One Base on an Overthrow

I'm Running Out Of Comfort

2012-01-29T20:21:00.001-05:00

Here's one from the glut that was serial label compilations back in the '90s (AmRep with "Dope Guns...", Trance Syndicate with "Love & Napalm", Toxic Shock with "Noise from Nowhere", "Teriyaki Asthma" from C/Z, etc etc), with almost all of them having pretty much the same 50% suck ratio that this one does. The Jonestown song is actually a pretty darn good Didjits-style ripper, and is easily the best song on here, although the Gas Huffer song is some pretty decent snacks also. Things go downhill quickly after that, starting with Porn Orchard (who were from Atlanta) who really want to be Phantom Tollbooth so bad: "We'll try some tempo changes, work in some metal riffs, come on it'll be cool!" I actually saw Porn Orchard once, at The Anthrax in the '80s; I believe it was on a bill with Falling Stairs, who were buddies of mine. I ripped their song here just so I could laugh at it later, but I'm not going to post it. Same with Daddy Hate Box, which equals funky grunge-metal that completely sucks.

I even managed to own two copies of this record; the one I have on black vinyl was trimmed out-of-round, so there's a lump of extra vinyl sticking out on one side and the grooves go right to the outer edge on the other side. Luckily the copy I have on gold vinyl is okay, so that's the one I used for these rips.

Jonestown -

"Fuck Your High and Get You Up"

Gas Huffer -

"Hijacked"

I Can't Stay This Fucked Forever

2012-01-26T20:51:00.003-05:00

I ended up getting to the Redscroll show late on Sunday and totally missed Curmudgeon, walking in at around 7:30 (!) just as they were finishing up their last song.... which means I ended up paying $5 just to see Al Borland play, which didn't bother me too much because I really like some of their songs, even though they have ~~zero~~ ~~negative~~ almost no stage presentation. It still ended up being worth the drive to Wallingford, since I found out about a couple of cool upcoming shows, bought the new Nazi Dust LP, and also bought a bunch merch from Curmudgeon and We Rise, including this Shaved Christ demo which came out last May or something. I ended up listening to the Shaved Christ tape almost the whole ride home, because it's pretty friggin' choice -- sorta like a cross between Double Negative and Confines, with some extra Void-ness in the tempo changes and so forth. You can find about half the songs from the demo on their bandcamp (shavedchrist.bandcamp.com), but they didn't put any of the ones that I liked the most, so "In Time" is my own cassette rip and thus doesn't sound as sharp as the other two songs that I've posted with it. It's supposed to be punk rock, jeezus. I'm still trying to figure out who the band is on the cover-- it almost looks like it could be Kiss, but I can't really tell. Watch, someone's probably gonna leave a comment saying who it is and make me look stupid.

Shaved Christ -

"In Time"

"Ages of Man"

"Bury It"

There's No Freedom When They Break Down Your Door

2012-01-24T20:46:00.004-05:00

MRR ran an interview with Bloodkrow Butcher last month and happened to use one of my photos for it (the tiny one up in the top corner there, big deal). There's a new Bloodkrow Butcher 7" out now on Total Fucker, here's a track from it:

Bloodkrow Butcher -

"Tribes of Survivors"

I Can Hardly Breathe In Here

2012-01-20T20:22:00.002-05:00

It shouldn't be too surprising that I think Velvet Crush's "Teenage Symphonies to God" is a great album, since I'm generally way too into anything that sounds like Cheap Trick, NRBQ, or Big Star. Right now I can't even find my copy of "Teenage Symphonies to God", even though I know I just listened to it about a month ago, which is annoying me to no end. Someday I have to figure out a better way to file my records other than "put the bigger square stuff with the bigger square stuff and put the littler square stuff with the littler square stuff". All is not lost, however, as I have the single for "Hold Me Up", so I'll just go with that for now. "Hold Me Up" is easily the best song on the LP, if not one of my top 100 favorite songs of all time; I totally love the intro ("deeeeeaaaaad on the phone") and how the guitar goes into overdrive every so often. I'll even include the b-side, which is the theme song from The Jetsons, "Mr. Spacely". Yeah, you gotta love Mr. Spacely. Actually, no, it's a Byrds cover, back when you had to cover the Byrds if you were a jangle band because it showed that you were serious. I owned a Byrds LP once, but it sucked, and then I lost it.

Velvet Crush -

"Hold Me Up"

"Mr. Spaceman"

I Don't Agree With You At All

2012-01-16T21:19:00.002-05:00

I bought this record from the drummer of Foreign Objects at a show last year, and I almost pee'd myself pulling the record out of the box (not really). Henry Fiat's Open Sore could possibly be the greatest pack-of-foreigners punk band of the previous decade or so, although I don't expect anyone here to back me on this. This is hyper-fast punk that stops just short of thrash, and although there's nothing on this single that's on the level of "Does It Look Like I Give a Fuck" or "George W Bush is a Fucking Hippie" (wait, that last one is a different band), this is still world-beater type stuff. Whether in Henry Fiat's Open Sore or Sir Henry Fiat's Bastard, Sir Henry Fiat's got some of the best pipes ever, like if Danzig were from Stockholm, only without the Elvis thing going on. This is also one of the loudest records I've ever ripped-- I literally had to turn it down to "1" in order to keep the headphones on. In short, this is just fucking GREAT.

Henry Fiat's Open Sore -

"(Proud To Be The) Black Sheep"

"(Wanted: Petite Female Born) 1972"

"I Beg To Differ"

"Love Makes You Fat"

I Sure Could Use Somewhere To Drown

2012-01-14T21:58:00.001-05:00

Cafe Nine was already packed by the time I got there at around quarter after 10 last night, which is unusual for a show with just two local bands. Turns out there had already been an earlier jazzbo show, and it was just that everybody hadn't left yet (duh, me). Anyway, Dead Wives went on around 11, and holy shit they actually sounded tight this time, or at least relatively tight compared to the two times I saw 'em at Popeye's Garage. Dead Wives' on-stage presentation is so low-key (hence the name, I guess) that they're never going to blow people away, but they've got such great songs that it almost doesn't matter. Their sound is almost directly Creature Did/'90s Danbury-related, though I'm sure they've heard none of those bands, it's just a coincidence and they're really just ripping off Nirvana/Dinosaur Jr./Madonna/Jesus & Mary Chain... Estrogen Highs played a set of almost all new songs, save for a couple ("Alley Man", "Weed Queen", "I Am Tradition", plus maybe one more) and another cover of "Quality of Armor". Mark and Wes traded instruments for a few songs, including the GBV cover if I remember correctly, which had Stefan requesting that "anyone can just grab the mike and sing along if they want to", but nobody did. That's a Popeye's-only thing, I guess. The new album-- "Irrelevant Future" on Trouble In Mind-- is supposedly being mastered by Mikey Young this very second, and should be a corker, very much along the lines of "Friends & Relatives" with a couple of huffers thrown in. Both of last night's sets were being recorded by the Wicked Squid mobile unit, so there was a huge cable running out the back door to an RV parked outside, with a blanket covering the cable on the sidewalk so that nobody tripped over it. So someone eventually is gonna have a decent live set of Dead Wives and all-new Estrogen Highs songs on their hard drive someday, though I know it's not gonna be me.

Mild by Dead Wives

Estrogen Highs - For All I Know

You Don't Even Talk To Me Anymore

2012-01-13T19:13:00.000-05:00

This is the first 7" from Her Tears, a band that among all of the '90s Danbury bands had one of the more impeccable track records. This early single is way Manchester and doesn't rock out nearly as hard as what came out afterwards, but the b-side, "Darling", still ranks among my favorite Connecticut singles sides from that decade. I'm only guessing that they were attempting some kind of Inspiral Carpets-type thing here, but in hindsight "Darling" sounds more like a Geffen-era Girls Against Boys song if you added a lot of extra wah-wah and recorded it inside an empty metal box. The a-side, "5:30 Blue", is almost too mopey, but that's okay, because by being there it makes the b-side sound that much better. The first couple of times I played this record, I'd drop the needle on the a-side, scrunch my nose a bit, and then quickly flip the record over, and then "Darling" would end up sounding ten times more rocking in comparison. Now you can do the same thing.

Her Tears -

"5:30 Blue"

"Darling"

Something's Got Ahold Of My Brain

2012-01-08T12:24:00.004-05:00

There were a ton of great singles that came out of Connecticut back in the '90s, but I think my favorite out of all of them is the Grand Passion "Negative Jesus" 7". Whereas bands like Nevertheless and Farmertan were coming at rock from a Replacements angle, Grand Passion refined things a step further, carrying a lot of the Cle swagger and noir-like feel of Prisonshake, one of my all-time faves. They could really kick it live, too; all three of the guys in the band (Brooks, Rich, and Doug) were top-shelf, especially Doug, who is still probably one of my all-time favorite Connecticut drummers. I think he even resurfaced as a member of The Suicide Dolls for a short while just recently, though I also kind of don't remember.

This single was originally pressed as an edition of 300 on clear vinyl and released on the band's own Pop Rocket Records, but I liked it so much that I had a second pressing made of 250 copies on pink vinyl and gave them away with the sixth and final issue of Brushback. The "Sidearm Records" version had a modified sleeve (actually just a double-sided insert), which Rich Martin was cool enough to design and print up for me for nothing. I'd actually lost the sleeve for the original clear vinyl pressing a long time ago (things get messed up when you move around a lot), but Rich owns a record store in New London now called The Telegraph, which I finally got to visit a couple of months ago. Lo and behold, there were some original Grand Passion 7"-ers sitting in the "local singles" bin, and they actually let me take one. The Telegraph is a really cool store, by the way, you should definitely check it out if you're ever in the New London area (it's on Golden Street, that little side street that runs between all the banks and the El N Gee).

As an "extra bonus", I've scanned the Grand Passion interview from the final issue of Brushback, even though I know that nobody ever clicks on those things. The photos in the interview were taken at one of Brian Sinclair's bashes held at the Municipal Cafeteria in Hartford (yeah, there used to be indie/punk rock shows right on Main Street in downtown Hartford; pretty weird, huh? I think it's a Subway now), and at The Beat in Port Chester, NY, which was the club that Brian and Shaun Sheridan ran after the Anthrax closed.

Grand Passion -

"Negative Jesus"

"Ass Cat (live)"

I've Been Entertaining Bad Thoughts

2012-01-01T13:51:00.008-05:00

Getting dangerously close to Wilfully Obscure territory here (just kidding)... not sure if The Magnolias ever dug themselves out from under the "second rate Replacements/Soul Asylum" tag, but they even acknowledge it on their website, so I guess they're not looking for any help from me on that one. The Magnolias lean more towards Soul Asylum and Hüsker Dü than The Replacements anyway, as their riffs are far more swirly/jangly than almost anything Westerberg, Stinson, Stinson, and Mars ever tried, outside of that one song. Plus the vocals are way too much on the Dead Milkmen side of things (or way too Those Melvins, for those of you still in Connecticut) to be anywhere near like Westerberg. Then there's the worst cover of "She Cracked" that I've ever heard, although admittedly I've only heard about three or four. This is the kind of stuff that used to be called "college rock", which is sorta funny when you consider what counts as "college rock" now. I mean, at least you can still call this rock, as this is almost as thick-sounding as any of Soul Asylum's records on Twin/Tone, only without all the puns or the hooks. I have no idea why I own this in the first place, other than it being a Twin/Tone record with the names Grant Hart and Steve Fjelstad on the back.

The Magnolias -

"Got No Place"

"Entertaining Bad Thoughts"

"My Own Life"

"One More Reason"

"Together Again"

If I Had A Gun I'd Kill Everything Evil

2011-12-30T17:44:00.001-05:00

This isn't the "Kill The Hippies" Deadbeats from L.A., rather one from Connecticut, and one that I've already posted here once before since they have a track on the second "Footprints of God" compilation. This is a pretty cool single that sounds like a bargain-basement version of what bands like Fuck and New Bad Things would be doing in the '90s, or the a-side does at least. The b-side is a bunch of screwy shit, which I happen to like somewhat, but the rest of you probably wouldn't have the tolerance.

The Deadbeats -

"Tracii"

"Honey Move"
Also, there used to be a web site that hosted a bunch of Populous Pudding sets-- withdrawnrecords.com or puddingvault.com or something-- but it's since been taken down (Populous Pudding was a venue in Willimantic CT). I managed to grab the sets for M.O.T.O., Woodchipper, and Deadbeats before the site eventually dissapeared, so if you're looking for a few more pleasant-sounding Deadbeats songs listen to, here ya go.
"Deadbeats Populous Pudding 1989"

Try Crossing The Line Every Once In A While

2011-12-29T21:49:00.002-05:00

The label said this was like "The Who if they let the guy with the big nose sing all the songs", but it's actually more like The Neighborhoods if the singer was trying to sing like there were people the next room and he didn't want anybody to hear him. This is actually a pretty good single as far as Connecticut "rock" records go, though almost all of the CT records that are similar and better-- Stratford Survivors, Reducers, Peer Pressure, etc-- came out a good 10 years earlier... so just pretend that the sleeve says 1981 instead of 1991, and you might like this a lot more.

The Vagabonds -

"Laugh or Cry"

"I've Heard It All Before"

You Ain't Talkin' To Me

2011-12-28T18:07:00.000-05:00

A big rock show at The Whitney House... I'm not sure if Powerblessings were better than the first time I saw them, mostly because that first time I was busy getting blown away by their sound, while the second time around I'd had a chance to hear their 7", so I was able to pay more attention to the songs... again, Powerblessings sound like Pipe mixed with Jettison/Understand-era Naked Raygun. They played at least one new song, which was as good as all the others, although I forgot the name of it (began with an R or a V or something)... Lushlife are a bunch of guys who've been around in a bunch of CT bands (100 Demons, Chelloveck 4, I'm pretty sure), especially Pugs, the guitar player, who I first saw with The Ugly Truth and The Spoilers back in the '90s. Lushlife play punked-up rock and roll, and I can picture them doing pretty well whenever they play at places like Cafe Nine and Elm Bar, basically because they've got the showmanship thing down pat. They mixed-in a handful of covers, the only one which I remember being "Motorhead", plus Toby spat out the lyrics to "Gimmie Gimmie Gimmie" and G.I.'s "I'm James Dean" during breaks, though I don't think they actually covered them. Both Jon (Powerblessings) and Toby were cracking funny one-liners the whole night, which was definitely different from the sort of thing that I'm used to seeing at Whitney. Buy the new Powerblessings 7", it's out now and it's pretty good...

