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Here’s another bumout - No Trend’s “Teen Love” 7″.

These guys were the DC answer to Flipper, dirging, repetitive, annoying, obnoxious, and at odds with most of the DC in-crowd. The guitar often just made horrible ear splitting noise, while the bass and drums rattled along, and the vocals spat each line, snarling against a hopelessly lost consumer culture.

The title track is an endless 6 minute track that’s a little dated now, but still gets the job done. Most of it focuses on a banal relationship between a young teen boyfriend and girlfriend, the punchline being their violent death in a car accident. The music plays like busted British post punk (early cure/joy div) as the guitar breaks up from time to time. It’s a shock tactic and not very subtle to kill the song’s characters in the end, but considering it was the 80’s (when a few things were still shocking) I can be a little more forgiving.

On the other side, Cancer pulses along with a happy-go-lucky bass line but forced up against buzzing screeching guitar, and snarled vocals that actually remind me a lot of Antidote. Of course, unlike Antidote, there’s no pay-off with bands like this, you just get dragged down into the muck, or if you’re already down there, you slosh about in it, and lament your first world problems. I think it’s an okay song, but again this shit tends to be on the dated side. When Flipper is good, they’re really good, but when they’re bad they’re the worst (I mean bad bad, not good bad). As such any band descended from their sound has to answer for its short comings, and the aspects that date it, and while Cancer and Teen Love aren’t too bad, they’re really of the time and nothing great.

The real gem here is the 3rd track, Mass Sterilization Caused By Venereal Disease. I guess you could say this is the hardcore song on the record, but it plays like a No Wave-ish answer to that sound. The guitar lays down a tv-static chainsaw crush of fuzz, while the bass plucks away and the drums bash and crash cave man style, everything on an endless loop essentially. The vocals only growl the song title over and over, and then punctuate it with a bizarre cackle again and again (though I’m quite sure it’s not a loop). It’s sort of the ultimate post ironic reduction of the original Discharge template. One indecipherable guitar note buzzing against the bass, one simple drum smash, one line of lyrics. No really, I think this song exceeds the brilliance of most other No Trend material, and it’s a personal favorite of the time and era.

btw - this copy is rather overpriced