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Here’s one of the weirder comps ever: End The Warzone. It’s probably most remembered for containing 9 (of 12) songs from Straight Ahead’s demo tape, thereby making it one of their 2 vinyl appearances.  Additional to that there’s also 2 live PHC tracks (was this necessary?), 4 Larm songs, and 2 Attitude Adjustment songs.

The Larm stuff is pretty solid for them, not their best stuff, but pretty much sounds like everything they ever did (out of tune, scrappy, thrash). I really like the Attitude Adjustment songs on here. I think they’re both from their ‘85 demo. Both were later re-recorded for their American Paranoia lp on Pusmort, but I think I prefer the demo versions because the vocals have more fire. The PHC songs are total nth tier junk. A bad Negative Approach cover, and a so-so original. Either way it’s kind of hard for this stuff to not be over shadowed by Straight Ahead’s contribution just based on the fact that it’s way bigger than anyone else’s. Even though the 9 songs probably only run 5 minutes, it’s still the fact that there are 9 complete compositions.

Straight Ahead at this point had just converted over from NYC Mayhem, who started as an early deathrash style metal band, then evolving into proto-grind core, and finally becoming almost a hardcore band, before changing their name and declaring themselves the full-on hardcore band you’ll find here. Most of the songs they contributed to End The Warzone, are actually modified versions of NYC Mayhem songs from their unreleased 7″ E.P. They owe a lot to Agnostic Front’s “United Blood”, as well as D.R.I.’s “Dirty Rotten E.P.” Most tracks don’t even take the time to repeat any of the parts, just delivering blast beats seasoned with tons of snare rolls and guitar breaks, and then occasionally slowing down for an awesome mosh part. I actually mapped out the structures of each song on this session once and they don’t make any sense. The riffs change to something new every 4 or 5 seconds and by the time you blink, 2 songs have gone by.

3 of the songs that appear here were later rerecorded for the Spirit Of Youth E.P. the band issued a year later, but the combination of a different drummer, and a more burly singing style on that release ensures that they almost sound like different songs here. Where Spirit Of Youth had gruff marbles in the mouth style vocals, singer Tommy Carol delivers a much more youthful and clear shouted style on this recording. By the way he also handles the drumming, which is amazing. Definitely some of the fastest blasting up until this point in time (I think the recording is from ‘85). If anyone has audio of any of the shows he played on drums with Youth Of Today (a band plagued by drummers I don’t care for) PLEASE COUGH IT UP.

All in all, Straight Ahead is one of my top 3 NYHC bands ever. It probably isn’t something you’d guess from this write-up because there’s really nothing I can even say about them at this point. From ages 18-21 I don’t think there was any band I was more obsessed with, seeking out live sets and videos, and replaying their brief output again and again. Eventually I sort of hit a wall with live sets and unknown info about the band because there is a finite amount of all that stuff, but still, this is basically one of the best bands ever in life. Maybe the only hardcore groups from NYC that can match them are V.I.P. era Agnostic Front, and the original phase of the Cro-Mags.

As far as I can tell this is the original pressing, I think the bootlegs all have blank labels. There are 500 originals w/ red labels like this, and 500 more with blue ones.

Young at heart, out for fun…

…oh and don’t forget to visit me here…