on “In This House That I Call Home”. This is a band in its prime, stopping and starting on a dime in “It’s Who You Know” and keeping the frantic “I’m Coming Over” from going off the rails.

For an ostensibly punk band with all of one album under their belts, it is stunning how sophisticated married life is portrayed in these songs, and with such candor. Every marriage is different, but somebody who has been in wedlock cannot say what it is like to be in any marriage. Just some of the titles convey the stark realities, such as “Adult Books” or “When Our Love Passed Out on the Couch”. A curious glimpse into Doe and Cervenka’s personal life is provided by the lyric “No more orange nightgown”, as she claims to have once owned such a piece of lingerie. Possibly more relatable to all listeners are the band’s struggles with apartment living: “Every other week I knew a new address/Landlord, landlord, landlord, clean up the mess.”

Speaking of messes, the album is not technically perfect, especially an inconsistency in mixes which sometimes gives this the feel of a compilation of tracks from multiple releases. But it is a glorious mess, not unlike the bizarre assortment of tracks which somehow work together on The Replacements’ Let It Be. If I have one complaint, it is “Adult Books” needs a faster tempo, as it feels like it wants to move faster than it does.

X would go on to do two more records of roughly this caliber, altogether making for one of the most solid four-album runs of any group. But my absolute favorite of their catalog is Wild Gift, such a generous helping of infectiously energized tracks that the title is truth in advertising. By taking the microfocus approach to the central couple’s relationship, it throws into contrast the chaos of the world outside. If only they could make things work out between themselves, maybe they could make the world just a hair better, too. As the catchy chorus of “Some Other Time” goes: “It’s very bad luck to draw the line/the night before the world ends/we can draw the line some other time.”