bidhardcore.com
hardcore records on ebay — aggregated and examined
Today’s guest blogger is Jon Westbrook from sunny (Southern) California. You may remember him from Knife Fight, or some bands he doesn’t want you to interview him about. In his words, “I don’t speak Spanish, so I don’t have anything interesting to tell you”. He’s also a purveyor of very fine vinyl platters.
I’m sure a lot of you saw this posted over at the livewire records message board, but cc’s on vacation this week and I’m working crazy hours these days (tax season….ok, I’m too lazy to scour ebay every hour in the hopes that some badass platters turn up, but honestly…tax season). Looks like we have the start of a whole collection being sold right now. Hopefully the seller didn’t blow his ebay load on this first batch though, because there’s some pretty good ones up there. Always better to build the hype if you want serious money for your goods. The most likely winner of the bunch will be the Antidote “Thou Shalt Not Kill” EP. I can’t imagine anyone not knowing this EP by now, but in case you’re a n00b, it’s a definite top 5 USHC ep, and in most cases top 2 (Negative Approach is better). Only 500 made, backups by JJ, feat members of M.O.I., yadda yadda yadda. Other gems include an original SSDecontrol “The Kids Will Have Their Say,” FU’s “Kill For Christ,” Rest In Pieces “My Rage,” and the ever popular XChorusX LP. The majority of this collection is in the straight edge vein (80’s and 90’s). And seeing that the seller is from Italy, maybe we’ll get lucky and get some Wretched, Underage, and Bloody Riot records next go around (here’s to hoping). But if there’s one thing to learn when it comes to record collecting for the person who’s serious about owning the best of the best, consider this anecdote: For many of my teenage years and into the early 20’s, I used to curse my parent’s names for waiting 8 years to have children. I thought paying $50 for a record was absurd, and thought “if only I was 5 years older, I could have paid “absurd” prices by 1989’s standards.” But a wise man once told me “if you have the money, just buy it because it’ll be worth more than that in a few years.” Just think about how dumb I’d feel now if I had passed on paying $75 for that Antidote EP in ‘97…
Got everything under the sun one the auction block here, but since this is bidhardcore, it’s kind of easy to filter out a lot of it. First of all let me apologize to Scot Oxholm (if he’s reading this), I am not going to talk about the Green Rage 7″ for sale. Moving on, here’s some items you might want to know about:
1) Naked Raygun “Throb Throb” test pressing. In truth I’d like to own this but I am probably not dropping the loot. From what I can tell this would be from the original pressing because it has a promo sheet attached from ‘84. Naked Raygun to this point had released a 12″ E.P. a three song single, and a few compilation tracks, and this was to be their first proper lp released through some Dutch East sub label (Homestead). I think it’s really their first great release, although I’ve heard it disparaged by some. Raygun were truly a one of a kind band, much greater than the sum of their parts. At times they would drop the most straight forward rockin punk tunes with numerous “oh’s” and “whoas”, so tuneful and melodic you never forget them, like the CLASSIC opener Rat Patrol. Just as quick though they’d turn out something with a rolling bassline and guitars that were more akin to Big Black while pounding a 50’s style rockabilly drum beat. By the way vocalist Jeff Pezatti played bass on the first couple Big Black 12″ E.P.s, and while, by the time Throb Throb was released he’d already been replaced by genius John Haggerty, original guitarist Santiago Durango (who co-wrote much of Throb Throb), was a member of Big Black as well.
2) …Speaking of Big Black, we’ve got a Pig Pile Boxset here. While they’re probably most famous because they were Steve Albini’s first well known band, Big Black is also quite remembered for being able to work up quite a miserable racket of guitars that were self described as going “schhiinkkkkt” and “vrooooooooom” against a pulsing atonal backbeat of a Roland 808 and an interminably drunk bass player. In all honesty this band was by my calculations, one of the heaviest, and most exciting of all time. The most interesting thing about this boxset is actually that it comes with a 5″ flexi record with a cover of In My House, which hasn’t ever been reissued. The record itself, which is live is actually a little disappointing in how clean it sounds compared to their studio recordings where they managed to make an ungodly racket. In addition you get a pretty cool video of the band playing live, and a pretty stupid shirt and poster, in a nice looking 12×12 box.
