bidhardcore.com

I got into Hardcore music when I was like 15 or 16, I heard Minor Threat, 7 Seconds, Youth Of Today, Warzone, Dag Nasty, and soon I was checking out as many of the local Straight Edge HC shows as I could. This would have been 1997 or 1998 I guess, which to many readers probably makes me seem really young. Hopefully it doesn’t totally obliterate my most likely questionable “credibility”. All I can say is “time and place”. If I hadn’t been diaper clad in 1981 in Northern Virginia, I would have been putting forth my best effort to catch those early Void gigs. Anyhow, I moved to Boston in 1999 to go to college and I was psyched on most of the Straight Edge type bands that were big there at the time, (although it seemed like they all broke up with in the first year I lived there). At that time my dorm was probably a 10 minute walk from one of the city’s big centers of commerce, Newbury street, where the original location of Newbury Comics still resides to this day. Newbury Comics is actually more known for stocking music than comics (their comic selection is actually pretty shabby), and so I’d frequently walk down and pick through the 7″s and lps looking for something hot.

This was a time in my life when I was basically willing to buy something that looked like it would be cool to me with no other information on what it actually was. I have no idea what about Talk Is Poison’s records looked cool, but I elected to purchase their 6 song 7″ around this time (1999 or 2000). I really didn’t have any kind of context for this stuff, besides “fast”, and “brutal”, and that’s all I really needed. The songs were fast, but not too fast, occasionally tuneful, and generally heavy. The bass cut through with a really distinct distorted twang, the drums were totally ace, and the vocals, really caught my ear as sounding great. I absolutely loved those vocals. Even though they were split between various members, they sounded identical. Very throaty, very angry, and completely raging. Anyhow this was one of the first instances of hearing a less polished style of hardcore where it just absolutely shredded my ears. I think it was a key moment in my formative years. When the breakdown in Right To Die (the first song on the 6 song T.I.P. 7″) drops, it’s absolutely beyond all criticism. It sounds frantic and maniacal, but controlled and deliberate. The riffing only slows down a tad so that the rhythm section can hit you a little harder in the gut, the drums switch to the toms, the bass gets plucked a little rougher, it’s thunderous.

The seller here is has the first Talk Is Poison 7″ on pink vinyl (500 pressed), and their split with Deathreat, containing maybe my favorite song by them, Isolation which has an instantly memorable chorus. The Deathreat side is no slouch either by the way, but that’s for another day. It’s kind of funny they have a split with a band I assume is named after a Citizen’s Arrest song, because T.I.P. certainly sounded a lot like Citizen’s Arrest (who’s 7″ I picked up around the same time period). Food for thought?

There’s a collection lp of these 2 releases, and the second Talk Is Poison 7″ on Prank Records who initially issued all of their records, and members can currently be found in Look Back and Laugh, Cali Love (still a band?), Needles, Warcry, and probably others I don’t know.