Most Of The Time I'm Not Much Fun, The Rest Of The Time I'm Not Any Fun At All

The first Flying Nun record that I ever bought new was the Jean Paul Sartre Experience "I Like Rain" 7", which I dug a whole lot, even though it was a bit more delicate than what I was usually listening to at the time. Besides, it had a cool silkscreened cover - I think mine was orange. Eventually I got rid of it (probably to make room for another dumb Sebadoh 7"), although at some point further along I picked up the first JPSE 12", which actually came out before the "I Like Rain" 7-inch, so I kinda bought them backwards I guess (plus, I was kidding, I didn't actually collect Sebadoh 7-inchers). This one's been most helpfully broken up into a "rock music" side and a "quiet" side, no doubt aimed towards assisting "rock" dummies like me in figuring out which side to play first, although the quiet side is neat as well and songs like "Own Two Feet" and "Walking Wild" are obvious precursors to the likes of Dick Diver, Salad Boys, Lower Plenty, Bitch Prefect, Twerps, etc. Okay, maybe it's not so obvious.


Jean Paul Sartre Experience -

"Flex"

"Fish In The Sea"

"Loving Grapevine"

Watch Who You're Calling Space Garbage, Meteor Mouth

I didn't know "Lolita Nation" was being re-issued, like, next week, which shows me for not paying attention to "Black Friday"/"Record Store Day" re-issue labels and their ilk, I guess. Hence, my incentive to pull this out now and give it a listen. Stuff like this was way too college rock for me back when it first came out, but like John Brannon says, "Maybe I was too hardcore at the time to like some shit, but I can appreciate that shit retroactively." Definitely a weird pop album from one of the weirdest "pop" bands -- a bit too precious and indulgent at times, at other times like Alex Chilton singing "Sgt. Pepper's" after Doug Gillard and Matthew Sweet re-wrote all the songs. If that sounds like a good idea to you, then no doubt you should pick up the re-issue (just google "Black Friday Record Store Day Labels", I'm sure the list won't be too long).

Game Theory -

"Kenneth -- What's The Frequency?"/"Not Because You Can"

"Go Ahead, You're Dying To"/"Dripping With Looks"

"Chardonnay"

"Last Day That We're Young"

"The Waist and The Knees"

I Ain't In A Slump, I Just Ain't Hitting

Of all the Boston Crew-type HC bands that went metal back in the '80s (which was pretty much all of 'em), I think that Jerry's Kids ended up making the best "post-XClaim!-era" record with "Kill Kill Kill", which in some ways has a sound that isn't all that separated from "Is This My World?" --- sure, some of the lyrics are dumber, and there's a bigger "metal" sound to the drums and guitars, but the songwriting in general tends to fall back onto straight hardcore thrash and a few of the songs on "Kill Kill Kill" wouldn't have sounded at all out of place if they'd been recorded back when "Is This My World"?" was being made. The F.U.'s, on the other hand, not only changed their name (to Straw Dogs) but changed their sound entirely, and "We Are Not Amused" is pretty much a straight-up commercial metal/hard rock record with barely a trace of punk to be found at all, other than Sox' vocals of course. It's not a great record all the way through -- the quality level really drops off after the top four or five songs -- but the guitars pack way more of a punch than any of the rock slough released by SSD or DYS (for instance), and it also has some of the best drumming I've ever heard on a hard rock record. I say that there's not much punk involved, but I suppose it takes a punk to take pot shots at all the phony "sign of the devil" Mötley Crüe crap and hit the target as dead-on as "Carnival In Hell" does. I'm not exactly sure what the slags against John Sex Bomb and the Anthrax Club on the thank you list/lyric sheet are all about, but I'm guessing it probably has something to do with a show that the F.U.'s tried to play at the old Stamford Anthrax years ago. At least, I think I read about it in a book somewhere.

Straw Dogs -

"Carnival In Hell"

"The Hunger"

"In Deep"

"Trigger Finger"

I Don't Know Right From Wrong

I bought this as a present to myself for $2 because it's Peter Dayton, frontman for Boston monsters La Peste, being helped out by members of the Cars (Ric Ocasek, Elliot Easton and Greg Hawkes); I mean, there's no way that could not be great, right? If you've heard the studio tracks at the end of the La Peste collection that Matador put out a couple of decades ago (a couple of which Greg Hawkes also played on, if I remember correctly) then you kinda already know what to expect from this. If you haven't, then nod your head and just go with it. La Peste's "Skin Tight" gets re-made as a new-wave power-pop song and is the top of the class here; it probably would've made for a nifty KBD-styled 7" 45 had it been released with "Perfect Wave" -- somewhat of a surf instrumental -- on the flip. The other two songs on here aren't anything special, although the extra-flabby ballad "Stuck on The Same Refrain" is probably what set this 12" up as probably nothing more than a resume for a record deal. If you don't own any La Peste stuff then try to track down the "Better Off Dead" single, it was recently re-issued twice and thus is fairly easy to buy online.