3) Finally, here’s something that’s not by a Chicago band revered by the aging indie elite: Chain Of Strength - Chain Crew record. Personally I’m not really impressed by this record at all, and I know it’s not as rare as it purports to be (100 copies), as I’ve known of more than a couple individuals who’ve obtained a separate cover, and then matched it to the corresponding vinyl. Just saying. Second, I don’t really like the 2nd Chain Of Strength 7″ a whole lot. The first one is totally bare bones straight edge HC just raging it up start to finish, but this one injects a significant chunk of Turning Point (lp) style melody, much more “emo” type lyrics, and a significant increase in hair-gel. Lastly I always found this particular edition to be kind of a bogus rarity because it wasn’t even made by the band, but by a friend of theirs, I believe posthumously. It does look REALLY cool, much better than the normal edition of the record, and the inserts w/ green toner are cool as hell (it sucks they don’t make colored toner for xerox machines anymore), but I’d rather own a silver sleeve edition of the first record and a studio recording of Til The End.
Uh oh, more 90’s HC, this time from my buddy Mark Hurst. I feel confident this is quality stuff though. Mark has made roughly 1.5 billion dollars selling all his records off over the last few years when not playing drums for Wound Up & Punch In The Face, and he has spent every cent on live DVDs of Blur and Ride. SELLOUT!
1st: he’s got 4 Despise You E.P.’s up for sale.
- Their 7″ entitled PCP Scapegoat
- Their split 7″ w/ Crom
- Their split 7″ w/ Suppression
- Their split with Stapled Shut
The Crom split and PCP Scapegoat 7″ are both the same recording session and sound kind of shitty IMO (still good stuff though), the Suppression split is better, but their split with Stapled Shut is some of the best material by both bands. Despise You were all kind of more grind-core dudes doing a “secret” side project that was more HC/Power Violence, circa the mid-90’s. They used a lot of Hispanic gang type imagery associated with bad parts of L.A. and kind of tricked a lot of people into thinking they were a bunch of criminals. When they hit their stride musically it was on this record and the Left Back Let Down 4 way split, sounding like a battle between the Terrorizer demos & Crossed Out’s vinyl output. That’s a rather generic description, but if you’ve ever listened to Despise You, you’d know it’s pretty accurate. They tuned their instruments to A, which almost put them musically into Carcass territory, but the vocal delivery was pure violent American hard core, just spitting hoarse out of breath shouts. By the way the best Stapled Shut song is on this split as well, Resin Heaven. I think almost every Stapled Shut song has a pot smoking reference in it, which is weird because most of them are pretty fast. This one works a real groove for about 5 minutes though, and is surprisingly catchy. They also had this cool sound to their instruments that sounded like they turned all the tone and treble knobs to zero, and ran everything directly into the mixing board. It gives it this absolutely impenetrable Wall-Of-Fuzz sound that I really like. Totally killer band whose releases can all be had very cheap.
Now to the other side of the globe for every D.S.B. record produced through the 90’s and into the early 2000’s. Chronologically:
- No Fight No Get 7″ original press on Devour/Bloodclot
- Radical Sharpshot 7″, red vinyl, on Overthrow
- Wings Continue To Strive With Unchanged Mind lp on Bloodsucker
- split 7″ w/ Deathreat on Mangrove
- Pure Cultivation 7″ on Partners In Crime
- Battle Into The Invisible Zone on Kangaroo
- Wait Tremblingly on Partners In Crime
The last 3 are pretty easy to still find new, but the others are some of the best straight up hardcore to come from Japan in the last 10 years that I’ve heard. D.S.B. did a weekend of shows on the east coast, kind of at the height of the early 2000’s Japan-core craze, and I managed to take in two of the shows. They were absolutely the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever witnessed. These guys just 100% went for broke, jumping and thrashing off everything, playing a boatload of catchy jams, and just generally proving what all the fuss was about to anyone who was there. I think the general consensus is their best work is the first 2 E.P.s, and I’m inclined to agree that they’re as good as classic records by greats like Outo, Nightmare, etc.