Powerblessings -

"Stunt Whale"

Lushlife -

"Aces and Eights"

I'd Rather Know You Than Be Right All Of The Time

2011-12-27T21:03:00.001-05:00

I'm usually embarrassed whenever a friend asks me to check out their band, since I'm figuring that they're expecting me to like the songs and I'd rather just be a grouch and hate everything. I mean, who needs the pressure. Most of the time the stuff turns out to be pretty good, though, which is a relief. It's bad enough that people even talk to me, right?

Lurve is what Mike from Guilty Faces/Rat Byte is up to now, and when I first listened to the demos that Mike sent to me a while ago, I felt right away that the songs were good. There weren't any song titles and the band didn't even have a name yet (they ended up setting on Lurve, which makes for a pretty useful Dirtbombs reference-- "My Heart Burns With Deeps of Lurve"-- even if they didn't know it at the time), but the songs all rocked pretty solidly, and they had hooks. Eventually Mike gave me a full-fledged 8-song tape while he was driving around Straight Arrows on their tour, which is that picture that you see up at the top there. I don't know if you can get one for yourself, though, he might've just dubbed a couple copies to hand out for now.

Anyway, here's a couple of songs for you to check out, except that one of the songs I'm posting isn't on the tape-- it's from the batch of files that I got early on, just labeled "Track 3", so that's the only thing I know to call it. I'm still gonna include it here, though, since I kinda like how it steadily chugs along, with a sort of low-key, muttering vocal. The other song, "Looks So Young", is their "hit" (ha ha), the one with the video on Vimeo that I posted on my Facebook a while back. Oh, wait, I guess none of you guys read Facebook, good point.

Lurve -

"Lurve Track 03"

"Looks So Young"

Fake Best Of 2011

2011-12-23T14:17:00.004-05:00

Kitchen's Floor -

"Insects"

The Moby Dicks -

"Spiders"

Michael Beach -

"There Is No Edge of The World to Run To"

Burning Sensation -

"Brainfucker"

"I Wonder"

Fuckheads -

"Fueled By Vice" (2011 tour tape).zip

Where I Live It's The Only Thing To Do

2011-12-21T22:11:00.002-05:00

I couldn't find the record that I wanted to post next (the Humpy/Oheisvasara split), so this is the one that you get instead. It probably doesn't matter, since only about 3 of you are going to bother to listen to this anyway. Workdogs had some pretty interesting records, based on the few things that I've heard here and there (the song about living with hippies was a riot), though this single may or may not have been one of them. Both sides of this 7" are the same song, one of them recorded with Bond Bergland (Factrix) on guitar and the other with Malcolm Riviera (Velvet Monkeys, Grand Mal) on piano. Malcolm Riviera also has a really interesting Flickr stream, which you can see here. Originally this 7" was sold as part of Vital Music's "Swinging Singles Club", but that's not how I got it, I just happened to randomly pick up a couple of Workdogs 7" for a couple of bucks each way back when. Now that I think about it, it's really amusing to think that Vital Music was trying to sell subscriptions for $35 to a singles club that included seriously shitty bands like Youth Gone Mad and Reverb Motherfuckers.

Workdogs -

"Haunted House of Love (Malcolm Riviera version)"

"Haunted House of Love (Bond Bergland version)"

The Fuck's With All Of You

2011-12-18T21:41:00.004-05:00

You might've noticed that I didn't bother getting my hands dirty with a lot of the post-hardcore/emo rock that came out in the '90s (okay, so I've still got a copy of "Fate's Got a Driver" on clear vinyl, big deal), though I did like Sparkmarker quite a bit, probably because they were way more metal that most of the other bands. You'll find a heavy D.C. vibe here, too, sorta like Ignition/Fugazi in that sense. I know this 7" been posted on a bunch of other blogs before, but ~~I'm better than them~~ I felt like posting it here anyway.

Sparkmarker -

"So Long"

"Kansas"

I've Got Something To Say When You're Done Talking

2011-12-11T21:15:00.000-05:00

I didn't write anything when Rational Animals came through Willimantic and played a bust-out set back in July because I was busy working on the zine at the time and blah blah blah. Anyway, their sound in the Handsome Woman basement that night was totally huge, with the guitar player and bass player pounding out dark twisted Ginn/Dukowski riffs up and down their fretboards non-stop as if they were pounding nails into the concrete floor. Easily the best guitar/bass pairing I've seen bookending a punk band since I saw Night Birds at Whitney House two years ago. Check these guys out if you get the chance-- they're fucking mean.

You can buy their new LP ("Bock Rock Parade") from Katorga Works, or download the whole thing for free, though the two songs I've posted below are my own vinyl rips. The LP's pretty neat -- the label artwork rips off the old Atlantic Records logo, and the b-side label is marked for the wrong speed (45, when both sides play at 33), which is almost funny.

Rational Animals -

"Guess What? (Crunch)"

"Darker Shade of Blue"

In Case You Didn't Feel Like Showing Up

2011-12-10T19:43:00.007-05:00

(Part Two)

The all-time list of rock solo artists, 1978-1983 (immediate pre-hair metal era) goes like this: 1) Eddie Money 2) Billy Squier 3) Donnie Iris, and I'm not even trying to open this up for debate (knowing that most of you guys don't even care anyway), I'm just throwing it out there. You guys got to turn on the radio when you were 16 and listen to Rage Against The Machine or the "Judgement Night" soundtrack. When I was 16, I got to hear "Ah! Leah!", if I was lucky. Wait, I probably had it better, now that I think about it.

"Ah! Leah!" was Donnie Iris' big hit, of course -- look it up on YouTube if you think you've never heard it, it's great -- but I've always liked "Love is Like a Rock" even more. It was sort of like a Mad Magazine version of a rock song, with an AC/DC type riff plus a lyric that seemed to saying that girls are dumb and you shouldn't listen to adults at all... which is pretty cool stuff when you're 15 years old, I guess. The back of the jacket and the record label credits this album to "Donnie Iris and The Cruisers", but I never heard anyone call it that back then, they just called it Donnie Iris. Even though I'm not fifteen anymore this song still fucken rules, especially for a guy who seemed to be pretty regional as far as his appeal goes (finding anyone outside of the Northeast who's ever heard of Donnie Iris is a bit of a lost cause).

Donnie Iris -

"Love is Like a Rock"

Billy Squier was almost inescapable in '81, with "The Stroke", "Lonely Is The Night", "My Kinda Lover" and all that. "In The Dark", the leadoff track to this album, is definitely the one Billy Squier song that I used to crank the most, since the way the chorus just takes off (followed by the bridge) is massive, and also because it's so fucken weird. For such a commercial AOR type guy, Billy used to cram a lot of odd stuff into his songs: ridiculous overdubbed "gunshot" snare hits, a lot of strangely dull keyboard parts, and some screwy vocal effects. It's as if he was being produced by a committee. There's even a blip during the middle of the guitar solo that almost sounds as if someone put their elbows down on the keyboards by accident. The chattering 'n shit at the end of the guitar solo is pretty great, though.

Billy Squier's fully-functional early '80s rock star effect

Billy Squier -

"In The Dark"

The front jacket photo might look like a set-up for some lame Eagles/Pablo Cruise soft rock shit (almost all of his other album covers are much better, at least the "I just woke up in some chick's apartment and I better find a pay phone fast" ones are), but there's no doubt that Eddie Money was the man, and "Think I'm In Love" is probably my favorite Eddie Money song. I think Sinkhole even covered this song; I wish I still had that record.

Eddie Money -

"Think I'm In Love"

(End notes: When I first posted "Part One" of this series a year ago, "In Case You Didn't Feel Like Showing Up" was just something that I googled (it's the title of a live Ministry DVD or something). I figured that it fit, because everybody would see that I wrote a post about Aerosmith and Cheap Trick and just keep on moving without bothering to read it. Maybe a month or two afterwards, "Beware of The Blog" started using the same title for their live show recaps, which I guess makes more sense. So, apologies to WFMU for stealing their post title before they even started using it.)

I'm Lost But I Haven't Given Up

2011-12-04T17:50:00.000-05:00

Don't know how many of you caught the Burnversion CD that I posted three years ago, but it's a pretty sizeable chunk of weirdo out-of-the-way four-track rocking. This single is a lot more subdued, but it can still give you an idea of what these guys were up to, especially at around the 3:15 mark of the a-side where all of a sudden things go haywire. Not sure what the b-side is for-- it just sounds like some random minute-fifty part of some other song-- but I guess it's okay.

Burnversion -

"Diesel Fumes"

"License Apply 4"

I've Got It And It Isn't Worth Having

2011-12-03T22:23:00.001-05:00

This probably sounds about as good as any 20-year-old flexi is going to sound, although whomever released this had balls for putting 7 minutes of music on one side of a flexi anyway. This is Boyracer's first-ever recording, and is schizophrenic like most of their best stuff is, starting off quitely but then going out thrashing by the end of it. One of the best of the '90s bands, and almost any starting point in their massive catalog will prove it to you. I'm not sure why I'm bothering to include the Sabine song, except that it's a pleasant enough diversion as far as '90s home-recorded stuff goes.

Boyracer -

"Boyracer"

Sabine -

"Painting Portraits"

If Punk Is Just A Gimmick Then Fuck That Shit

2011-12-02T22:07:00.000-05:00

Warning//Warning might be the band for you if you like stupid raw noisy punk, or if you like looking at weiners since the drummer plays completely naked. They're from France, I guess they don't care. (The internet says that one or two of them used to be in Gasmask Terror, who had a split tape with Bloodkrow Butcher, who rule.) When they played the Whitney House the other week, some guy who was either with them or from one of the other bands (I'm not sure) stripped down and jumped into the pit naked, too. Warning//Warning brought with them a tour edition (#/100) of their new LP and a repress of their 2010 EP, neither of which have any particularly great songs on them, although the EP has funny stuff written on the labels (see below). I like bands that try to sound like shit but have a sense of humor, except for Skimask, who kinda suck.

Warning//Warning -

"Fucker! Fucker! Fucker!"

"I Can't Beer You"

"Artist Shit"

I'm Getting Good At Letting People Down

2011-11-27T19:19:00.001-05:00

This single came with the second issue of Seven 'zine, right around when Starvation Army were beginning to de-evolve from a pretty good Clevo/Radio Birdman-styled p-rock outfit into hard rock/metal. Even still, "Nasty Bit of Work" moves a ton of ass, helped along by an awesome glam riff and some quality work from Fraser Sims-- a completely underrated vocalist who always managed to not sound like anyone else. The sleeve to the record was actually a 7-1/2" x 8" pocket folder with an 8-page Starvation Army interview stitched into the middle of it, while the zine itself was a combination of several booklets-- including a short story written by Sims-- and postcards, with the whole thing being thrown into a polybag. I'm including a full scan of the interview (even though I know nobody reads those things), so dig it.

Starvation Army -

"Nasty Bit of Work"

Don't Leave It Up To Me

2011-11-26T19:16:00.003-05:00

Salvation -

"Mortality Interactions"

Hoax -

"Fagget"

"Leech"

Confines -

"Culture Trust"

Do It Or Shut Up About It

2011-11-20T17:27:00.000-05:00

I didn't even own a copy of the "elusive" final Kingface 12" when I posted their first 12" three years ago, though obviously I stumbled onto one eventually. There's some flabby moments here -- like, "Jealousy" has a pretty good riff, but at 7 minutes long it could've used a bit more tightening-up -- but if you were into the first Kingface EP then this one rocks just as hard, and sounds a lot better, too. Again, I think you can easily draw a line from Bad Brains to bands like Underdog and Supertouch, and put Kingface directly in the middle of that line, too, even if their sound was a lot more "rock" than those other bands. And their lyrics were way more like Rusted Root, or whatever.

Kingface -

"One Truth"

"Life Keeps Getting Longer"

"Jealousy"

Wasting Your Time Is All I'll Ever Do

2011-11-13T08:23:00.001-05:00

The most I knew about this record when I first bought it was that four bands from Boston had recorded a 10" EP of Tampoffs covers before the Tampoffs themselves even had a record out, which is a pretty funny idea. I was already a little bit familiar with Turpentine Brothers, since I have one other record of theirs (a 7" split with CoCoComa), plus The Konks is Kurt Davis of Kustomized and Bullet LaVolta, of course. I had to pump up the volume a bit when I ripped this because the mastering is annoyingly quiet, but the covers themselves are fairly good and loud, as they were all recorded on a 4-track in a basement somewhere-- the way God intended music to be recorded. Well, Tommy and The Terrors kinda suck, but their song has the best title ("Hartford Pigeon"), so I'm leaving it in.

Turpentine Brothers -

"Too Long"

The Konks -

"All The Time"

Spitzz -

"Splinters"

Tommy and The Terrors -

"Hartford Pigeon"

I'll Bury What They Leave Behind

2011-11-07T20:06:00.006-05:00

Verbal Assault is a band that hasn't aged well at all with me, dredging up bad memories of "New Wind" 7Seconds, Beefeater-era Dischord releases, and that failed Justice League LP. So, you may ask, why am I bothering to foist this record upon you (instead of that Toddler 7" that I've been sitting on) if I think it's such a crummy platter, anyway? Well, first of all, it's not that crummy-- at least, the guitar sound isn't all bad. Plus Verbal Assault were fairly instrumental to me during my developmental years in hardcore. I ended up seeing them a bunch of times in a bunch of different towns-- Albany, Boston, Providence, Stamford, Norwalk, NYC-- and they were the first band I ever stagedived to (7Seconds/Verbal Assault, 11/29/86), which I thought would be an interesting bit of trivia to pass along except that I realize how stupid it sounds now that I've written it aloud.