Peter Dayton -

"Skintite"

"Perfect Wave"

If You're Gonna Be An Artist You Gotta Draw The Line Somewhere

One of the things that I find amusing about the legacy of Big Dipper is that they're now being portrayed -- or, at least, back when all the reissues were coming out -- as this sort of whimsical underground band that no one had ever heard of, when in fact they were a favorite band of a lot of people back in the '80s, myself included. I guess "unknown band" these days (post-internet) is shorthand for "the college sophomore intern at PopMatters never heard of them", which -- in this case -- makes me wonder what those people would think if they ever somehow stumbled upon an Embarrassment record. "Wait, there's a band that's even older than Big Dipper, with some of the same songs and even one of the same guys in it? That's it, I quit." Don't even think about the Volcano Suns, jesus.

I'm pretty sure that I saw Big Dipper at least a couple of times while they were still around, although the only time that I remember was at TT's in Boston, where Peter Prescott was in the audience, standing in the back of the room and glaring towards the stage with a "you stole my band" look on his face. Actually, Peter was there, but I could just be making the 'glaring' part up. Anyway, enough of me talking -- do you want to hear some songs from Big Dipper's third record, "Craps"? It's a fairly excellent album, if I say so myself. I think it was maybe the next one that was kind of bad.


Big Dipper -

"Ron Klaus Wrecked His House"

"The Insane Girl"

"Stardom Because"

"Hey! Mr. Lincoln"

"The Bells of Love"

(files have now been disabled)

When Everything Is Coming Your Way It Means You're In The Wrong Lane

I was pretty psyched to find this at Deep Thoughts (record store in Cambridge) the other weekend -- "Early Singles", a collection of Bimbo Shrineheads (aka Shrinnirs) stuff that I'd otherwise hadn't heard, for the most part, or even had any idea that it had existed. The package is pretty funky -- an LP jacket spray-painted black so heavily that it became soggy and warped, a tape reel box affixed to the front with a booklet and some papers inside, and almost no mention of the band name anywhere -- so it's no wonder that most people wouldn't know what this was, even if they saw it in a store. For a near-20-track LP, pretty much everything on here is fairly prime avant-rock; now that I'm finally getting the chance to hear all of this stuff, I'm realizing that this is a band that carried a really high on-base percentage, for sure. Figures that I had to go record shopping in Massachusetts to find out about a Connecticut band.


Bimbo Shrineheads -

"Implosion"

"Slabs"

"How To Get Fucked Up The Ass With a Flag and Smile and Be Really Happy and Grateful"

"Separating Your Face From My Windshield"

The Thing I Hate Most About Writing Is The Paperwork

Out now - Incremental Decrepitude #4

32 quarter-sized pages of blatherings, featuring a discussion with Bonus McGinty on
some heavy matters related to all-time personal faves Dredd Foole and The Din / Volcano
Suns. Edition of ten (10) copies printed; if I thought you might be interested and
I had your current address, a copy is already in the mail on its way to you. No
further copies are available.

The Future Ain't What It Used To Be

This was the next single that The New Christs put out after the "Born Out of Time"/"No Next Time" 7-inch, and while it doesn't live up to the explosion that was the previous single -- as if anything could, since "Born Out of Time" is practically my favorite Aussie 7" of all time -- it still lays quite a bit of rubber in its own right. As before, the b-side rocks harder than the a-side, which adds some handclaps or exaggerated snare hits into the mix, like this was a Soul Asylum record or something.

The New Christs -

"The Black Hole"

"Addiction"

I Lost My Mood Ring And I'm Not Sure How I Feel About It

One of the first indie records I ever bought was the Lyres "On Fyre" -- I heard "I Want To Help You Ann" somewhere, and the riff was so great that I went out and tracked the album down, although they'd shortened the name to just "Help You Ann" on the LP; something to do with the label thinking it was more accessible that way or something. Anyway, it turned out that the two tracks that I liked best on "On Fyre" ("Don't Give It Up Now" and "Help You Ann") both skipped on the crummy bought-from-Two-Guys record player that I had at the time (ca. '84), which sorta sunk the whole record for me because those were about the only tracks on the album that I really liked, the Pete Best and (two) Kinks covers notwithstanding.

This single, which I bought afterwards, carries a much better slugging percentage though -- "Someone Who'll Treat You Right Now" and "She Pays The Rent" are two genuine rock 'n roll hits ("She Pays The Rent" is an extra track here, and isn't on the 7" version), which definitely puts the Lyres on the 'plus' side of Bands That Use Keyboards As a Lead Instrument (positive: ? and The Mysterians, Suicide, Vanilla Fudge; negative: Emerson Lake and Palmer, Matt & Kim, The Doors).


Lyres -

"Someone Who'll Treat You Right Now"

"She Pays The Rent"

My Electric Toothbrush Is Broken So Now I Use My Acoustic One

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

My Grave Makes All The Other Graves Look Like Shit

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

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


C.I.A. -

"Violence"

"Gangland War"

"Waste Product"