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hardcore records on ebay — aggregated and examined
Charles Bronson - Youth Attack 12″ w/ metal cover
With hindsight I guess it’s kind of easy to shit on Charles Bronson’s “legacy” but I for one find it to be unfair. Sure there were plenty of people into the novelty aspect of the band (the name, the song titles, the samples, and for a lot of posers the song lengths), but start to finish I find that their output holds up quite well. Maybe it’s because this was one of the first really fast type bands I checked out as a teen but I dunno, all the splits are still raging obnoxious blurred speed-HC, the demo and first 7″ are pretty awesome sub-Neos teen scuzz, and their lp, Youth Attack, is IMO the best of this wave of thrashy pv bands (not counting Despise You, who are more like a grind band trying to imitate HC anyway).
I remember around the time I got into hardcore music was when the Charles Bronson lp actually had come out and I remember that it was impossible to find if you were clueless beb. Soon after I found out about the version with the metal sleeve being auctioned here. A few years later the band put video of themselves shooting a hole through one with a shotgun as bonus in their discography. There’s supposed to be 333 of these, but some people say there’s only 100. Whichever is the correct number is irrelevant, it’s a desirable collectible.
Anyway, like I said Youth Attack is one of the best extremely fast HC records of the day (the 90’s). It still sounds like a total blur to me sometimes, where I can only kind of figure out what’s happening. Just frantic dick grinding style riffs with a million mile per hour screaming and shouting coliding with it. Also - this features one of my favorite all time samples where the band called Bulldog Records asking if they had any Charles Bronson stuff in stock (”who?”), and then asking if they had One Life Crew records available (”yea”). Still makes me laugh sometimes. Blew my mind when I was 17 or 18 when I heard them (ohhh my God I can’t believe they did that). I think this plays much better than the Bold phone call on that Slapshot lp. Not much slow stuff going on in the tracks just sort of a constant barrage of blasting then a quick break, then some different blasting, although occasionally there’s time for a mosh part to last 4 or 5 seconds.
I wonder if the actor ever got wind of there being a band named after him…
i had one of these. it was a cool record to have but it was too clunky to keep. i think the metal cover was rather pliable too if i remember right. good record though!
what was bulldog records? i was wondering about this last night while looking at WarZone “victory years” CD liner notes, where they mention “bulldog records” in a few photo captions. just an alias for Victory or something?
I think I heard somewhere the metal came off of a roll, and as a result most of the records became warped from conforming to the inside of the sleeve. Mine was really warped but I traded it away for a bunch of good Japanese HC so I guess it didn’t matter in the end.