Verbal Assault also were the first band to show me that hardcore bands didn't have to listen to just hardcore, a fact that I'd accepted as a given in my Youth Crew-brainwashed mind until the day I rode in Verbal Assault's van in '85 or so, back when all they had was a demo out. It was either on the way to an Anthrax Club show or on the way home from one, but anyway, I found out that what Verbal Assault mostly listened to in their van was reggae and Metallica, which back in those anti-hippie/anti-longhair days nearly bordered on sacrilege (okay, just kidding). The Verbal Assault demo was totally great, by the way, and it wasn't hard for kids like me-- kids who were let down by the slow deterioration of the XClaim! bands while waiting for the eventual Youth Crew explosion a few years later-- to get behind the sentiment of "What The Fuck Do You Do?", or finger-point during "RIX". It was clear, though, that Verbal Assault were interested in being more than just a Youth Crew band, and the last couple of times I saw Chris sing "RIX" he was noticeably going through the motions, and it was obvious that he'd grown tired of the simplistic sentiment.

After "Learn", though, Verbal Assault's records didn't really cut it with me anymore, although I liked them long enough to interview them a couple of times around '86/'87 (interviews for two different zines that never saw the light of day), and also help them get lost on the way to their first Sunday matinee show at CBGB's. I told 'em, "yeah, I know how to get to CB's, follow me", and so they followed my ancient VW Rabbit all the way from Connecticut in their van , only to realize that I'd taken the wrong bridge somewhere along I-87 once we noticed that we were on a dead end street facing LaGuardia Airport.

So, here's the "Tiny Giants" 7-inch-- "More Than Music" blasts out of the speakers pretty good after all these years, so maybe listen to that one first-- along with some Verbal Assault pictures from three of my zines; the top photo is by Sean Reardon, the two middle photos are mine, and the bottom photo is by 'Jenni' (a random photo that I think Al Quint might've sent me).

Verbal Assault -

"Tiny Giants"

"More Than Music"

I'm So Good At Making Friends

2011-10-23T20:09:00.001-04:00

Shoppers -

"IV"

Natural Law -

"Cheap Blood"

Brain Killer interview, MRR #342

2011-10-21T21:27:00.000-04:00

Brain Killer interview in MRR #342, with photos
that I took at The Whitney House

Our Goals Have Now Become Our Regrets

2011-10-15T22:05:00.004-04:00

I saw Veterans at Popeye's the other month and they friggin' rocked it out, alternating between totally pissed-off speedy thrash and slower parts that were really punchy, like Sabbath-style hard rock or something. I know I've written a bunch of times before about bands that do something similar (Napolean Complex is pretty good at it, and Escalator), but the approach that Veterans uses has a more technical-metal aspect to it -- like, they're branching out and taking a whole new direction within the song, it's not just a breakdown or mosh part or whatever. They have a split tape that came out just a couple of weeks before they played Popeye's (the song I've posted below is one of their two songs on the tape), and I've heard some other songs on their Bandcamp page, but none of it even touches how good they were the night that I saw them. On the recordings, the slower parts are made to sound more spacey and atmospheric, like they're trying to be doom/psych or something, but when they play the songs live there's less fucking around. It's just ripping thrash, and then all of a sudden there's a total SST-core/Ginn-metal breakdown. Plus two of the guys in the band (the drummer and the bass player) wore X's, so I had to like them.

Then Vaccine played, and I'm so used to their "thing" being 8-minute/15-song sets, but this time they hit the 8-minute mark and then just kept going, playing for what had to be at least twice as long as the first time I saw them (which was last summer at The Whitney House). When Vaccine plays, it's like a machine gun, a bunch of 15-second bursts with some 3-second pauses in-between... just amazingly intense. Afterwards I was all pumped up, walking around and saying to everyone I ran into, "We just saw Vaccine play a 20-minute set!" like some kind of idiot. I guess the "Crimes In Blood" 5-inch is still the most recent thing they've put out, so here's a rip I made of the entire b-side (neither side of the record is any more than a minute long).

Vaccine -

"Crimes In Blood" B-side

Veterans -

"American Hero"

I've Been Here Far Too Long

2011-10-14T20:40:00.003-04:00

I don't expect any of you to give two shits about this record, just like I wouldn't give two shits about this record either if it weren't for the Alex Chilton connection: The Yankees' Jon Tiven produced and played guitar on AC's "Bach's Bottom"/"Singer Not The Song", while Alex co-wrote one of the songs here and sings back-ups as well. Parts of this record rise above some of the '70s pop-rock that was happening at the time (what exactly was "happening" in 1979? "My Sharona"? "Do Ya Think I'm Sexy"? "We've Got Tonight"? Randy Vanwarmer?), although that statement is open to interpretation. "Take It Like a Man" almost sounds like shitty Wilco, or shitty Wilco almost sounds like it, one or the other; the vocals are mixed louder than on all the other tracks on the album, so I guess they were hoping that this one would be the "hit". "Everyday I Have To Cry" steals the chord progression from "Free Again", which I guess is okay because Tiven co-wrote that one, too.

Google says that Jon Tiven was originally from New Haven (where he had a fanzine called "New Haven Rock Press" that Tosches, Meltzer, and a bunch of guys wrote for), and a few New Haven-area musicians that you might recognize appear on this record, such as Christine Ohlman and Roger C. Reale. Also the album jacket makes me think of NRBQ, for some reason.

The Yankees -

"Take It Like a Man"

"Everyday I Have To Cry"

"Take Me Home & Make Me Like It"

I Already Straightened Up In Here Once Today

2011-10-09T11:38:00.001-04:00

I think this is one of the oddest rock records that I own, not to mention one that showed up in every used bin and was mailed to anyone who had a fanzine back in the late '80s. The Wild Stares started out as a Propeller band from Boston, and even though I've never heard any of their earlier stuff, I'm sure it had to be pretty crummy, since my only memory of The Wild Stares before this album came out was of them being on the butt end of the occasional snide remark in either Conflict or Forced Exposure. "Skorch Turth" received a better reception, though (I'm pretty sure Gerard gave it a good review, at least), and even though there's still a sort of an annoying artiness to it, it's a fairly reedemable record once you let it roll around for a while.

Holding this record in your hands and looking down at the grooves can be pretty amusing for about a second or two, as the tracks vary wildly in length, alternating between minute-long thrashy bursts and longer, more languid efforts. "Piece of The Picture", the opening track, starts off sounding like Men Without Hats with Ron House singing and makes you wonder what you've gotten into, but it gets better as it goes along and even piles on some scraping guitar noises towards the end. It's also about the only song on the record that sounds like this (synth-y, or whatever). The other more "rock" stuff comes off like a mutated Volcano Suns, or maybe a weird mix of The Birthday Party and The Embarrassment, only not really that intense. This is nowhere near one of the best records of all time, or even worth the two paragraphs that I just wrote about it, but it's not always just the great records that are worth listening to decades down the road. Sometimes it's the weird stuff that you felt like throwing away at the time that becomes the more interesting thing 20 years later.

The Wild Stares -

"Piece of The Picture"

"Lonesome Tiger"

"We Are The Gone Kids"

"Can't Watch You"

"Your Secret is Safe"

I Have Shit For Brains

2011-10-07T22:49:00.000-04:00

Easily one of my favorite singles ever, if only for the b-side, "Shit For Brains" -- one of the earliest and best examples of the whole creepy-guy noise rock thing, before the inevitable cloning.

Bastards -

"Shit For Brains"

I Can't Count On You For Anything

2011-10-04T21:49:00.003-04:00

I hafta* admit that when I first heard the Straight Arrows LP back at the beginning of the year, it was way too much like standard issue garage/psych for me, and I deleted it fairly quickly from my computer. This kinda made me not want to go to Popeye's to see them last week, though it's a good thing I changed my mind, because the show turned out to be a blast and Straight Arrows friggin' ruled. Any weaknesses found in the LP (and I did end buying a vinyl copy from the band, so there, I'm not being that much of a dick) were completely kicked to the side by their live set, which went a long way towards proving that underneath all of the "period-appropriate" production dreck, Straight Arrows have some amazing songs. They gotta be one of the top 4 or 5 touring bands I've ever seen at Popeye's, without a doubt, as well as one of the most hysterical bands I've ever talked to. Most people, when I drop one of my terribly dry jokes in front of them, just go "what the fuck", but these guys would pick it up and run with it until I was laughing my ass off. Australians...

Straight Arrows brought a tape with them that they'd made just for this tour, called "Hits From The Zong" (ahem), which as far as I can tell is a bunch of their early vinyl (like the "Can't Count" 7" and their split with The Creteens) plus some other odds and ends, like a cover of the Dicks' "Kill From The Heart". There's a whole bunch of songs on the tape that I hadn't heard before that are really great, and after about a week of listening to it I can definitely say that it's one of my favorite things I've heard so far this year. I don't know if you'll be able to track down a copy (they only made 100), but if you ever see one, try to grab it.

*old Flipside useage, don't try to correct my spelling

This was the last-ever show at Popeye's, making Estrogen Highs the last band ever to play there. As a result, they churned out a set that was nothing but heat, ripping through a handful of new songs ("Tell It To Them" keeps getting better and better, and I might like the song that they started off the set with even more, though I don't know what it was) and finishing off with a blood-letting version of Guided By Voices' "Quality of Armor". Wes kept randomly plucking the bass solo to Fleetwood Mac's "The Chain" in-between songs, which led to Stefan remarking that they've been working on a '70s rock cover band, to be called "Hug" or something. Not sure what that's all about, and seeing how I "missed" Shotgun Dregs, too, I'll probably never find out.

Straight Arrows -

"Can't Count"

"Something Happens"

"Haunted Out"

Estrogen Highs -

"Ever"
(Flipper cover)

I've Been Sitting In This Dump All Night Just Waiting For You

2011-09-30T16:37:00.004-04:00

I ended up seeing Easy Action twice in the same night last Friday; after they finished up their set at The Flywheel at around 10:15 or so, they then scooted another 25 miles north up I-91 where they played an even better set at The Wheelhouse in Greenfield. Not that they even had much of a chance at The Flywheel, since the sound at the beginning of the Flywheel set was pretty rough; I couldn't hear the guitar at all at first, just mostly the drums and vocals, and then midway through the first song John abruptly stopped singing and dropped the mic to the floor because he was getting shocked by it. Eventually the mic situation got sorted out, and then after that the problems with the sound seemed to go away also. There were a few sludgier songs early on in the set that I didn't recognize, either -- new songs? or songs from a record I don't have? I never found out, because they didn't have a set list written out for either show -- but, in any case, it wasn't until about halfway through the set that things started to warm up.

I ended up hearing about the second show while I was milling about in the front room before the earlier show, thumbing through the Flywheel's zine library; it was around that time that Thurston Moore showed up and started chatting with the band just as I was standing there reading a zine called I Would Punch An Ass For Cake (true story). John Brannon: "Yeah, we're playing another show after this one, a few miles up the road", but nobody seemed to know the name of the place or exactly how to get there, so as we were all leaving, I told Easy Action that I was just going to follow their van, and then we both did U-turns in the center of Greenfield a couple of times before finding the place. It turns out that The Wheelhouse is actually a pretty nice little room, tucked along a back alley and hidden downstairs in a basement somewhere, with a whole bunch of plumbing and sprinkler pipes sticking out, and a bunch of writing on the bare stone walls so that it still looks like an actual basement. Easy Action came out swinging this time, changing up the set list from their earlier show by opening up with "I'm Waiting" (with John's voice on the first verse sounding like one long solid "WOOAAHHRRR", just like back in the old Negative Approach days), and then even doing their 10CC cover, "I'm Not In Love", which they didn't do at the Flywheel. They pretty much ripped it up and laid it down, with about half of the people who were in the audience at The Flywheel making the drive up to Greenfield to catch the second show as well. If you were one of those people who were at the somewhat-flabby Flywheel show but then didn't go to the second show, it would've turned your whole night around, trust me.

The Deacons opened up the show at The Flywheel, and I've known Rich for over 25 years now (and Al for a little bit, too), so it was nice to hang out and catch up with them and buy a couple of records and stuff. A band from around that same area of Massachusetts, called Powerblessings, went on before Easy Action at the Wheelhouse show, and they friggin' kicked a load of ass-- I don't know how many of you out there remember a band called Pipe, who were on Merge back in the '90s (I've posted a couple of their singles here), but these guys sound a lot like them. They were supposed to play at a Whitney House show that got cancelled by the hurricane a couple of weeks back, so I'm glad that I ended up catching them here. I don't really know any of the words to their songs but the singer's viewpoint seems pretty great, way more amused than pissed off, like in a "well, that shit was pretty fucking stupid" kind of way. I saw someone else compare them to The Jesus Lizard, which is something that I really can't follow along with, unless you amend it to mean some of Pissed Jeans' faster songs mixed with Pegboy/"Understand"-era Naked Raygun. Anyway, they've got four songs up on Bandcamp which are supposed to be on a 7" that's coming out soon-- I'll go ahead and post one of them here...

Wet Ones by Powerblessings

Easy Action -

"Dead of Night"

The Deacons -

"D-Train to Brighton"

I Hate Your Folks And You Know Why

2011-09-19T20:42:00.001-04:00

The first show I ever went to at Whitney House was Guilty Faces and Dean Dirg back in 2008, only I left before Dean Dirg even set up because I wanted to be home by 10 (I'm pretty sure it was a weeknight). Probably one of the more stupid things I've done lately, but there's been so many bands in my life that I've seen and don't even remember seeing, that missing one or two now isn't going to make much of a difference... anyway, this is the "tour" edition of Dean Dirg's "The Chimpänzee EP", though I don't know what makes it different from the regular edition other than the fact that the tour edition is hand-numbered. The songs on this 7" are all kinda short, so rather than doing my usual thing and just posting two or three songs that are only 30 seconds long (which would be pretty dumb), I'm going to post the whole thing as a zip file.

