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Well, the leaves are changing and the days are getting shorter, so here’s a great lp to play on your headphones while you take a walk in the fall night and contemplate the direction of your life and all that important shit. The Wipers 1981 classic, ”Youth Of America”is their second lp overall, but it’s personally my favorite from their catalog. It’s far less straight forward than ’79’s “Is This Real”, opting for more melancholy and stretched out almost Kraut-rock inspired pieces that emphasize repetition. It’s also extremely catchy, and still very poppy, although the level of mournfulness is probably deeper than anything previous.

A particular aspect of Youth Of America that I love is that it’s produced and engineered by The Wipers main man, Greg Sage (who was already the only remaining original member on this album). The guitars ring and echo with delay and vintage sounding fuzz tones, but are quite bright and defined. A lot of Wipers music is a showcase for Sage’s sinewy and spare guitar lines that sometimes remind me of what might happen if the early (punky) Cure material went on a surfing trip with The Ventures. The Bass is a nice round rumbling sound that fills in the bottom end as the guitar is often playing single higher notes. The drums are tight and snappy, there’s some echo on the snare, but they’re actually fairly compact sounding compared to the vast echo of the guitar. The drumming is typically circular with its patterns, and provides the solid backbeat for Sage to work off of. Again, it kind of takes me to a Ventures type space in my mind, but with much darker music built on top of it.

Side A is the more direct of the two, starting with Taking Too Long, which  is almost power pop in its delivery, right down to the fact that it plays at the optimum pop song length of 3 minutes (well 3:07). Sage works a nice little guitar lead into this one during the intro that gets your toes tapping. He sticks with the upbeat flavor for the next track, Can This Be, which is also right around 3 minutes, and almost goes in a Ramones direction with a Chuck Berry type guitar progression, and a great rock ‘n roll ascending riff in the chorus. By the next song though, Pushing The Extreme, the pop shell is starting to crack a little bit. The song still has a hummable tune, but it’s more aggressive and also a bit more melancholy, with a guitar overdub that sounds like Sage is leaning on a tremolo bar. When It’s Over finds Sage contemplating his on mortality, sounding like a funeral dirge sped up to 78rpms. It works as a nice segue to the second half of the record, its indisputable centerpiece.

No Fair opens side B with a sad sounding guitar dirge, that the bass and drums fill into after a few measures. Sage inserts some spoken prose over it painting a pretty despairing picture from the get go that’s a lament on the futility of modern life. There’s a pause for a couple seconds of silence, and then the bass guitar builds up with the drums before the song kicks into a nice quick tempo. Sage sings in his recognizable mid-range about urban alienation and anomie as the band continues the minor-key assault until a fade out. The title track is the big closer and it’s been noted as a reaction against the increasing brevity that was becoming common in hardcore and punk songs, as it clocks in at about 10 and a half minutes, though it never actually slows down beyond a standard punk tempo.  The melody that the song constantly returns to is instantly recognizable, mournful, and unsettling. The bass and drums pulse in another surfy sounding configuration, the guitar cutting in and out through the duration sometimes issuing sheets of heavy feedback, others soloing, sometimes working the grey area between the two. The lyrics make plain the point of the song from the getgo:

Youth of America is living in the jungle
Fighting for survival with the wrong place to go
Youth of America the pressure’s all around
The walls are coming down the walls are crumbling down on you

When the chorus kicks in, it’s big, arena sized even, maybe almost triumphant sounding but ultimately the track leaves the listener without closure, even fading out, suggesting that it may have actually been longer in its original incarnation.

Of course this is the original pressing on Park Avenue records, though if you’ve never heard it, I recommend picking up the very nice reissue that’s available in most record stores on 180 gm vinyl. Too bad this copy’s in Germany… HIGH postage.

Motorhead “s/t” + Black Flag “Damaged” - Observing the Obvious

These are 2 of maybe 5 records that basically my entire musical palette is built on. Motorhead and Black Flag both have other records of note and influence, some arguably more-so, but for both bands, their first full length releases were the ones that established them as unignorable forces on the ‘world stage’ so to speak. Both have been scoffed at time and again by fools, parents, critics, and so on as low brow garbage. Noise. Shit. Of course each of these dismissals only serves to qualify what should be obvious to anyone with ears. That each preserves the tradition of Rock N Roll and its original rebellious nature, in full. I mean I shouldn’t have to say it, but sometimes I just flip when I find out people really don’t think Motorhead and Black Flag are the best bands ever.