Well…. like an idiot i just lost the stuff I’d just written today about Floorpunch. I found all these editions of their 7″ for sale by one seller:
- Red vinyl #’d 200
- Blue vinyl (of 800)
- Black vinyl - 1st press
- Black vinyl w/ Green lettering on sleeve - 3rd press
- Euro tour edition w/ Judge sleeve
- White vinyl farewell edition
as well as a copy of their lp on white vinyl, and the In My Blood Records shirt.
This sucks total De Ja Vu from an hour ago. Anyway all I really wanted to say is that FP’s legacy has held up remarkably well over the last 10 years. The recordings still sounds pretty hot, the songs still deliver the power-load, the shirts still look good, the records still have cool layouts, it’s all still there, not really dulled at all by time. I was pretty disappointed I didn’t make it to their reunion show last fall, especially since I only really saw them twice when they were around. One more thing I gotta give credit for was how they were able to be a serious band, while still keeping a good sense of humor in interviews and on stage. If anything, the 90’s were plagued with overly serious, self important bands in every sub-genre around, and it’s safe to say, looking back a lot of it was presumptuous and I’d go so far to say some of it was downright insulting. Floorpunch was never caught in that trap. I mean their name defined, if it were in a dictionary, essentially means “To mosh.” Right there that tells you a thing or two, but even though the lyrics and music were simple, it still meant something. The anger was still there at the heart of it, and, even if some people don’t want to admit it, the rebellion against the outside world (and the larger “scene” for that matter). Also they always picked great cover songs.
So that’s not everything I was going to say, but that’s the gist of it. BUST!
Yeesh, it’s been a while so here’s a whole stack of misfits rarities. In bullet (haha!) form:
- Bullet 7″ red vinyl w/ Better Dead On Red sleeve
- Halloween 7″ w/ insert
- 3 Hits From Hell 7″ 1st press w/ red label
- Walk Among Us lp w/ pink sleeve on Ruby/Slash (1st press)
- Die Die My Darling 12″ purple vinyl
- Evil Live 12″ w/ OG sleeve
- Wolf’s Blood 12″ w/ full-color sleeve
- Static Age lp purple vinyl
- Collection II lp clear vinyl
- Samhain - November Coming Fire lp orange vinyl
More or less… that adds up to a couple (a few) grand. Even though I feel Misfits collectors take part in creating and overhyping stupid things like pressing errors, and trivial variations, these are all pretty cool variations of these records to own, and there’s no denying Misfits records are awesome, and have a cool common aesthetic. I think I’ll be kicking myself for the rest of my life over a few of the deals I’ve passed up on some of this stuff, but I can’t take it to heart too much because of the ammount of time and money it would cost to track down all this stuff. I actually have to say, I’m sort of shocked that Caroline doesn’t keep reissuing this stuff in new collectible variants. I’m sure all the members of the group still need the money it would net, and I just can’t really fathom that it’s out of some “respect for the fans”. Also - is there a worse sounding live record than Evil Live? Oh wait here it is! (FROM THE SAME SELLER).
Seriously though, shouldn’t there be some kind of definitive Misfits Re-Re-Re-Issue series on vinyl and CD. I’m not even sure how it could be done, the original singles have been chopped up and re-mixed onto the Collection lps, the Static Age, 12 Hits From Hell, and other such things. Maybe keep the Static Age disc as is, get a definitive issue of 12 Hits (if you mix Bobby Steele off this record I’m coming for you Glenn Danzig!), some kind of Collections Redux that removes the tracks from the Earth A.D. session, but adds stuff like the original Cough Cool and Night Of The Living Dead tracks, as well as other session outtakes like Who Killed Marilyn and Spook City. It hurts my head to think about, and it’s clearly more thought than probably even the songwriting here took, but at some point it has to happen. They’re a classic American Rock (Punk) band with one of the messiest back catalogs of all time.