1. Squad Car (:32)
2. I Don't Like You(r Band) (:58)
3. Amateur Action (:38)
4. Mum I Hate Your Kids (:29)
5. Hit The Wall (:30)
6. 15,16,17,18... (1:14)

Dean Dirg – The Chimpänzee EP [Ken Rock, 2005]

We Hate This Fucking Place

2011-09-17T21:23:00.000-04:00

I've already written a couple of times about how I used to be really into Freemasonry back in the '90s, which is how I stumbled onto buying this 7" in the first place, since Galanas:.Cerdd is ex-Freemasonry. This is one of the neat little 7"-ers that I was going to review in the last issue of Brushback, except the issue never came out and blah blah blah, you know how that goes. I forget what the Soli Deo Gloria song on the other side sounds like (and I didn't listen to it again here-- I'm pretty sure it's an instrumental), but the Galanas:.Cerdd song is pretty great, sorta like a more amped-up/metal'ed up version of the kind of stuff My Pal God was putting out at the time-- you know, bands like Hurl and Dis- and so forth.

When I first got this 7" in the mail, it came with a fairly long and despondent letter from Chuck, the guy who ran Moodswing Records, talking about how all the bands he was putting out were breaking up and so forth. I'm hoping he doesn't mind me reprinting the letter here, because it's definitely one of the more memorable things I've ever gotten with a record. I'm pretty sure the label situation turned out okay anyway, because Moodswing is still around and you can even still buy this 7" from them (for like a buck-fifty or something).

Galanas:.Cerdd -

"Three Dot Dash"

What I Can't Do And What I Won't Do Have Become The Same Thing

2011-09-13T21:40:00.002-04:00

I guess Oiltanker's new LP coming out just as they're about to go on a 10-month hiatus counts as a weird sense of timing (obscure reference that you won't get: "it's your delivery"), but so far it's no big deal because they kicked ass at their LP release show on Friday anyway. Oiltanker's set-up happened to be the biggest row of stacks/cabinets I have ever seen at Whitney House, meaning they were pretty loud, but the place was so packed tight with people that once I moved back about 30 or 40 feet I didn't even really need to wear earplugs. I keep hammering on the fact that I think Oiltanker are the best live band in CT, and it's because their riffs are friggin' killer, everyone in the band knows their shit, and when they're locked-on the sound is overwhelming. Their "Crusades" 7" is literally one of the best punk/HC records ever from CT and so it oughta be a tough one to top, but after a quick listen-through I think I can say that the new LP is worthy of the task. The packaging came out really nice, too-- great artwork on the sleeve, a full-sized lyric sheet (printed in two languages), plus everything's all in black and white so the overall look is really intense.

Escalator shook a little rust off in time to play a great set, also. It's been a while since the last time I've seen them (like 11 months, maybe?), which makes it kinda easy for me to lose track of how much I like their sound. Escalator's sound is really heavy and thick for "just" a two-piece, but leaves plenty of space to allow the riffs to work. I really like Ben's guitar playing-- it's Iommi heavy (taking on part of role of the bass) but still nimble and punk as fukk. Fast noisy shit with deep grooves in between, you'll like it.

Oiltanker -

"Who's In Control"

Escalator -

"Efficacy & Obsolescence"

I'm Stupid Anyway

2011-09-11T12:57:00.003-04:00

Three best American punk bands: Crime, Pagans, Weirdos, though not necessarily in that order... I was never lucky enough to actually own any Crime records, but I ended up being just lucky enough to find "Piss On Your Turntable", a bootleg CD that collects just about every piece of Crime vinyl in one place. A good chunk of the CD is the "San Francisco's Doomed" LP, a semi-legit release from about 20 years ago, half of which was a studio demo recorded in early '78, the other half being a rehearsal recording from '79. The '78 stuff fucking rips-- heavy drums and loud guitars all over the place, just a classic piece of rock... there's also a 12-page booklet of lyrics and stuff, but I'm not gonna scan the whole thing because nobody ever reads that shit... anyway, here's a couple of tracks from the '78 recording, plus the whole thing all at once, which I'll take down sooner than eventually...

Crime -

"San Francisco's Doomed"

"I Stupid (Anyway)"

For a short time, here's a .zip file with all 11 tracks from the '78 recording:

~~Crime - San Francisco's Doomed (1978 demo)~~

I've Heard Things That Made Me Break And Die

2011-09-05T21:35:00.002-04:00

The new Kitchen's Floor album is now my favorite LP of the year-- the thing friggin' smokes, and the songs are hooky, too. No doubt the last one had great songs on it, too, but the sound was sorta tinny. This one blows out of the speakers like a mid-period Government Issue album. There's no fucking around with the songs, either; most of them are over and done in a minute and a half. Just do your business and get the hell out of there. One of the songs might even be stealing the riff from TJSA's "Baboon's Liver", I think.

The album isn't officially out til the end of the month (on Siltbreeze), but the band has plenty of copies with them right now as they tour around the States. I got to see them twice this past weekend, in New Haven at Popeye's Garage and in Northampton at Feeding Tube Records, and they were awesome both times. Just three guys bashing out songs, in a Wipers/Volcano Suns/Feedtime sort of way. Not that they sound like those bands, necessarily, just that they all have three guys.

(As an aside, Feeding Tube Records is amazing. My first time there, and I wasn't even planning on buying records, but I still walked out with 5 or 6 things. Best indie record store I've ever been in. I can't imagine all the weird stuff I'd be listening to if I lived next to this place. Plus they've got a Nocturnal Projections 7" on the wall that I'm seriously dying to own.)

The LP comes with a download code, but this was ripped from the vinyl.

Kitchen's Floor -

"No Love"

You Don't Have To Be A Dick About It

2011-09-04T17:17:00.001-04:00

One of my favorite parts of any M.O.T.O. song is the neat little Beatles rip that starts off the cassette version of "Dick About It"-- something that isn't as apparent on the 7" version, which disappointed me a bit when I first heard it, in like 1988 or whenever it was. The original version also has a fine speck of a guitar lead that Paul ended up turning into an entire song, "Blast of Silence", decades later. He tends to be resourceful like that.

When M.O.T.O. played at Cafe Nine a few weeks ago, Paul began the set by playing "I Like Fucking" solo, without the backing band; the place was pretty still at the time (hardly anyone was there anyway, as it was a Wednesday), so hearing the chorus as it reverberated around the room was pretty funny. The opening band then hopped up on stage to back Paul up after that, and they seemed to know the songs pretty well, or at least better than the drummer that Paul had borrowed the last time he played in New Haven. M.O.T.O. ran through a few songs from the new "Pack Your Troubles In Dreams" album, as well as a bunch of hits -- "Fucking Job", "Primeval", "Dance Dance Dance", "Crystallize", etc -- at one point even doing "I Won't Give It Up Until You're Mine" as a duet with the Ham Steak guy, with whom Paul did a split 7" once. Then when the band left the stage, Paul played one more song, "Ghosts", by himself. (I heard Tommy Perkins got to hop on the drums for a bit a couple of nights before, when M.O.T.O. played Philadelphia.)

Besides the original "Dick About It" from "Bolt!", here's also the original 4-track version of "It Tastes Just Like a Milkshake" (from 1993-- covered by Nobunny in 2010).

M.O.T.O. -

"Dick About It"

"It Tastes Just Like a Milkshake"

Put Down The Cigarette And Drop Out Of BU

2011-08-28T08:32:00.001-04:00

Evan recently posted "Modern World" by The Modern Lovers over at Swan Fungus, which re-acquainted me with how much I love the song. The file Evan posted is pretty quiet, though-- maybe it was from a CD or something, I don't know-- which spurred me to rip a better-sounding one from my own copy of the LP. The ingeniously lame handclaps and the weird solo towards the end are two of the best things ever. This is probably my third favorite anti-hippie song of all time, after "Dope Smoking Moron" and Poison Idea's "I Hate Reggae".

The Modern Lovers -

"Modern World"

Another Drag Like Anything Else I Like

2011-08-27T20:41:00.003-04:00

Here's an oddity to go along with all the Atlas stuff that I've already posted. Gazzara was one of Sean Sheridan's post-Atlas projects, and this is a demo CD EP that Walt from Brass City Records gave to me around 2000 or so. I was already entering one of my slow periods at the time but still hoping that I was going to finish off the last issue of Brushback (#7), which I had already been fussing with for about 2 or 3 years by that point. Anyway, I thought the demo was great and even sent off a letter to the band-- looking to find out about upcoming shows and maybe do an interview or something-- but I never got an answer back. Just as well, I guess, since I never ended up finishing the zine anyway.

As it happens, "The Shool Bus EP" sounds a lot like Atlas, which isn't naturally a given since Sean's done punk stuff and jazz stuff along the way, among other things. The lead-off track, "Work is a Drag", sorta chugs along nicely, but the song that I've always liked the most is "Dreaming of Ruby", which, much like Blanket of Ash's "Too Messed Up", is one of those great lost Connecticut power-pop gems that no one's ever heard. "Dreaming of Ruby" has no real chorus or bridge-- like any of those early Guided By Voices songs, in a way-- and then just when you're really getting into the hook, it ends all of a sudden, which is such an awesome move. The demo finishes with a great instrumental, the skillfully-named "Anything's Impossible", which has a really tough-sounding riff and isn't surfy or wimpy at all, if that's what you're thinking.

I'm not sure how many copies of this thing circulated, since it looks all hand-made to me (remember when people used to use a labelmaker program to put artwork on their CD-R's? Now all they do is write the band's name on them with a magic marker), but I'm guessing only a handful of these managed to get passed around. So, I'm going to post all three songs here, since they're all pretty neat.

Gazzara -

"Dreaming of Ruby"

"Work Is a Drag"

"Anything's Impossible"

Gazzara used to have a page on iLike, though it's long gone now; I managed to swipe some mp3's from it years ago, before it disappeared. As a bonus, here's one of the songs, "Supergirl", which ends with a nice surging guitar solo and features the line "I'm like Roman Polanski / I'll be hiding here when your father comes to get me"-- one of the greatest lyrics in CT indie rock history.
"Supergirl"

God Peed On All My Enemies

2011-08-19T21:23:00.003-04:00

I'd never seen Ultrabunny before, so I was a bit surprised by how hard they can rock out. Not that Bunnybrains were wimpy, or anything like that (is it in poor form to mention Bunnybrains here? It is, isn't it? Oh well, fuck it), just that Ultrabunny are, like, way way rock, like Flipper "Get Away" meets Kilslug type rock. When they played at Popeye's the other week, I was standing off to the left (away from the guitar amps) so that all I could hear was the drumming-- which was loud and direct, the way I like it-- and Malcolm pumping out the Lemmy-like basslines non-stop. It was pretty great, actually. There's plenty of records and tapes to document all of this, of course (Ultrabunny have a new release every week or so, it seems), but none that I've heard match up to STANDING IN FRONT OF THE BASS AMP SO THAT ALL YOU CAN HEAR ARE THE BASS AND DRUMS THE WHOLE TIME. Friggin' awesome.

I bought the "Volume Merchants"/"Unsafe At Any Age" LP when I saw them at Popeyes -- the "Volume Merchants" side has a track listing that goes Small War, Medium War, Large War, and My War-- so here's Large War, all eight minutes and forty nine seconds' worth of it. Put it on and start washing dishes or something, I don't know.

Ultrabunny -

"Large War"

The People That I Met Taught Me Nothing New

2011-08-14T21:21:00.004-04:00

Saw Rank/Xerox last night, what a great band... legit Xpressway/first-wave post-punk type stuff, and why not, there's an actual New Zealander and an Australian in the band (don't ask me to defend that, I'm just making up blanket statements as I go along)... the more I listen to their stuff, the more I'm impressed with how inventive and friggin' precise all of it really is. Great artwork on all their records, too-- they capture something that's really arid-- and then when you go see them live, it becomes even more obvious that they're not interested in recreating anything, and at the most are just maybe running alongside of it while making their own thing... If you do get to see them on this tour, make sure you grab their split tape with Grass Widow, they're selling it for a chintzy three bux and their 5 songs on it (from '09) equal some of the best flat-out rock shit I've ever heard. Their new LP just came out, too, I haven't sat down with the whole thing yet since I just bought it last night, but here's side one, track one...

Rank/Xerox -

"Sterile Regions"

Fanzines Are Cheap I Know

2011-08-13T17:44:00.004-04:00

Issue #1 of Incremental Decrepitude out now

PayPal your address and $0.82 (eighty-two cents) to
rock_in_my_shoe @ yahoo.com

or see me at a show and ask for one

-- sold out (or, given away, most likely) --

Thanks for the kind words:

Giddy as a Titmouse

Incremental Air Strikes

If Everything Goes As Planned

2011-08-13T15:48:00.004-04:00

I think I promised that I was going to write about this compilation three years ago, though obviously other things intervened in the meantime, like maybe I was too busy writing about Punchbuggy records or something. Anyway, Popfactory was a pretty ace little indie-pop label from the Tri-State area back in the 90's, prone to fuzzy stuff, and the "Gift From Sing-Sing" compilation was a collection of the label's early 7"-ers, along with some other unreleased stuff. All I have now is the CD version, but this also came out on LP, and that's what I originally reviewed in my zine (Brushback) way back when. The CD might have some extra tracks that aren't on the LP, I sorta forget. I still have some of the original Popfactory 7"-ers that are on this compilation-- Razor 18, Sunhead, Heartworms, and Her Tears of course-- besides the fact that I've already posted Her Tears' "Ultra-Crush" (Popfactory #1) as a vinyl rip from the 7", which now you'll be able to get as a CD track with "superior" CD resolution (arf arf). I'd go on but the compilation's liner notes are pretty extensive, so read those instead.