Rock and Roll was originally just loud electric blues. It pissed off parents and authority figures, and it was cause for concern. As such the disciples of this new form of noise began dreaming up all kinds of imaginary qualifiers and desirable characteristics for a rock band to possess, and viewing it as a misunderstood art form, which in turn was absorbed into the collective consciousness of the music world, and then regurgitated, in a circular pattern, until eventually shit like Genesis was rock n/or roll and the original spirit had been totally warped and obscured. When you hear the distortion thick bass intro at the beginning of Motorhead, or the thick descending guitar line that comes in at the beginning of Rise Above, it’s an invocation of the primal aspects of Rock ‘n’ Roll, and a return to the inevitable. For everything that Rock music can be dressed up as, in the end it’s inherently written into its DNA that it’s animalistic and ‘low’. You can teach a dog all kinds of tricks to make it seem smart, but in the end, you still have to take it outside to piss on a fire hydrant.

As it pertains to this site, I’m of the opinion, that basically everything covered here can have a line drawn back to a handful of records. Probably less than 10. These are 2 of them. Motorhead aren’t really a punk band, but they’re not really a proper metal band, and they’re not quite like any Rock ‘n Roll band before them either, and even though Black Flag can be easily grouped as Punk or Hardcore, they spent as much time deconstructing what that could mean as they did building it up. SO why am I making this post? Some days you just wake up, and remember, no matter what, Lemmy and Ginn are the greatest of all time, even at their most obvious. Sometimes it’s all you need to remember.

Well well… a “Portland Edition” of Poision Idea - “Kings Of Punk” on Pusmort.  The auction says it’s #’d out of 100, but after referring to Cooch, Boston’s #1 Poison Idea collector, he says there is no numbering on them, and the number made is uncertain. Nonetheless this is the version of the album you want to own if you are into records and good rock music.

Kings Of Punk is the first of numerous great Poison Idea albums (”Record Collectors…” should be counted as an E.P.), and I milestone in the most impressive winning streak in American punk and hardcore. Minus live lps, and a couple of less interesting singles, basically everything this band did from their inception, right up to longtime guitarist Pig Champion’s death, is indispensable. This is one of their more important releases, in part because it’s the first record to have a more pronounced Rock N Roll influence, with Pig Champions incredible soloing abilities really taking shape before your eyes. The songs still have a lot of similarities to the ones of their first EP, but are now beefed up with a modern guitar sound, plenty of digital reverb and echo, and an overall clean sheen. Rock N Roll, big studio sounds, and 3rd records are the things that kill most good hardcore bands or at the very least drive them to the depths of banality. To use a cliche’ though Poison Idea are not most hardcore bands. Their song craft continued to take shape here and songs like Ugly American, which stretches 3 minutes and has a bit of a midpaced build-up are really PI coming out of their shell and stretching out for the first time. There are multisectioned compositions, and more repeated choruses, but still enough of the initial brutality of their early days to make this the bridge to their late 80’s era.

Despite the fact that I just wrote up the Ringworm lp last week, I’m doing an Integrity entry today, which may do much to further erode my credibility, but seriously fuck it. This one’s rare and also, I love it. Integrity and Ringworm being arguably the only cool “metal-core” bands ever (despite certain members of the former), in a court of law, this might be exhibit-A. Humanity Is The Devil (on pink vinyl). Despite all the baggage that this band carries, all the bad blood and ripped off mail orders, it all washes away when you play this.