I like this seller’s listings. I’ve featured them before, but this set is kind of cooler because it’s several different things — a bunch of rap lps, a bunch of Japanese hardcore, some American grindcore, and a little bit of NYHC. I dunno, you could probably have a decent time hanging with this person.Here’s a tasty Japanese ripper… or something like that. LSD’s - Jast Last 7″. This is hardly the genre I’m most knowledgeable in, but this is one record that left an impression on me right from the get go. The vocals pour out in a mess of distortion and slurred growling, most likely double tracked (it could just me some kind of echo effect though?), but sounding pretty crazy. The music is kind of more controlled and somewhat metallic in the delivery, with fairly precise mid-paced type riffs. My favorite song is the 6 minute Karen Nash which begins with a clean guitar intro, and then builds up with a noodley riff, before kicking in full power with the most deranged vocal section on the entire record. The song pushes into hookier and more melodic territory, more-so than the other two on the record, or for that matter any other LSD song. By the time the maiden-esque solo kicks in 2 minutes deep it’s pretty obvious you’re hearing a masterwork. Finally at about the middle the sheets of distortion let up for a return to the same clean guitar work from the beginning. The buildup back into the song is cheesy and “of the time” as could be but it works because the band sell it, and to me it all sounds necessary, like there’s no fat to trim (which is absurd because in reality it’s a 6 minute song), they have me under the spell. When the speed really picks up again and the vocals come with tortured “whoas” echoing into 80’s reverb oblivion, it’s the payoff. I really have no idea what this song is actually about, but it just sounds moving. Maybe melodrama has a big effect on me. As a sequel to yesterday’s posting: a Crossed Out 7″. Of course if you know me at all, you know I’ve staked some of my creativity in this record’s legacy, much to the disappointment and annoyance of a person or three, but generally these are people that are old and/or Scottish. Seriously though, this one’s timeless. A template for a dozens and dozens of bands thereafter, none one tenth as good. Crossed Out said they were into Siege and the Skitslickers, it really can’t get much more straight forward than that. It’s that kind of simplicity that permeates the sound and style of the record. There’s nothing tricky or hard to grasp, it just sounds like a hammer beating against your skull really fast, and then really slow. There are a couple of 90’s bootlegs of this but the seller has taken care to list attributes that verify it as an original (matrix numbers being the give away). If you’re ever not sure about one of these, look at the between song gaps, the original pressing has long silences between each song, like 5-10 seconds, you should be able to see them just by looking at the vinyl.
I Was A Sellout Before You Were A Sellout - by Joe Losurdo - (From Roctober #9, 1994)
Gather round kiddies and let’s hearken back to those dark ages known as the mid ’80’s. Yes kids, before MTV was serving up your weekly Alternative hero, before Circus and Rip magazines changed their “formats” to suit the times. The year was 1984 and Punk was pretty much dead to me with Hardcore soon following suit (This decision was made at the ripe old age of 16). But as fate would have it, an opportunity opened to me that I had previously only dreamed about. A local “Hardcore” band called Life Sentence had called me up and asked me to play bass for them and do some touring, so I immediately dropped out of high school and said “later!” to my boring suburb (where else, right?) and headed out. I had grand visions of screaming groupies, packed houses and trashed hotel rooms, though I couldn’t admit it, ’cause I was “Punk”. On the outside I wanted to be Minor Threat, on the inside I wanted to be KISS. However, after three months of playing in people’s living rooms, not making any money, not bathing and worst of all not eating, I went home ten years older than when I left. We were pissed off because we were good (relatively) and yet we weren’t getting anywhere. Sound familiar, folks? We were confused as to why shit groups like GBH and The Exploited were pulling in $500 to $1,000 a show when we weren’t even making gas money. So we said fuck it, we’re going to attack every market in the Punk rock underworld syndicate. First, the new Metal-”crossover” scene was a virtual goldmine! It was truly ironic that all the same people who would beat you up for being Punk were now getting into it. Then again, today’s Nirvana and Pearl Jam fans are yesterday’s Def Leppard and Judas Priest fans. I’m a firm believer in genetics, and it’s what I dub the “sheep” chromosome. Regardless, we were blessed with a stroke of luck when a friend of ours gave James Hetfield of Metallica a Life Sentence sticker, and the next thing you know it’s stuck on the leather jacket he’s wearing in Kerang! magazine and the promo poster for the “Master of Puppets” record. So we of course sent off more merchandise goodies to our ‘ol pals Metalica, and BOOM! Lars is wearing our shirt in the “Cliff ‘em All” video. Jackpot! Next thing you know Anthrax, Nuclear Assault and our touring buddies D.R.I. are Life Sentence fans and the snowball effect has started. We definitely made more money off our merchandise than off our guarantees from shows. We had serious Metal fans coming to our shows, and we would oblige them by playing Slayer’s “Chemical Warfare” and Motörhead’s “Ace of Spades”. Ahh, but folks, man does not live by Metal alone. Our lust for Punk domination became insatiable and we were hungry for more! Our next target: skateboarders!