Sunhead -

"Seasonal"

Razor 18 -

"P Street Beach"

Heartworms -

"If Everything Goes As Planned"

Saturnine -

"Like a Kite"

Her Tears -

"Lady Killer"

"Ultra-Crush"

Blessed Ethel -

"Veronica"

The full CD, which I'll leave up for about a week or so:

~~A Gift From Sing-Sing CD (Popfactory, 1996).zip~~

Ain't No Telling When You'll See Me Again

2011-07-23T13:15:00.000-04:00

Fireballs of Freedom have some great singles, and the a-side to this one could be my favorite out of all of them... this thing will totally scuzz up your face.. silkscreened sleeve and colored vinyl, if that's what you're into (I sorta am). You should still be able to get this from Wäntage, as well as the "Greasy Retrospective" CD which collects most of FOF's early 7"-ers. Start pedalin'.

Fireballs of Freedom -

"Exorcism in The Key of You"

You've Got A Weird Way Of Showing Your Charms

2011-07-22T22:35:00.001-04:00

A Frames popped up in a conversation I was having last weekend, something about how early on I was hoping that The Field Recordings might morph into A Frames at some point, just not on this single, which is more like A Frames sounding a lot like Crime, on "Traction" at least. This single is a beast of rock n roll, each side is a perfect 2-1/3 fucked-up minutes. That is all.

A Frames -

"Police 1000"

"Traction"

I Wish I Had My Shit Together

2011-07-16T16:38:00.002-04:00

Though it's been around for a while, last weekend was the first time I've ever been to a show at the Flywheel. My excuse is that it's never really been convenient to anywhere I've ever lived; even now that I've moved a bit further north, it's still about a hour's drive away. Not to mention the steep road that leads into Easthampton, which must be a full mile straight down the side of a mountain, ending with a 90-degree lefthand turn directly at the bottom. No wonder the road is sometimes closed during the winter.

Anyway, the show last Sunday was awesome, partly because there were two people there wearing Void and Replacements "Stink" t-shirts-- two of my all-time top-ten favorite records, seriously-- and partly because the Flywheel has a cool zine archive on hand, so I spent a bunch of time in-between bands flipping through old issues of Stay Free! and Speed Kills (no, they didn't really have anything much better). Guinea Worms went on last, and they slayed; they've got some pointless noodling and bizzaro electronic songs in their discography, but on stage they're just a full-on relentless rock show, kinda like what Homostupids would sound like if they had diplomas, and it was pretty great. Afterwards they sold me like $40 worth records (the pink-and-orange version of "Sorcererers of Madness", the Savage Records single, and the Guinea Worms version of the World's Lousy #8 compilation to replace my shitty-looking Vivian Girls one) for only 20 bucks, which I was pretty psyched about. I've only just started listening to "Sorcererers of Madness", which is a double LP, so I'm still trying to digest it all. For now that mostly means trying to figure out which Foreigner song the bridge to "Afterhour Party" steals from ("Double Vision", maybe?).

First show with the new camera, too, I guess it's okay.

Guinea Worms -

"Drunk In Yr Uggs"

"Bugged"

"Afterhour Party"

There's Nothing Worth Anything In My Head

2011-07-11T21:42:00.004-04:00

Here's the second Modern Machines LP, some more flat-out early 'Mats-ish rock n roll with an ear for the occasional Bob Stinson flaming guitar solo.. oh, sorry, that's "Bent Outta Shape-ish" for you younger kids... the one time I saw Modern Machines, I was immediately impressed with just how naturally great Nate is, as both a singer and guitar player... a great band that remains sorely underappreciated around here (I think)... I've also got a test pressing of this, which is nothing special, just looks like a blank 12"... still a nice thing to have, I guess. Exit stage rrright...

Modern Machines -

"Zero Kid"

"Ay, Paisano!"

"M.A.D."

"(Reverse) The Rotation of The Earth"

Stick To What You're Good At

2011-07-06T21:19:00.003-04:00

None of Oiltanker's mics seemed to be working last Friday, which in some ways maybe isn't a bad thing, but their set still plummeled anyway. As far as everything else goes, they sounded as good as ever, and you'd have a hard time finding a band that sounds better within the acoustics of the Whitney House basement better than Oiltanker... I was hoping that Cleansing Wave would blow the doors off the place, too, based upon their demo, which I've been listening to for a solid month now trying to figure the damn thing out. There's a solid layer of reverb and distortion over the recording that gives the demo a real Cult Maternal type vibe (Neon Blud/Slavescene/etc.), but with some heavy riffs underneath that I figured would only get heavier and more pronounced when the songs were played live. Except that on Friday, Cleansing Wave's sound was almost a carbon copy of their demo: same amount of reverb on the vocals, guitar on about the same level in the mix. They brought green lights with them when I was hoping they'd bring a hammer. Maybe not as insane as I had hoped, but still good. ("Toad" is a studio mp3 swiped from bandcamp, by the way, while "Nap Necessity" is my own sub-standard tape rip.)

Cleansing Wave -

"Toad"

"Nap Necessity"

Everyone's Got Something They Do Badly

2011-07-02T18:09:00.001-04:00

Monsterland's "Peanut Butter Karma" single was released in two different versions; the more common version seems to be the one that came out on SpinART in the U.S. with "Why Did I Fall For You?" as the b-side, but there was also a numbered edition released on Serial Killer in the U.K with "Sunburn" as the b-side. I think either b-side is actually better than the a-side (I'm that way sometimes), and "Sunburn" is probably one of my top 3 or 4 favorite Monsterland songs-- I'm just really into the way that the verse starts to take off towards the end, and the start/stop riff that tears apart the little mini-chorus. "Sunburn" also showed up later on the Pop Narcotic "Why Do You Think They Call It Pop?" double-10" compilation, which I have a copy of (a little birdie sent it to me) though I haven't opened it yet.

Monsterland -

"Sunburn"

I Don't Even Like You All That Much

2011-06-27T20:57:00.002-04:00

My three favorite punk bands (meaning pre-1980) are probably Crime, Pagans, and the Australian X, so I'm gonna go ahead and write this up anyway, even though the copy I have is all beat to shit. It didn't bother me as much when I bought it, because I got it for practically nothing, but now that I'm trying to post it for the blog I'm wishing that I had a better copy.

Anyway, this is the first re-issue of the Australian X's "Aspirations" LP, which is really one of the best records ever made. The rips I made aren't worth downloading, but I'll post them as listen-only samples anyway, so you can at least check out what are two of my favorite parts on the record: the fake spit at the beginning of "Dipstick", which is so ridiculous that it almost makes me laugh every time I hear it, and the absolutely murderous way that the drums and bass kick-start the beginning of "Present". (Don't bother listening to the rest of the files, it's not worth it.) The drums and bass on this record sound so bad-ass, it's friggin' unbelievable.

If you haven't heard this record before, then you should hunt it down right away. You can hear the whole thing here, on the ever-loving Biannual Haircut (you should also grab X's "Home is Where The Floor Is" EP while you're there, it's almost as excellent), and then besides a couple of CD re-issues-- one of them on AmRep-- there's also the newest vinyl re-issue of "X-Aspiriations" which came out last year, if you can find it and feel like dropping 25 bucks on it.

White People Sure Gotta Lotta Nerve These Days

2011-06-26T14:44:00.000-04:00

Life Flows Through The Death Of Me

2011-06-24T23:16:00.012-04:00

I was expecting The Men to split my head wide open last night, but it never happened. "Leave Home" is a great record, the Nerves cover is great, so on and so forth, but if I didn't already know who they were and didn't like all of their records already, my impulse reaction to them last night would've been "well, these guys sorta blow." Okay, I liked a few of their songs, especially the last one which they said was new and had a great bass-driven melody for part of it, but overall there was too much finesse going on when they should've been cracking skulls. I really think their drummer should've been slamming the hell out of something most of the time, but instead he kept fussing with his crummy cymbals too much. Their set in general was way too quiet, and it couldn't have been the room because when IceAge played they were loud as hell. I dunno, maybe I just didn't get it.

Medication sounded a lot more like themselves than they had just a few nights earlier at Elm Bar, though Mikey didn't seem to think so because every so often he'd randomly shout one of the words into the mic so that it came out all fucked up and distorted. I thought their set was pretty good, and so did some other people ("Hey, you guys are pretty good. Where you from?"). Most of the crowd that had just packed the room for The Men went outside while Medication were playing, which was a crappy move on their end, though it's a safe bet that it was all the noobs who had never been to a Popeye's show before this one because of their pronounced fear of standing next to all the dirty "noise kids" (like the scene is made better by fake punk bands that sound like Papa Roach and put their records out on Paper + Plastick).

I really thought I'd end up being annoyed by IceAge, but their set was actually pretty good. I mean, they're safely nestled in that in-between spot where there's a whole list of bands earning far less hype that are way better than them, but then they're also not nearly as bad as the backlash wants you believe. I'll admit right now that it's kinda dumb to hate a band just because of the kind of people that like them, although for about a million bands it remains pretty attractive. "New Brigade" still sounds fairly atrocious to me, and it's become obvious that everyone's afraid to review it objectively and instead are feeling like they have to come up with reasons to prove how much they actually like it (how come none of these same guys are lining up to review Rank/Xerox?). Live, though, IceAge were satisfyingly aggressive, almost spectacularly over the top at times, and there were even some bass-heavy parts that borrowed a bit from "My War" that I actually really liked. Still, let's be honest; saying that you "saw IceAge in 2011" won't ever be like saying you saw Black Flag-- more like saying you saw Squirrel Bait in 1986, to name another easily-hyped band whose sound was too obviously made up of parts of other bands, and whom everyone ended up being too embarassed to admit they'd ever liked barely two years after they'd broken up. I can already see that in another 5 years there will be a whole slew of "former members of IceAge" records that'll sound miserably like Cold Cave or some boring shit like that, you can bet the house on it.

The Men -

"Walking Out On Love"

Medication -

"Fog"

You Gotta Sleep Sometime And That's When I'll Set The Fire

2011-06-22T19:43:00.000-04:00

A split of two Australian bands (actually one's not-so-Australian, that's just a lame joke) doing Halo of Flies covers... neither one can touch the original, but Vertigo does way better than their miserable Crime cover, at least... Cosmic Psychos rule in general, I wish I owned more of their records.

Vertigo -

"You Get Nothing"

Cosmic Psychos -

"Garbage Rock"

I Just Shot My Stylist

2011-06-20T21:43:00.000-04:00

I thought the Elm Bar (the old Rudy's in New Haven) sounded like shit Saturday night, but then I was told that it was just me, so I guess I'm wrong. Whatever it was, the sound was way too loud and brittle most of the time, which didn't help me get into Ferocious Fucking Teeth all that much. I like their recorded stuff a lot-- by the way, their new 7", "Hounds", is pretty ace, plus it comes with a nifty booklet-- but their set on Saturday was like 5 lbs of sardines in a 2 lb bag. I dunno, maybe I just need to see them in a bigger room that has a better mic set-up, like Daniel St. (where they just played the other week) or Toad's, though maybe that's not it either. Ferocious Fucking Teeth rocked, they were nuts, but I think I was just in a grouchy mood. I'll wait to see them again, hopefully in a place where the two drum kits aren't set up facing each other so that they resonate a little better.

I made the mistake once of not buying a whole bunch of used Nerve City records that was in the bins for dirt cheap at Redscroll one day when I was there; they were all gone by the next time I went back, and I'd been mildly regretting it ever since. Nerve City were already playing when I walked through the door on Saturday, and at first I wasn't even sure it was them, since everything was being played with a rock beat and most the reverb was gone... though all the tattoos sorta tipped me off, but I still had to ask somebody. The couple of Nerve City records that I'd heard before (thanks, internet) didn't really prep me for how "regular rock-n-roll"-sounding Nerve City would be on stage, although I guess that's the same sorta thing that Medication does when Mikey plays out live. Anyway, Nerve City were definitely alright, plus afterwards I bought up all the records that the guy had with him, so now at least that's out of the way.

Medication went on last, and were way loud; it might seem funny to say it, but they sounded huge, like a Detroit version of themselves or something. It was pretty awesome to hear them that way, though again maybe the rest of the people in the room didn't think it was as loud as I did. After a while I started to get antsy, so I stuck around long enough for them to play "Neighbors" plus one more song after that, and then I left to go get a Chipwich.

Nerve City -

"Sleepwalker"

Ferocious Fucking Teeth -

"Handsome Creeper"

Medication -

"This Town"

We Don't Buy Your Sympathy

2011-06-18T21:05:00.000-04:00

Brain Killer -

"What's Your Excuse?"

Curmudgeon -

"Spineless"

Big Eyes -

"Your Lies"

I Can't Help You At All

2011-06-17T12:32:00.001-04:00

If you're at all interested in the sort of rock that bands like The Nils, Squirrel Bait, Doughboys, and Government Issue were exploring in the first early post-hardcore years, then Moving Targets' superior mid-80's output is well worth looking into. If you haven't heard "Burning In Water" yet-- and I'm constantly running into people who haven't-- then you should definitely check it out, as it's no doubt one of my top five favorite LPs from that era, plus it's still pretty easy to find. Their later stuff, while still good, slips a little bit; not that the songs slowed down at all or that all the hooks went away, just that there wasn't the same energy As it is, "Away From Me" is fairly typical of Moving Targets' later stuff: an okay song with a decent enough hook, almost poppy enough to sound like something that could've been on one of those Cher Doll compilations that came out 5 or 6 years later. The two songs on the flip are from a WERS Metrowave broadcast, and sound a bit tougher; I know that "Selfish" is an older song, one of the ones that was on the "Bands That Could Be God" compilation. Even though the sticker on the front says "limited edition", this is still a Taang! single, meaning there were probably a billion different colors pressed and you can still buy it from the label for $2.50 (I know there's at least three different colors of this 7" sitting at Brass City Records right now).

Moving Targets -

"Away From Me"

"Falling"

"Selfish"

I Got A Tapeworm, And Nobody Cares

2011-06-12T11:56:00.000-04:00

A one-sided single with the blank side not even having a center label, which actually looks sorta cool... I think these tracks are home-recorded demos and such, I'm not sure. Perfection in rockness.

