My Grave Makes All The Other Graves Look Like Shit

To my ears, CIA's "God, Guts, Guns" is easily the best '80s hardcore 7-inch to ever come out of Connecticut, especially if you don't count the Youth Korps demo, which I sorta don't because the Youth Korps EP was only released as a bootleg after-the-fact (the list kinda goes 1. CIA 7", 2. Violent Children 7", 3. Can't Close My Eyes or Hit Squad for God or No Milk on Tuesday or something, 4. Reflex From Pain. I dunno, it's kind of a rough draft, maybe I'll keep working on it). I think makes the CIA 7" such a classic record is that the sound is fairly hefty -- you almost can't beat the mix between all the elements, guitar drums vocals bass, it's practically perfect -- plus all of the songs totally rip and are way catchy as far as hardcore songs go. Bones has always been a very underrated vocalist, or underrated by me at least since I was never the biggest fan of 76% Uncertain (FYI: CIA and Reflex From Pain eventually morphed into 76%), but Bones could carry a melody and his voice had a lot of grit to it, which overall made "God, Guts, Guns" sound relatively tough and on the level of some of the best Boston and NY records from back then. The lyrics are some clever horseshit, too.

"God, Guts, Guns" was re-issued a few years ago as a 12" with some bonus tracks, which is what I'm posting here; if you want to hear the original EP, or the Youth Korps EP while you're at it, then it's pretty easily found on the internet (Erich Keller's "Good Bad Music" blog is usually good for that). Admittedly, the bonus tracks aren't all that great, especially the covers and live tracks on the flip, but the Audio West demo tracks and the outtakes from the 7" are pretty useful. "Violence" was originally released on the Fartblossom Enterprises "Empty Skulls" compilation, I'm pretty sure, so you might've heard that one before. Todd and Kenny from 76% have a new band now called Watchlist that just released an album that's surprisingly very solid, comparable to Off! and stuff like that, and you can peep that stuff over here --> https://www.cdbaby.com/cd/watchlist


C.I.A. -

"Violence"

"Gangland War"

"Waste Product"