I Run Into The Woods A Lot To Lick The Toads

It took me long enough to get around to posting the Kitty Badass CD, mostly because I'm full-on dumb and lazy and partly because CDs are just pieces of boring plastic. Well, they're nice for the car, I'll give them that, only just not as fun to take pictures of when you've got a blog, or something. I'm pretty sure "One Cell At A Time" was pressed up as a 12", too, though for the life of me I've never seen one. Kitty Badass were definitely one of the better Connecticut bands of their time, only to have mostly escaped notice as the years have passed; their ability to meld off-kilter melodies with tempos that effortlessly shifted gears (from almost indie-pop to almost-thrash) lead to some killer hooks, and the first six tracks on this album, as a group, match up fairly evenly with anything else that came out of CT in the last half of the '90s. Of course, I'm going to be a dick by only posting four of the six songs here, though this CD shouldn't be a hard one to track down (I think Elevator was having a fire sale not too long ago, you can pick up that J.C. Superska 7" while you're at it) anyway.

Kitty Badass -

"Brand New Vampires"

"New Vow"

"Tilted"

"Untangled"

There's A Man Made Of Shadow Behind You

Kitty Badass were definitely one of the more interesting bands to come out of Connecticut in the last half of the 90's, besides being one of the best. A great live band, their songs were both spastic and amazingly catchy, and they had the ability to downshift quickly from thrashy punk to ripping powerchords, much like the Libyans do now. Not everything they did was gold, of course-- starting off with an okay track on the "I Can't Do Anything With 50 Cents" compilation and a split with Fudge Daddy-O's-- but when their first EP came out, the first two songs ("Tilted" and "Wings Folding") crushed anything they had released up to that point.

A second EP, "385 Seconds of Kitty Badass", was released within a month or so of this one (on Al Pist's Red Tape Records), and then there was 1998's "One Cell At a Time" CD, which wasn't recorded as well as the "We'll Let You Live" EP but had even better songs on it; in fact, I'd say that first six songs on "One Cell At a Time", taken as a group, were as good as any batch of songs released by a CT band that decade. Kitty Badass continued for a couple more years afterwards and there might've been one or two more releases beyond that, but I don't really know because I sorta lost track. "One Cell At a Time" is definitely worth picking up if you happen to find it though (ugly cover and all), otherwise I'll probably get around to posting it here eventually.




Kitty Badass -

"Tilted"

"Wings Folding"

Guess I'm Really Screwed

Connecticut was home to a whole bunch of killer compilations back in the 90's, including the "Chop Whip Grate Liquify" LP/CD, the "One" 7-inch on Capsule, TPOS' "Destroy All Mediocrity" triple-vinyl set, and the Frozen Monkey CD. You're probably thinking to yourself, "I've never heard of a single freakin' one of those records," but trust me, they're all great. You can also add to the list the "I Can't Do Anything With 50 Cents" 7-inch, which came out on Jeff "Spaz" Coleman's Computer Crime label (Jeff was/is the drummer in Seizure, the Injections, Fudge Daddy-O's, and Clusterfuck, among others).

There's five ripping punk tracks here, all of them good, plus a cute Crass rip-off picture sleeve, and then those little extra touches that give a record its character-- in this case, Jeff's goofy explanation about where the comp's ingenious title comes from:


My favorite song here is Blanket Of Ash's "Too Messed Up", which I regard as the one greatest overlooked gem of the 90's Ct. punk scene and remains the only Blanket Of Ash material to ever be pressed, as far as I know. Ugly Truth's "See You Tonight" is another great pop-punk song, as well as being a notch above any of the four songs on Ugly Truth's self-titled EP that came out around '95 also (on Hatebreed's Stillborn record label, no less). The best Ugly Truth stuff, though, is on the Frozen Monkey CD compilation, which I'll get around to posting if I can ever find my copy.

Hardly any two Kitty Badass songs sounded alike, and their song here is one of their catchy, minute-long Cub-type numbers. As for the rest, I'm (rather reluctantly) leaving off the songs from Broken and Fudge Daddy-O's, since this compilation is still floating around out there-- Vital and Trash American Style still had some copies, last I knew-- so now you've got something to hunt for.



Kitty Badass -

"Chevy Impala"

Blanket Of Ash -

"Too Messed Up"

Ugly Truth -

"See You Tonite"

(these files are now listen-only)