Homostupids -

"Having a Houseguest"

"Finding The Corpse"

"Tapeing The Worm"

"Brutal Birthday"

Attack Them All Until They're Destroyed

2011-06-11T15:20:00.002-04:00

Chris Brokaw was playing last night at the Arch St. Tavern, but the last time I went see a show there I couldn't even get into the parking lot, so this time I went to Cafe Nine to see Oiltanker instead. There isn't another CT band I'd rather see on a Friday night than Oiltanker, anyway, though it was sorta different seeing them up on a stage at a club when before I've only seen them in basements and so forth. Once they let go, though, they still sounded like a monster behemoth... as good as ever, actually. They've got the test pressings for the LP in hand now (and an acetate, too-- weird), so hopefully it'll only be a matter of weeks before that's out... I thought about jetting early but I stuck around for one more band, Napoleon Complex, and I'm glad I did because they were maybe even better than the first time I saw them at The Whitney House back in February. They way Nicholas puts his riffs together is really cool; their songs are all mostly fast thrash, but then a lot of times they'll drop into a heavy hard rock beat, and it sounds really really good. CD coming out soon for them I guess, I'd rather see vinyl or even another tape, but it still should be worthwhile...

Oiltanker -

"Crusades"

Our Kind Comes And Goes

2011-06-08T18:51:00.000-04:00

This demo is pretty awesome. I actually knew nothing about it when I bought it from Foreign Objects at the final FDZ show a few weeks ago-- Pink Nightmare includes Terry and Melissa from Foreign Objects, on guitar and drums-- but the I ended up playing it about four times in a row in the car on the ride home (at 5 songs total, it's only about 9 minutes long anyway). I don't have a really good way of describing this, except that it's punk rock and it rips. The singer for Foreign Objects said it was "like UK 82 style punk" when she handed it to me, but that's a scene that I never paid all that much attention to (other than owning the first couple of Discharge singles), meaning Pink Nightmare could sound just like The Varukers or something and I wouldn't know it. The pacing of "Botulism" and the one-string guitar solo reminds me of Guilty Faces "One Step Closer", that's about the best I can come up with. There's also a Pink Nightmare 7" that came out earlier in 2011, I haven't listened to it yet but if it's jut as good as the tape I might post that one later, too.

Pink Nightmare -

"Botulism"

"White Lies"

We'll Be Easy To Spot Because We'll Glow In The Dark

2011-06-05T15:41:00.002-04:00

I humped it on down to Danbury last night in record time (61 minutes) for the Adrenalin O.D. reunion, getting to the club just as A.O.D. were setting up, which was pretty good timing on my part... hung out, talked to some people, bought some records from Malcolm... A.O.D. friggin' ripped; they could've taken it easy and played some slower stuff, but other than a handful of exceptions ("Masterpiece Theme", "A Nice Song in the Key of D"), mostly all of the songs they played were from "Wacky Hi-Jinks" and "Let's Barbecue"-- "White Hassle", "Going to a Funeral", "Small Talk", "Suburbia", "Old People Talk Loud", "Trans Am", "Rock n Roll Gas Station", etc., all at the same speed as the originals... playing stuff that had to be physically demanding by this time, there were a few flubs (Dave blew out his kick drum), but overall I think they nailed it. If everyone who'd ever paid $150 for a copy "Let's Barbecue" had showed up there might've been 20 extra people there... on the way home I couldn't get the guy at the Dunkin Donuts drive-thru to understand what "only a eyedropper-full of cream, like no cream at all" meant, so I got out of the car and made it myself...

Adrenalin O.D. -

"Trans Am (the saga continues)"

My Principles Must Govern Me

2011-06-04T21:05:00.001-04:00

I realize this record can be found fairly easily on the internet, but I'm posting it here anyway since it's forever been my favorite early-'80s HC 7". Obviously this isn't an original pressing from '83, but the re-issue from six years ago. I used to own two copies of the original, though, back in the mid-80's when they were still cheap and relatively easy to find. There isn't anything about this record that isn't great; from the songs and the lyrics, to the production, to the fold-out lyric sheet and the photos on the back sleeve and the fonts, everything about this record is friggin' hard as fuck. The re-issue has a lot more treble than the OG version and some of the vocal tracks are obviously different, but you can still figure it out. If you took the Negative Approach EP or Agnostic Front's "Victim In Pain" and made the guitars sound like "My War", you'd get this.

State -

"Subvert"

"Attention"

"Police State"

"Girl Violence"

I Swear I'll Never Surrender

2011-06-03T21:11:00.001-04:00

This was supposed to be the kick-off to The Credentials' summer tour and the release of their new LP, but they ran into van trouble and didn't show up... this was my first time seeing The Book Slave since a couple of years ago, and I was amazed at how much more physical their stage performance has become. Lots of stomping and jumping around, which is pretty good considering they're just a two-piece. Their material is much stronger, too; I forget how I described them the last time, but their songs are built around churning, dissonant guitar parts -- like the parts of those Sonic Youth songs where they're just on cruise control-- with some twisted, heavier parts in between. They introduced one song as being about "younger kids going to shows and treating bands like heroes so then the bands think they can get away with acting like idiots and writing shitty songs", which I thought was ~~all the bands on the CT Sound message board~~ awesome, but I didn't think to look around for a set list to see what the name of the song was... the first song on Dead Uncles' set list was listed as "Surrender", but I think it was actually the song on their new split 7" with The Credentials, "Constant Dissapointment", which (if so) is on its way to becoming my favorite Dead Uncles song-- at least the way they play it live. They'd just gotten copies of the new split and were actually still assembling them (there's a paper obi-strip type thing that goes around the glue pocket, which is kinda cool) in the parking lot right before the show. This will be the last Dead Uncles show for a while, they've got better things to do than sit around waiting for your lame ass... I've posted a stream of the new song below, which is from the 86'd Records bandcamp page; that's the label's mispelling of "Constant", I tried to fix it but I couldn't.

The Book Slave -

"Surfing The Trough"

Constant Disappointment

The Mind Has No Time For Religion

2011-05-30T20:54:00.000-04:00

If Amphetamine Reptile did one thing good besides put out Halo of Flies records, it's bringing a bunch of Australian releases into the States: bands like Cosmic Psychos, Lubricated Goat, Feedtime, and then of course King Snake Roost. "Ground Into The Dirt" is waaay more metal-y than the one other King Snake Roost record that I've heard, "From Barbarism to Christian Manhood"; the earlier record is kinda slopping-around Feedtime/Killdozer type stuff, while the sound on "Ground Into The Dirt" is a lot crunchier and heavier. Recorded by Butch Vig, back when that still meant you'd be getting a pretty good record, before what's-their-names and that other thing he did. If you've never heard King Snake Roost before and want "Ground Into The Dirt" compared to something newer/more familiar before you dig in, imagine taking the beat from the Melvins' "Steve Instant Neuman" and putting Kepone riffs on top of it.

King Snake Roost -

"Cannonfodder"

"Stonge's Planet"

"Obscure Enough"

"Adrenitude"

Titus Andronicus Ain't Punk Rock, You Pussy

2011-05-29T23:14:00.013-04:00

Jay Hinman thinks that 8Tracks is going to replace radio forever; I think it's a less interesting LastFM that even fewer people will want to use. However, I've been admiring the podcasts that Paul Bruno puts together for a while now, which has me thinking about starting a podcast myself, if only as a way to share new tracks and the odd mp3 or two that I otherwise wouldn't feel like writing an entire blog post about. The whole process of recording my voice and talking between songs and making musical "beds" and editing the whole thing, however, is probably well beyond my capabilities. So, I've decided to give this new 8Tracks thing a shot and use it to put together a mix of my own. There won't be any of me talking here, just a bunch of songs in a row that you may or may not be able to skip thru (8Tracks appear to be nazis about that sort of thing). Everything I've picked is fairly standard rock-sounding stuff-- nothing too weird or noisy-- although I've intentionally tried to cross everyone up by putting together a batch of songs where no one person could be familiar with everything that's on it already, unless you're the kind of person who spends all day with your nose in blogs downloading everything.

If you want, you can get back at me by leaving some kind of low score in the comments (1/13, 2/13, whatever), and that'll teach me to never do another one of these things.

1st One Base on an Overthrow mix
(click on link for mix; they're still too stupid to know how to let you properly embed these things, sorry)

Track Listing:

Knaves Grave - I Don’t Wanna Be Yr AARP
Estrogen Highs - Kings Run Errands For Me
Diet Cola - Sick Modern
Outdoor Miners - Bent Brain
Cold Warps - Stupid Tattoos
Sir Henry Fiat’s Bastard - Senorita, I’m In Spain
Title Tracks - Turn Your Face
Mess Folk - Modern Man
Sandworms - Broomhead
Demon’s Claws - Hypnotize
Royal Headache - Eloise
Rot Shit - Hipster Grandma
The Men - Bataille

I'm Gonna Kill It Before It Kills Me

2011-05-28T20:43:00.001-04:00

This messed-up lookin' rig is a box set that Scat put together of the first three Prisonshake singles (even though not all of them came out on Scat), plus an extra 7" of unreleased tracks, "Loaded Deck", that was included just for the fuck of it. I've already posted most of the material on the first three singles, which leaves "Loaded Deck"-- self-described as "a bunch of weird stuff that wouldn't have fit on a regular Prisonshake record", although as it turns out most of the songs were later included in some variation or another on "I'm Really Fucked Now" and "A Girl Named Yes".

Of the four songs on "Loaded Deck", "I Hear Your Name" is the one that sounds the most like your average straight-ahead Prisonshake rocker, though it's actually an Offbeats cover. "Kill That Bottle" is a stab at falling-down country, and can easily be passed off as something that could've been included on the second disc of "All For Nothing, Nothing For All". On the flip, "Greasy Chicken" slides in your ear like an Alex Chilton solo track (in fact, you can practically sing "Boogie Shoes" from "Flies On Sherbert" right over it), while “Hanging Eyeball Noose Trigger” is Prisonshake as Sockeye and Pain Teens (i.e. “Here’s Where The Sockeye Comes In”).

Not everyone is gonna think this stuff is great, of course, but keep in mind that this was just an add-in to a box set that came with three better-than-great Prisonshake singles to begin with, plus the box set as a whole was yet another in a string of flipped-out early Prisonshake releases that proved them to be a band that was pretty much willing to try anything... sorta like pre-Homostupids in that sense (calm down, that's just a joke). By the way, the weird-sounding compression on “I Hear Your Name” is from the record, not my mp3, so go pick your nits elsewhere.

Prisonshake -

"I Hear Your Name"

"Kill That Bottle"

"Greasy Chicken"

"Hanging Eyeball Noose Trigger"

You Can't Replace The Things You Erase

2011-05-23T22:46:00.001-04:00

RIP The Fucking Discovery Zone. Fuck America 2011

Foreign Objects -

"A Kind of Life"

Dylan Bredeau -

"So We Beat On"

Curmudgeon -

"Shut Out"

I'm Left To My Own Devices

2011-05-21T12:28:00.002-04:00

Out of the million New Bomb Turks singles that I own, here's one of them. That's what I do here, keep giving you a bunch of scratchy New Bomb Turks mp3's that you probably already have on the "Pissing Out the Poison" CD anyway. Actually, the sleeve design for this one is pretty neat, including one of the coolest band photos ever. That guy (Jay Brown) took a whole ton of good NBT photos, all at the same place it seems. By the way, absolutely no one I knew was calling this "gunk punk" back then, you're not getting me to fall for that one.

New Bomb Turks -

"Polyester Thinking Cap"

"Got No Proof"

That's Not A Face That's A Stain

2011-05-20T20:56:00.001-04:00

White Drugs sent me a copy of their "Gold Magic" album about a year ago, though it didn't really sink in with me all that much. Luckily they also included a copy of their first CD, "Harlem", which I like a lot better. (They've also got a split 7" with H-O-F that sells on the AmRep web site for $20, which is pretty weird.) With a name like White Drugs and the fact that they're from Denton TX, I guess it'd be easy to expect this to fall within the trebly garage rock realm (see how that happens?), but cranked at their fullest-- like during the chorus for "Kleaning Kru"-- the guitar tone leans more towards what you'd find from The Men or on a Drunkdriver record. Here's my two favorite songs from the CD so you can figure it out for yourself.

White Drugs -

"Kleaning Kru"

"I Hate Your Face"

I've Seen Age Upon Your Skin

2011-05-19T19:08:00.001-04:00

"Mirror Blues", Died Pretty's second single, has considerably more added stomp than the other two Died Pretty records that I've posted already ("Free Dirt" and "Next To Nothing"). At over ten minutes long they had to split it into halves to make it fit over both sides of a 7", though I believe there was a 12" version also. This is what you were doing if you were me back then, still listening to hardcore but moving further and further out, sticking your nose in Forced Exposure and Conflict a lot while soaking up what was coming out of Homestead and Australia as much as possible. Anyway, the middle part gets a bit fluffy as it goes on, but then it comes right back for the coda at the end.

Died Pretty -

"Mirror Blues I"

"Mirror Blues II"

I've Got A Wallet On My Ass With A Rock 'n' Roll License

2011-05-15T20:49:00.004-04:00

My way around Milford is for shit-- I mean, I've been there a bunch of times before so I should know my way by now, but the town's just so fucked up-- so I left extra early on Saturday, figuring that I was bound to get lost on my way to the show. I actually didn't get lost (well, not really), but it's a good thing that I got to the club early anyway, because Estrogen Highs were made to go on at 9:00, even though there was only Cheap Time playing between them and the headliners Guitar Wolf, and Guitar Wolf didn't actually hit the stage until a quarter to midnight. I don't know if that had anything to do with Estrogen Highs playing more subdued, but they seemed to be reigning in their instincts a bit, like not freaking out during songs as much. It was almost like one of those "sober Replacements" shows that I keep hearing about. They were still really good, though-- "The Supposing View" has become a cracking good song live, even beyond what it is on the record-- plus they had copies of their brand-new 7" on Southpaw, which is four songs that were supposed to be on the "Sods and Odds" tape on Herp-a-Derp but I guess the guy fell down or something.