The Skate-Punk resurgence was ready to explode into the mainstream. We could smell it and we wanted in on the action! As luck (that’s the key word) would have it, while we were in St. Louis for a show a couple of skateboard bigwig pros were in town for a “skaters camp”. Steve Steadham, Monty Nolder and Christian Hosoi were hanging out at the show so we made our move, initiated by Steadham and our guitar player’s love of spliff. Everybody was good ‘n’ high, so we had Steadham come up on stage and play drums with us for a “Blues” jam as our first song. Needless to say the kids loved it, and in the next issue of Thrasher, the skater’s Holy Qu’ran, there’s a photo of Monty doing a handplant with our colorful logo on his chest. We also got one of those hilarious Pushead adjective-abuse reviews. On tour we used to have this inside joke of asking locals where the nearest half-pipe was whenever we’d arrive in a new town. A review in a San Diego zine called Black Market described me as “Joe, who plays a mean bass and craves skating vert!” I can barely stand on a goddam skateboard! But of course we always had them on tour with us. To help move the amps.
The last factions of Punkdom we had to crack were the Straight Edge crowd and the Maximum Rocknroll P.C. army. I believe the Straight Edge crowd to be almost on par with the Metal crowd for generating laughs with their sheer ridiculousness. This was way past the Minor Threat, S. S. Decontrol days. This was more the Uniform Choice and Youth of Today era with plenty of hilarious T-shirt slogans that would have made Nancy Reagan proud: “Straight and Alert”, “Drugs and Booze, the sure way to lose”, etc. We sort of inadvertently got lumped in with Straight Edge ’cause our old singer made us sound like 7 Seconds (whom we also used to play with alot). I can remember a couple of occasions when we would literally fall out of the van drunk and completely bum out the 14 year old Straight-Edgers who were waiting for us to show up. For a humorous take on the Straight Edge movement, go to your local library and in the American Hardcore archives and look under “Crucial Youth.”
The Maximum Rocknroll-Veggie-Leftist-Anarchist-Homo/Lesbian-Revolutionary crowd was pretty easy to infiltrate. We had been reading the magazine long enough to know what catch phrases we should use in our interviews. I can actually recall saying “Protest and Survive” in an interview which functionally translates in America as “Mom, if you don’t buy me the new MDC album I’ll kill myself.” Our first album was chock full of politically Left anthems such as “Peacetime Death”, “Men In Blue”, “Election Day” and of course “Take A Stand”. The funniest part was that our old singer who wrote those songs was one of the most politically ignorant people I ever met. Let’s just say the skinhead he once was still lived in his heart. When we were being interviewed on MRR radio in Berkeley, I threw a curveball to my bandmates by saying that I was in the Revolutionary Communist Youth Party. Our drummer Tom, not to be outdone, went on to talk about the time he spent in El Salvador. Yes, we were full of shit. All kidding aside, a tip of my hat goes to MRR for teaching many bored suburban Punk rockers about more going on in politics than they possibly could have found out from the idiot box or the newspapers.
