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The Chameleons debut album starts full of fury with the boisterous "Don't Fall"**** ("How did I come to be drowning in this mess, Ahh! Fuckin' mess, Don't fall"), slightly altering that gothic rock trope the descending chromatic. In "Monkeyland"**** Mark Burgess mills around the verses morosely until after dead stop he introduces the chorus bellowing his outraged Eureka "It's just a trick of the light!", continuing "I have to know what is real And what is illusion." "Second Skin" is more moody and has a Joy Division sparseness. "Up The Down Escalator"**** ("there must be something wrong boys"), "As High As You Can Go", and "Paper Tigers" rock along similar to U2's "I Will Follow", though without Bono's histrionic delivery and The Edge's trebly attack The Chameleons' approach is more restrained than those early punk-y U2 records. There's nothing restrained about the hammering beat of the harrowing, violent "A Person Isn't Safe Anywhere These Days"****. Elsewhere, the album seems to predict directions popular music would soon be taking, in the case of "Thursday's Child" ("creatures come and creatures go"), the textured guitar sound U2 would soon turn to on The Unforgettable Fire; and "Less Than Human" ("I must have died a thousand times") eerily foreshadows Angelo Badalamenti's "Laura Palmer's Theme," heard throughout the Twin Peaks series, while the menacing stomp of the song in general foreshadows their later single "Swamp Thing." While Burgess and John Lever's rhythm section is at times dark, jubilant, heavy, or driving, Reg Smithies's and Dave Fielding's layers of delayed guitars give the album a consistent atmospheric flavor, and while a few of the songs sound somewhat similar there's not a bad song in sight.
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