Cheap Time's 20-minute set was pretty decent, too, although the 40-minute set they played right after it wasn't (they played too fucking long, that's the joke there, son). I kinda had enough of Cheap Time a couple years ago and wasn't expecting much from them this time around-- which in these modern times means I was texting people things like "I think this next band is going to suck an egg" before they went on-- but they were actually just as rippin' "punk" as when I saw them in the Whitney House basement back in 2008. I was also pretty stoked to see that they had copies of the Scion split with Bad Sports with them, since the Bad Sports song was one of my favorite songs from all of last year. They also made their own hand-stamped-looking alternate sleeve to go with it, too, possibly to offset the fact that they're charging people 6 bucks for a single that they no doubt got by the boxload from Scion for free. At least it keeps the Scion logo out of your face every time you pull the record out (although the label still has "Scion is a marque of Toyota Motor Sales and Scion and the Scion logo are trademarks of the Toyota Motor Company" written all over it), which will go towards helping you forget that you actually own a punk record made by an auto company whose cars all look like a box of farts.

After seeing Guitar Wolf for the first time, I think all bands should do every single one of these: A) Have a ridiculously dinky fog machine that makes a ridiculously dinky amount of fog B) Stand in one spot and give everyone the devil's horns for about a minute before playing anything C) Slug down a can of beer in one chug and throw the can out into the crowd D) have "ROCK AND ROLL" spelled out on the band of your underwear (okay, maybe it was a belt, what difference does it make) E) Put tape on the back of your guitar neck so that you can remember all five of the chords that make up your set list F) Rock the fuck out, regardless. How much fun would that be? For about a week, at least.

Guitar Wolf -

"Jet Generation"

"Kaminari One"

Cheap Time -

"Proper Introductions (Running Nowhere)"

Estrogen Highs -

"For All I Know"

Be Quiet Or Be Killed

2011-05-14T15:31:00.002-04:00

Some photos of Iron Hand at Popeye's last night. The new Iron Hand "Liquid Assets" 7" on Safety Meeting isn't officially out yet, but the band had copies with them last night. Be sure to pick it up when you get the chance.

Here's a nasty Screamers cover, "122 Hours of Fear", from the "Liquid Assets" EP (my vinyl rip).

Waiting For The Lightning To Strike

2011-05-14T12:20:00.001-04:00

A split 7" of two bands covering each other's songs: That Petrol Emotion (who I never really dug but are OK here) cover the Membranes' one big "hit", while the Membranes pull out a lengthy reworking of That Petrol Emotion's "Big Decision", which is a nice enough turn, I guess, even if it never really goes anywhere... makes me wonder, when someone asks you to contribute a cover song for a measly 7", who thinks sending in something 8 minutes long is a really good idea?... almost makes me wanna post "Mirror Blues" next, just for laughs.

That Petrol Emotion -

"Everybody's Goin' Triple Bad Acid, Yeah!"

Membranes -

"Big Decision (Slight Return)"

I've Got Questions For You

2011-05-11T20:25:00.002-04:00

This is something that I picked up on one of my trips to In Your Ear, mostly because of the cool packaging: a 7" wrapped in aluminum foil with two obi strips, sealed inside a zip-loc bag. It certainly wasn't because I knew any of the bands on the compilation, of which the only one I'd already heard before was Fat Day, and they kinda suck. It turns out that if you're into outsider rock at all then the "Kakuhanki" compilation is pretty solid all the way through-- the Cosmic Babylon track almost sounds like a JSBX record played at warp speed, right down to the Russell Simins drum beat and the howling-Elvis spoken word intro, and Wagplaty's "Kazari" is sorta Brainbombs-ish. Maybe the best part is that you have to take the foil off just like you're opening up a thing of Jiffy Pop in order to get the record out, and then besides that, they trimmed the paper inner sleeve by hand so that the end result would be suitably round. The whole thing's pretty neat, even if the pressing is for shit.

Fat Day (US) -

"Airways Clear"

"Mow (Radio Edit)"

Cosmic Babylon (JPN) -

"Olo"

Bilge Pump (UK) -

"I've Got Questions for You"

Velocityut (JPN) -

"C2 Acute"

"C3 Newer"

Wagplaty (JPN) -

"Kazari"

"Taikyoku"

Strike Where None Resist

2011-05-08T18:38:00.002-04:00

Friday's show at the Whitney House started on time, which caught me by surprise because when I got there at my usual 8:30, Oiltanker were already playing (they were halfway through "Consume and Grow" as I entered the basement, if my memory is any good). Late arrival or not, this was probably the best I've ever heard Oiltanker play. I seriously don't think I could name another band that can match Oiltanker for both skill and power; their songs are full of bottom-heavy riffs that sound great when played well, and at full-throttle they're like "Get It Away" SSD at d-beat speed. New LP is at the pressing plant now, I think, so keep an eye out for it... Fuckheads (from Boston) were flat-out awesome. If you want hardcore with noise, then these guys are fuckin' noise-- the singer is totally unintelligble and screeches his lungs out, and the guitar player sounds like he's making a pile of broken glass. They had two tapes with them (a demo from 2010 and another one from barely a month ago), plus they have a 7" coming out soon, and you should buy all of it. They ripped through their set and then walked off, without even saying a word. Friggin' great.

Oiltanker -

"The Circle Complete"

Fuckheads -

"Sit Around"

"Ignorance"

We'll Get Through Somehow

2011-05-07T13:02:00.005-04:00

I once bought a White 7" from a guy, and when it came in the mail it was all scratched up as if someone had dragged a wire brush across it... which is sorta funny, because then there's this other White record-- the one I'm posting now-- which is an unlabeled 7" inside a clear plastic sleeve, and they stuck a chunk of sandpaper inside each one so it's supposed to get all scratched up. I put a small amount of effort into cleaning up the pops and crackles, although I'll warn you that it's the a-side ("It's my fault you're so boring... I should probably kill you") that took the worst of it. The b-side seems to have come out okay. Between the sandpaper idea and the Warren Zevon cover, this whole thing seems pretty brilliant. I mean, I'm seriously busting a gut over here right now.

White -

"Life on the Ranch of Elizabeth Clare Prophet (Isn't All It's Cracked Up to Be)"

"Play It All Night Long"
(Warren Zevon cover)

I've Got A Problem With The Way You Talk

2011-05-05T20:46:00.000-04:00

Yet another really interesting bill at Popeye's, with the sort of bands you won't usually find anywhere else... the set-up of the room had been switched around so that the bands were playing against the back wall (which is like sheetrock or fabric or something) instead of the concrete wall in the front. It may have even helped the sound out a bit, but I forgot to notice... Jacques Le Coque are a relatively new band from Stamford, and their approach seems to be from the Ty Segall/Moonhearts side of things, which is a good start I guess. They've got the banners but not the ammo, and as I was standing there watching them on Sunday, nothing really jumped out at me in a "wow, that was really neat what they just did" sort of way. I like at least one of the songs that they've posted on their Facebook, so maybe it'll only be a matter of time; until then, I'll just keep them filed under Warrant for now... Tyler Jon Tyler's set was totally enjoyable, which I'll admit was above what I was expecting. Their records verge on skewed indie pop-- at times sounding like Kate Eldridge fronting Unrest or some other Teenbeat band-- but live their drummer and bass player attacked their parts in an almost math-y way, which gave the songs a little extra kick. I don't remember if the other two guys talked at all, but Rebecca kept making self-conscious jokes throughout the set, which was kinda cool and disarming. They've already posted a video from their set on their web site, which you can check out below (the guy with the camera was right next to my elbow)... Medication's set was short, only about six or seven songs, but 7 songs from Medication is still better than 20 songs from any other band. Mikey writes songs that are amazingly efficient, made up of a few simple parts that sink in quickly, and it's hard not to be awed by how good they are. This also might've been my favorite Medication set out of all the ones I've seen, though I'm not sure why-- maybe because it seemed more casual than all the others, who knows.

Tyler Jon Tyler -

"Paul"

Jacques Le Coque -

"Ain't No Fun"

Medication -

"Farewell Letter"

Tyler Jon Tyler: "Here’s a video of us from Popeye’s Garage, playing a new song
called 'Pacific Daylight Time.' It’s about the SF Giants winning the World Series."

Giving Drugs To Little Kids

2011-04-30T23:09:00.002-04:00

Joe Stumble used to have this one up on Last Days of Man on Earth, but it's gone now, so I figured I'd step in. Plus Joe's living in New Zealand now or somewhere far enough away where he can't punch me... even though this may or may not be a real copy of the first Drunks With Guns 7" (I think it's the bootleg version that came out a couple of years later), it still goes that each Drunks With Guns single that came out between '85-'89 was by itself the greatest non-hardcore 7" of that half-decade, and if that doesn't make any sense the way I wrote it then you're all a bunch of friggin' dorks... I doubt that I'll be keeping this one up for long, so grab while the grabbing's good.

Drunks With Guns -

It's Either That Or They Hit You

2011-04-29T17:24:00.003-04:00

When I first started buying actual punk records around '84 or so, instead of the usual chain-store shit, there was a lot of trial and error involved. One of the things that I figured out early on, thanks to Lyres "On Fyre" and the first few Mission of Burma records, was that Ace of Hearts had an asthetic that I really liked, and so from then on I latched onto pretty much anything I could find that had an Ace of Hearts logo on it. This was back when you could still find stuff like "Trem Two" and "Academy Fight Song" fairly reasonably, besides being able to buy all the copies you could want of "Signals Calls and Marches" at the original $6.98 list price or whatever it was.

One of the first Ace of Hearts singles that I bought was The Neighborhoods. The copy I found at Brass City Records came without the sleeve (the two pictures you see here are from a Google image search), and for the longest time I didn't even know there was a sleeve, so I never knew that they'd snuck a nekkid lady on the front, or that the back looked totally goofy. I still don't think much of "Prettiest Girl", though I'm including it here anyway. "No Place Like Home" has a lot more zip to it, so I liked it a lot more, even throwing it onto a mix tape that I made for Bill Callahan once (this would've been back in '85), probably because we were both acting ticked off about still living at home with our parents or something with a really deep meaning like that.

The Neighborhoods -

"No Place Like Home"

"Prettiest Girl"

Don't Need But A Little

2011-04-27T22:43:00.001-04:00

I'm pretty sure the main reason why I got this Doo Rag single in the first place was because Jay Hinman used to talk them up big in Superdope-- I think there was even a photo of them on the cover once, with the big plastic spiral tube that Bob Log used to sing through... a great single, though I didn't bother hunting down any other Doo Rag stuff afterwards, which means I'm not very smart sometimes. When I listen to "Grease & All", I can't imagine how you would even begin to play like that (yes, that's a locked groove at the end of it). I wasn't born with the best vocabulary for describing this kind of scratchy blues stuff, but safe to say if you likes your Feedtime and your Bassholes and your Get Haunted and so forth, you'll probably like this. Or "Toys in the Attic" or old AC/DC.

Doo Rag -

"Hussy Bowler"

"Grease & All"

Ever Think You're Smart Then Find Out You Aren't

2011-04-25T21:16:00.008-04:00

Popeye's Garage has been back up and running for about a month now, with shows scheduled out into July so far, which is pretty great. Friday's show started off with a couple of harsh noise sets, including Bella Reese (Chris Point), which were most definitely head-cloggers. Obviously my exposure to this stuff has been somewhat limited, but I certainly was digging what I heard. People were head-banging, and it actually seemed appropriate. You could've probably head-banged to Queening's set, too-- there's a part at the end of "Strays" that builds up until it gets really frenzied, with the drummer pummeling out all sorts of patterns and the guitar player's hand sliding up and down the fretboard, and it was seriously powerful. Tia has this way of playing guitar that seems to rely heavily on downstrokes, and her guitar ended up sounding almost exactly like a bass, even though I found out later that it wasn't intentional and it was maybe just a happy accident of the room's acoustics. Most two-piece bands that I've been seeing lately tend to play really distorted and over the top, but Queening tend to pick their spots a bit more carefully and in the end they were more intense than other bands that play three times as loud. The drummer, Jon, has a very basic set-up without any cymbals, just a high-hat and kick drum with a couple of toms and some kind of really deep snare which practically sounded like a tom. I think if I had to pick a comparison for Queening it would probably be something like The Warmers but more scrappy, or better yet The Yips, though even that's probably not accurate. Anyway, they released a brand-new single last weekend (I guess they'd just finished assembling them the night before the Popeye's show), plus they're on tour right now and they're definitely worth your time if you get a chance to check 'em out.

After Queening played, Stefan sat down and played a solo set of mostly Estrogen Highs songs plus a couple of covers, with Medication's "Don't Die" being one of them. Having the Estrogen Highs songs laid bare like that really brought out the riffs in the songs-- I'd never paid attention to how intricate the guitar part is to "I Remember Everything", for instance, and it transformed one of the riffs to "Kaleidoscope" into something more like a Mark Sultan riff (like "Waddlin' Around" or "Shake Real Low" perhaps). There was also one new song, "The World Is Flat", which so far has no real surprises. It's being said that the next Estrogen Highs LP is coming out on Trouble In Mind (back-up: was mentioned by Lisa and Bill in a blog interview earlier this month)...

Queening -

"Dry Spell"

Keeping The Kitchen Neat

2011-04-23T12:50:00.005-04:00

"Gerrymander Bob combines great casual harmonies, beer-swillin' fuzz guitar, beautifully rough production, occasional distorto violin, and melody-- like the hummable kind-- ending up somwhat reminiscent of Camper Van Beethoven (if they were great)." --r. griffin's somewhat over-the-top review in Seven #2

There weren't a lot of indie rock singles coming out of CT in the late '80s, and many of the ones that did come out have been forgotten-- deservedly so in most cases. The first Gerrymander Bob 7" was one of the few good ones. It's definitely one my favorite CT indie rock singles from that period, meaning the five or six years that led up to the whole Nirvana/Sub Pop "breakout" in '91 or '92 or whenever it was, back when "indie rock" was still pretty underground in this part of the country and even if you were a really lame band like Miracle Legion or Dumptruck the best you could hope for was to be listed in CMJ and get played on college radio every once in a while.