Of course there was the flipside of the MRR crowd: the dreaded SKINHEADS! The name alone sends people scurrying like mice. BOO! I scared you! When I was 12-13 years old, I lived for Skinhead “Oi!” music. My favorite bands in the world were The Cockney Rejects, Blitz, The Business and Peter and the Test Tube Babies, amongst others. But the Oprah wave of Skinheads, who would have never heard of the movement if it weren’t for all the media attention and who were likely to be Nazis (despite the fact that the original English Skins were Black), seemed to be more into Agnostic Front, Murphy’s Law and the Cro-Mags. Sure they were skins, but they weren’t Oi! So every now and then we’d play “Oi, Oi, Oi!” by The Cockney Rejects and the Skins would go apeshit, but it was quite obvious that most of them didn’t know the tune, but knew they were supposed to. When we played in Montreal there was a group of French-Canadian Nazi Skinheads(?) that were sieg heil-ing us as we played it. Not one of those morons could speak English so how the hell did they know what we were singing about?!!! For all they know we could have been singing “We are all homos! Oi! Oi! Oi! We love Commies! Oi! Oi! Oi! Being bald is stupid…etc.” They’re probably all hockey players or mounties now.
My point to this whole article is that there is no point…to any of it! Black Flag in ‘81, D.R.I. in ‘84 or Nirvana in ‘91, NONE OF IT MATTERS! Like those geriatric corporate machines said over 20 years ago “It’s only Rock n’ Roll!” So shove your twenty something-Slacker-Grunge-Generation X-Details-MTV-in it’s eco-pak-bullshit up your ass, America! Throw in your Pearl Jam CD’s and Docs too if there’s room! Oh yeah, and here’s a tip: If it goes platinum, there’s nothing “underground” or “alternative” about it! Now get out of my room kid, visiting hours are over.
Here’s a hot mess. Someone’s early 90’s shoebox of 7″s plenty plenty plenty of junk. But there’s some choice picks, like No Comment’s “Common Senseless” (why is this record so hard to come by?), Trip 6’s one and only “No Defeat No Surrender”(plz don’t speak ill of the cover art), a bunch less remarkable things too like 7″s by Outburst, Against The Wall, Turning Point, early Seein Red, Confrontation. Also there’s 2 10″s, both by kinda weird bands, 1 is the post Brotherhood project, Resolution- foolishly this is not tagged as being pre-Sunn or Burning Witch. For all the bad music Greg Andersen has been involved with, he gets a pass for life for being in Brotherhood. Oh also there is the Demise 10″on Erich Keller’s Off The Disc, in fact it’s a rare variation limited to 100 copies. Demise were around the same time as Infest, and gigged around with some of the weird thrash bands in Cali but never found the same popularity that some of their peers did (I think in part because they took up some nationalist political views later on). This 10″, and their
Furnace of Tension 7″(which I believe is just remixed 10″ tracks?) are their best stuff which is still just OK at best. The clear gem in this stuff is the No Comment 7″. While it’s not an example of a perfect hardcore record (that would be their Downsided 7″), it’s damn near close. Andy Beatie (I think I spelled his name wrong), is one of the best vocalists ever to take up extreme music. Please someone - read this and get the Low Threat Profile e.p. released. Trip 6 is a cool band probably most remembered for their track on the Revelation “The Way It Is” comp, and somewhat less so for being the band that The Psychos dissolved into. In fact the full recording session for this 7″ was actually a 12 song demo, about half comprised of re-done Psychos songs. Tommy Rat, the final singer for the Psychos has one of the burliest vocal styles in NYHC, kind of transposing the NY-Street vibe onto something that reminds me of Crucifix or some other such band… Trip 6 is hardly a peace punk band, but they have a dirty primitive sound and that’s what I mean when I say this.
