Saturday, February 16, 2008

When Will It Start Bothering You?

click for enlarged view

Although musically I'm a semi-avowed Anglophobe, outside of a few exceptions (Buzzcocks and Judas Priest, mostly), this 45 found its way into my collection back when I was a puny little punk-rocker type, mainly because Killing Joke were always being mentioned as an influence by a lot of the Minneapolis/Chicago bands that I was really into at the time-- Big Black, Naked Raygun, Rifle Sport, Breaking Circus, and so forth. Either that, or the record store was all sold out of their copies of "Too Drunk To Fuck", and I needed something else to spend my two dollars on. Anyway, I quickly found out that this was an awesome single, although I never bought another Killing Joke record again-- I must've figured once was enough, history lesson's over.

If you've never heard Killing Joke, or if you're only familiar with their later-period MTV "120 Minutes" crap (like "Eighties"), which is all horrible, you'll probably be suprised at how metallic their earliest stuff is. "Requiem", in particular, has the crunchiest guitar sound this side of a Negative Approach soundboard tape. Personally, I've never been able to decide upon which of these two songs I like better; every time I plop this record down onto a turntable, I'm like, "Hey, this is cool-- can't beat that!", and then I flip the record over and go, "Hey, this side's pretty cool also!"

I also really like how a lot of the British new-wave singles I've seen have the record label information stamped right into the vinyl, instead of using a paper label. I'm guessing this is because the Germans took all of England's paper supplies during the war, and they've never given any of it back.

click for enlarged view

All dumb jokes aside, I think this sounds pretty damn good for near-30-year-old vinyl.


Killing Joke -

"Requiem"

"Change"

(these files are now listen-only)


6 comments:

Anonymous said...

HEAD next to KILLING JOKE??? Are you me??? (A copy of What's THIS For! has equal space next to STREET LEVEL ASSAULT in my record collection). You missed out by not picking up another record from KILLING JOKE. Good shit, not always, but interesting always. The first two LP's are works of art.

Brushback said...

You might be right, I should check those out...

Brushback said...

Also, sorry, but the mp3 files on this post are now listen-only (non-downloadable) files. For those of you who came to the party late, I will do my best to respond to any e-mailed requests for the original files.

Lightning Baltimore said...

OK, this is a response to an old post but what the Hell. Decent song but "Wardance" and "The Wait," also both from their first album, are much better, IMO.

Brushback said...

Yeah, I'm very, very lacking on my Killing Joke knowledge (mostly because their 80's new-wave output was so shitty).

I've heard their new stuff of the past couple of years or so is supposed to be pretty good, too.

Lightning Baltimore said...

I should add, then, that the two songs I mentioned are about the only KJ songs I actually like.