This single has also been an experiment in just how far I'll go to make a post, since every one of the four copies that I own skips like hell. When I first started making a rip of this 7" for the blog about three years ago and had it skip, I thought "no big deal", and just went to Brass City Records to get another one. They still had the same copy from 1989 that I had scrawled "Local -- Nice Single" on the front before tacking it up on the wall (back in the '80s I used to handwrite reviews in marker pen onto the shrinkwrap of some of the records, for my own amusement), which obviously encouraged no one to buy it. But that copy skipped too, as did the next two copies I found, which by now had me thinking "fuck it, I guess every goddamn one of these is messed up." I tried a bunch of different things-- new needle, extra cleaning, different tracking weights and speeds-- but nothing I did ever got any of them to play all the way through.

For now I've gotten bored with sitting on this record for so long, so here's three of the four songs, even though each track has at least one skip in it. That should be enough to help you figure out that this is a pretty decent single, though. There's a minor funk quotient involved and some oversized bits of guitar wankery here and there, but I'm still calling this the greatest single of its kind to ever come out of that particular era of Connecticut. I realize that "Really Don't Mind" is listed on the sleeve as "Don't Mind", but the label shows it as "Really Don't Mind" plus that's how the chorus actually goes, so that's what I'm sticking with. As for the other two songs, "Keep Me Down" has a nifty hook and sounds to me now like Velvet Crush mixed with (aha!) a little bit of Prisonshake, even though it sorta pre-dates either of those bands. "Dirty Feet" is kind of a weird rocked-out howler and is the one that has the violin on it. It also sounds like it was mastered wrong.

After this single the band moved to Philadelphia or New Jersey somewhere, released another 7" that was a half-step down from the first one but still pretty good, and then a CD on Shimmy-Disc of all places-- which was in more of a Those Melvins/Big Train direction-- and that was it as far as I know.

Gerrymander Bob -

"Really Don't Mind"

"Keep Me Down"

"Dirty Feet"

Here's To The Future We're Pissing Away

2011-04-19T22:40:00.011-04:00

Screw Record Store Day, seriously. At least, screw the "if someone else wants it, then I want it too" mentality that has people lining up outside record stores hours before they open, then going onto eBay before noon to bid $40 on the already-overpriced $8 single that they didn't get. Screw the major labels trying to turn their moldy $3 used bin-cloggers into re-pressed "collectibles"-- I mean, aren't these the same idiots who were trying to bury the mom-and-pop stores and telling us all along that vinyl wasn't worth shit anymore? And now here they are, trying to leech off what everyone else has already accomplished by going ahead without them.

Not that I didn't enjoy Record Store Day anyway, even if I took my time getting down to Redscroll at around 8pm... meaning all the high-ranking Record Store Day "exclusives" were long gone already, leaving nothing but a few random clunkers. I flipped through the box of RSD leftovers anyway, just for laughs, and I may have even visibly flinched when I almost touched an Eric Clapton record by accident. In the end, the only sort-of RSD record that I ended up buying was an extra copy of the new Iron Hand 7", which had been given a special hand-numbered sleeve (limited to 35 - I skimmed through all of them and pulled out #27 (pop punk)) just for Record Store Day, which also happened to be the same day as the Iron Hand record release show that Redscroll was sponsoring later that night.

photo swiped from Redscroll's blog
Waiting for the Iron Hand/Confines/Gowl show to start (Vaccine were also on the bill but had to drop out when their drummer got an infected leg or something) gave me some extended time to browse through Redscroll's used bins, especially the ones in the neglected back room where they happened to have every AC/DC LP up through "Flick of The Switch" for maybe three dollars each, including "Powerage" and "If You Want Blood". Now that's a fucking GREAT RECORD STORE! Redscroll improved the size of their used selection recently, so now they're definitely worth the drive from out-of-state or somewhere, though the store is still only about 4 yrs old so don't go there expecting to find any Huns singles or anything. What you will find is that they still don't sell much garage stuff (though that's slowly changing), so when they do get a used copy of something from X! or Die Stasi, they usually put it out for only a couple of bucks. The extra time I've spent in Redscroll and Brass City Records over the past two weeks has been worth it in more ways than I could've figured; as a for instance, now I know someone's been going to every store in CT and turning in all their used Daybed records.

I've seen Gowl a couple of times this year. Trying to figure out what Gowl are doing is funny, because they seem like straight-up grind with cookie monster vocals most of the time, but then they have these Melvins-like sludge-metal parts, and there's even a song midway through their split tape w/Stone Titan where they sound like fuckin' Montrose. Live, they're a bit different-- the guitar player holds back a lot, so the bass almost becomes the lead instrument, which is sorta cool... Confines is another band that I've been waiting to see for a while now, or ever since I first heard their demo, which was probably my favorite HC demo of 2009. They weren't quite as out-of-control as I had figured based on that whole made-up "mysterious guy hardcore" thing (which means what, they put a black and white picture of a house on the front of their demo?), but they still delivered. Their songs totally rip, but they still take the time to add some crunchy hard rock riffs-- not like metal or even mosh parts necessarily, but parts where they drop into a rock beat while still keeping the tempo up. The singer was flat-out nuts most of the time-- I kinda wish more people had taken his lead and had done a bit more moving around, just not me, I'd rather not get stepped on.

Iron Hand's set was vicious, probably the hardest set I've ever seen them play. Usually I mostly watch Ross' drumming whenever I see Iron Hand play, but this time it was different, as I don't think I've ever seen Brian sing as good as he did on Saturday. I still can't always pick up on what song they're playing because it's mostly just one big twin-engine roar that goes right over my head, but now that their record's out I'm getting better at it. I think "Phobia" is my favorite song on the EP, but they've put up the title track ("Usurper Divine") as a free dowload on their Bandcamp page, so that's the route that I'm going to take here. There's another Iron Hand song-- from their upcoming "Liquid Assets" 7" on Safety Meeting-- that you can grab for free also, providing that you can get your hands on the Safety Meeting 2011 sampler which was part of the Record Store Day swag that Redscroll was giving away. How 'bout that, some real Record Store Day goodness.

Confines -

"Phoning It In"

Usurper Divine EP by Iron Hand

My Head Is Hard As A Rock

2011-04-16T11:16:00.000-04:00

I thought about posting "Smash Hits!" right now, but full-length LPs can be a bitch to rip, so I went looking through my boxes for the Teengenerate 7"-ers instead. As a single,"Sex Cow"/"Bad Boy" maybe isn't totally essential to own, since both songs are on "Smash Hits!" anyway-- which Estrus just reissued literally like a couple of weeks ago-- but all the songs on those early Teengenerate 7"-ers were real game-changers for me as far as what a truly kick-ass punk record could sound like. Like Feedtime a decade earlier, Teengenerate were one of those bands that put a different idea in my head about what sounded cool to me and what sort of stuff I should start tracking down. Or maybe I've just been sheltered all my life, who knows. The guitar solo on "Bad Boy" is one of the greatest fucked-up things ever, by the way.

Teengenerate -

"Sex Cow"

"Bad Boy"

It Makes No Sense For Me To Even Try

2011-04-15T13:57:00.000-04:00

Chinese Millionaires were one of my favorite bands of the whole mid-to-late '90s "retro punk" phase, though this single's been sitting in front of me for a week now and I'm really at a loss to explain why I used to like it so much... not that I still don't think it's a great single, just that I've gotten to the point where I'm starting to run out of adjectives for this type of stuff that aren't some variation of "rok" or "rock n roll" or "rawk"... must've lost my focus along the way, I guess. I suppose this means 15 years from now I'll be wondering what I ever saw in that Brain F≠ single... anyway, some great dinged-up rock n roll here ("rawk") with crappy lyrics: "I'm your Automatic Boy/And everything you love I will destroy/Yeah yeah yeah", which you can either look at as being generic or being true to the form (fake-KBD lyrics aren't supposed to be smart, right?). Like R. Griffin once wrote, "Buy a Crime bootleg, it might cost a bit more but it's the real thing"... except then you'd miss out on the shitty Rip Off Records packaging and the smart remarks on the shiny-side label... man, I wish all my records were this cool.

Chinese Millionaires -

"Heart on a Chain"

Right Now I'm Going Backwards

2011-04-12T19:08:00.002-04:00

Seeing as I just posted a Gaunt record the other day, I figured why not post another one. This was a bonus single that came with an issue of the '90s zine Speed Kills, a zine of impressive scope if only middling quality. Not that this 7" is middling, though: shit's punk. I mean, this thing's about as blown-out as anything Rip Off ever released.

This one's for all the jokers who think stuff like Best Coast is "lo-fi".

Gaunt -

"Solution"

"Black Cat"

I'm Standing Too Close To The Poison

2011-04-10T17:35:00.001-04:00

Maybe they weren't the tightest-sounding punk band ever or their songs have the best hooks, but it was hard not to like Gaunt, since they sounded like a bunch of average guys who just decided to pick up some instruments one day and bash out a few songs so that Jerry Wick (god bless him) could rail against everyday shit. I wasn't really the biggest Gaunt fan right off the bat because the first couple of records I heard of theirs were sorta wimpy, like the split with New Bomb Turks. This 10" is pretty good, though. The songs remind me a lot of Starvation Army, and not just because there's a song called "Salvation Army", about all the trendy rich kids picking the thrift stores clean ("They're taking all the good shit from the Salvation Army and making my life a living hell... I'm down to my last pair of jeans... I'm down to my last pair of socks"). I'm guessing if "Silly Watches" were written today it would be about pizza or something.

Gaunt -

"Silly Watches"

"USA"

"Jim Motherfucker"

There's No Danger If You Do It Right

2011-04-10T08:10:00.000-04:00

This is a flexi that came with the fourth issue of Take It! magazine, but I never got a copy of the magazine, I just found the flexi sitting off by itself one day at Brass City Records. It's not all that rare or anything-- in fact, you can still buy copies of all five issues of Take It! (takeitmagazine.com), though they're $17 each. Despite some sonic issues (this is a 30-yr-old flexidisc, after all) this is fairly wonderful... which you can find out for yourself by listening right now.

The Mutants -

"Message to The World"

Half Japanese -

"Heart"

"No Danger"

I'm Glad I'm Not Your Friend

2011-04-09T19:25:00.003-04:00

I wrote a list of my ten favorite '90s Connecticut 7"-ers for one of my zines once, only the issue never came out and then I lost all of the stuff for it (this was ten or eleven years ago so it's no big deal). China Pig's "Aurel" 7-inch was on the list, though mostly for the b-side, "Blanche Mafelda", which is probably the best example ever of how really good China Pig were at alternating between balls-crunchy rocking and somewhat dissonant droning. One of the amazing things about the b-side is how the drums sound appropriately dulled, as if the drum kit was underneath the studio floor and the drummer was pounding for his life to get out.

This 7" made up the other half of the M.U.D.D. colored-vinyl double-pack ("dos plattos") along with the Creature Did 7" that I just posted a few days ago. Both 7"-ers have run-off groove etchings on each side, and one of the four etchings-- on the b-side of the China Pig 7"-- is "Kill 'em all and let Groundwork sort it out". Maybe somebody else besides me will think that's funny.

China Pig -

"Aurel"

"Blanche Mafelda"

Don't Know What It Is But I'll Keep It Anyway

2011-04-05T21:38:00.003-04:00

"Flirtatious Negative Headjive" was the second Creature Did 7" but the third one I bought, since I bought them out of order. It ended up being my favorite out of all of them, though not everyone had the same opinion, I guess. When I bought this at a show in Danbury, Kevin told me later that day in an interview that not everyone liked this 7" as much as the other two ("We learned afterwards that you can't put any throwaway songs on the b-side of your record because people will take them seriously no matter what"). There's actually an almost-funny story about that show: Chixdiggit wasn't on the bill-- the show was The Muffs, Uncle Joe's Big Ol' Driver (anyone remember them?) and Creature Did-- but they were touring with UJBOD, so in-between bands they jumped up on stage, played a few songs, and then quickly jumped off. I don't know this firsthand, because I was outside the club at the time, but that's what I was told later at least.

The third Creature Did single might've represented the band's sound the best, but the first two were recorded at Trod Nossel-- where a lot of the tracks on Chilton's "Dusted In Memphis" were recorded, fuck yeah-- which is pretty good all by itself. I think what makes this one my favorite is that every song manages to hit on something wicked in one way or another, plus they're all a bit different from each other. The title track is one of the usual top-level Creature Did power-rock efforts; I think Kevin's vocals would work better here if they sounded a bit more unhinged, but otherwise it's a song that always left blisters when they played it live. "This Is All" features some nifty harmonica playing-- no, really-- from Joe Roberto (of G'Nu Fuz), and "Swimming Through Stucco" (one of the throwaways?) is about as close as Creature Did ever came to a pop song built upon a big hook. "Wrong Idea" goes completely in the opposite direction: recorded live, it starts out like a big thrashy mess, but then the breakdown/mosh part kicks in and drops a neat groove in the middle of everything. Though I normally like to leave one or two songs off when I post an EP, in this case I couldn't make up my mind on which songs to leave out so I figured fuckit, I'll post them all.

Somewhere along the way M.U.D.D. Industries paired together this single plus China Pig's "Aurel" single (MUDD #5 and #6) as a limited-edition double pack on splattered green and blue vinyl. I believe only 50 of these double packs were made, and I own two of them. One of the sets I have came with two copies of "Flirtatious Negative Headjive" by mistake, so all told I actually have four copies of the same EP. Yeah, pot is lame.

Creature Did -

"Flirtatious Negative Headjive"

"This Is All"

"Swimming Through Stucco"

"Wrong Idea"