Somehow I’m falling into a tape theme up in here. I didn’t mean to but scrolling through a bunch of really good records, these 3 cassettes stood out to me. All most definitely originals (I once shared an apartment with 2 Raw Deal demos). I never took the plunge on buying up original demo tapes but they’re undeniably cool, especially when from my favorite demo tape locale, NYC. I mean it’s no secret I can talk about this stuff more than any other microgenre in hardcore. To be totally exact though, one is from Connecticut, and another Long Island, but Raw Deal is undeniably New York City, Yonkers to be exact. Raw Deal took the blueprint that most of them had already laid out in Breakdown, injected a level of percision Breakdown never really seemed to have, and made a hell of a band out of it. The main thing that always struck me as the difference between the two was the much tighter drumming, and guitar playing, everything is more in synch. Don’t take that as a slight to Breakdown, who I honestly prefer, but Raw Deal, and later Killing Time, just come off more palletable.
From Long Island, comes the classic Beyond “Dew It” demo. You could make a sound arguement for this being better than the No Longer At Ease lp they recorded just a year later. I wouldn’t, but one could. The level of fleeting youthful anger and uncertainty about the future on display is impressive with how clearly it’s articulated, and despite the lyrics getting a little day/way, slow/go, fast/last, the vocal phrasing is surprisingly well thought out, frequently breaking with and going against the flow of the song. Of course focusing on that would say nothing of the music itself which is shockingly well performed and nuanced, coming across in a way similar to Absolution at their best, but sounding completely and altogether different musically. That of course is still leaving out one important fact: Beyond are all highschool aged on this recording. Seasons was written by a bunch of 16 year olds, think about that. I mean REALLY think about that. It’s one thing to hear a band like the Teen Idles and have someone tell you “they’re only 18 on this recording”. It’s not really a surprise. Beyond at 16/17 years of age, not only were worlds more technically skilled than most of their peer group, but had the compositional skills to lay pretty much everyone not named Gavin van Vlack to waste.
Oh and there’s also the Wide Awake - “Hold True” demo, which is their most well known demo tape. Seriously what am I supposed to say about a demo tape that has an X’d up character from Family Circus on it. The 7″ is pretty good late 80s SxE HC cheese, but like the same way Polly-O string cheese is good. It’s not exactly the best idea to try and subsist off it.
More tapes tomorrow?
Check out this dude selling some original foriegn HC demos. For me the 2 coolest pics are the original Raw Power demo, and this Bastards tape on Propaganda (one side studio, one side live). Far as I know these are original as could be, and if you’re lucky haven’t been overplayed. There’s something about the tape aesthetic that is irreplacable. Even though tapes are harder to mass produce than CDs at this point, sound worse than vinyl, or CD, and are easiest to break, bands keep making them. Maybe it’s some kind of OCD thing with how everything fits so nicely into that little plastic case. It’s the ultimate in portability.
belated year end list for 2007:
12”/CD
- Gauze – 5th cd (don’t have the translated title handy)
- Black Sabbath w/ Ronnie James Dio – The Dio Years (new songs)
- Skitkids – Besoket Vid Krubban
- Iron Lung – Sexless//No Sex
- Electric Wizard – Witch Cult Today
- Rampage – Limit Of Destruction
- California Love – Reaping Whirlwind
- Invasion – 12”
- Crow – Hametsu No Haoto
- Double Negative – The Wonderful and Frightening World…
7”/EP :
- Framtid/Seein’ Red - split 7”
- Waste Management – Get Your Mind Right
- Death Church – Unsilent Hate Anthem
- Jay Reatard – I Know A Place
- Iron Age – The Burden Of Empire
- Wasted Time – No Shore
- Total Noise Accord -
- Sex/Vid - Tania
- Threatener – Bending Of Throats
- Kvoteringen/Pisschrist – split 7”
REISSUES:
- Imperialist Pigs - Pork Corkscrew
- The Stalin - Stop Jap Naked
- Thergothon - Sog Yogoth demo 12″
- Talk is Poison - Condensed Humanity
- Diatribe - demo ‘85 7″
- Siege - Drop Dead 3rd edition (new song, i gotta include it)
- Mob 47 - s/t 7 “
- Despise You - West Side Horizons vinyl
- The Kids - s/t
- Deathyell - Morbid Rites