At certain times I’ve felt this was the best Integrity record, which is funny because it’s a 10″, and we all know it’s one of the stupidest formats known to man. But here it is adorned with one of the only legitimately good Pushead covers of the 90’s (man I wish this was a 12″ EP so bad) and featuring a lean 6 songs with crisp production, each delivering maximum payload. It opens with what some have termed the best 1-2-punch of the 90’s.  “Vocal Test” into “Hollow”.  I’m sure many will disagree. Well if you do, to paraphrase Raybeez, this mic is your mic, this stage is your stage… and thus implicitly, this blog is your blog. Vocal Test is one of the most absurd intros ever. Literally it’s just a hard riff with wordless screams laid over it. It sounds so stupid when describing it, but whether you’re 16 or 27 it’s a fist-pumper when you’re hearing it. The segue into “Hollow” is a distorted bass line reminiscent of the Cro-Mags glory days before a snare roll leads the charge for the rest of the band. As the riff descends the vocal delivery builds to an urgent chorus which features guest vocals by Ringworm’s Human Furnace, who has never sounded better than this. When the break down comes, it’s huge. Stadium huge, which is only emphasized by Aaron Melnick’s vintage Hammett-style soloing. It pulls on you from inside your chest and lifts you up, or maybe pulls your down depending on how you’re looking at things. There are a few riffs/parts in songs that have given me goose bumps every time. For years this has been one.

Psychological Warfare brings back the slow crawl of Those Who Fear Tomorrow complete with “Micha” style plucky bass intro. It fits well after the up tempo openers. I think it (as well as the track Abraxas Annihilation) was written by Frank Novinec (formerly of Ringworm), and I also think these were his first creative contribution to the band. Both bring to mind the older Integrity sound but with more precision and less meandering.The lp closes with “Jagged Visions Of My True Destiny…” a contemplative hardcore approximation of Metallica’s “Fade To Black” that works the same kind of clean guitar intro and then builds it into a thick wall of anger and melancholy with of course, liberal guitar soloing. It may not be for everyone, but it’s definitely for me.

Copies of this record on pink vinyl are supposedly limited to less than 100 as it was a mis-press, however, I’ve seen a considerable amount in my life and would guess there’s at least 200. Nonetheless it’s the version of “Humanity” to have. The insert inside it has a photo of the band from their brief lineup with Bob Zeiger as drummer. He’s wearing an SDS shirt which is kind of cool, and Integrity were definitely making reference to various Japanese hardcore bands in interview material and whatnot at this point. Somewhere I have an ad for a G.I.S.M. tribute that Dwid was going go put out, hmmm. Tomorrow I promise not to write about a record from 1990’s Cleveland.

Dudes, dudettes, I’m back. In my weekend travels to Seattle, I learned a few things.

1. Layne Staley does not have a grave, he was cremated. R.I.P.
2. Ben Shepard owns a bar & parties hard.
3. When the sun comes out in Seattle, it’s actually shocking how beautiful it is.
4. Jive Time is a really well kempt record store. No bullshit.
5. Ethiopian food can clog my bowels for days. I think it’s that spongy bread.

Now that I’ve returned, you’re probably expecting something massive, but I’m afraid you’ll come up short. The Fuck-Ups “FU82″ 7″is hardly massive. Although it bills itself as a “6 song Mini lp” it’s really more of a “6 song 7″ E.P.” The Fuck Ups kinda sound like if Flipper was an actual hardcore band to me, but maybe meaner and less self hating. I guess it’s not surprising they have a Flipperish vibe as they come from the same scene, which is where Fang was from too. This is one of the first hardcore records to really get a reputation as reactionary, and being from the bay area, I’m sure they got a lot of shit for it. All these stupid ‘lofi hatepunk’ bands you’re hearing now owe their left nut to the Fuck Up’s crowd baiting.

The cover has the most disgusting looking baby ever taking a switchblade in the head. Fucking gross. It’s released on the band’s own Fowl records in a few different editions (either 2 or 3). I think there’s some peach covers, some green covers, and some pink covers, and I believe each says which pressing it is. Green is first maybe?

A killer. A crusher. The Worm… The Promise. This is one of the most classic records of the 90’s, standing the test of time twice over as far as I’m concerned. Ringworm’s debut lp “The Promise” is also quite notorious for sounding like total crap. The fact that it has overcome that infamy and is known firstly as just a great metallic hardcore album is quite a feat.

Ringworm released their demo in ‘91 (I think), and it has quite a bit to offer as basically a hybrid of Entombed, Cro Mags, Raw Deal, and Slayer. It’s pretty thick sounding not to mention one of the first recordings of its kind, and it prompted a “deal” and a little bit of cash from Incision Records to do an lp. According to liner notes in the reissue, the first day was spent dicking off, drunk as hell, and the next day the band realized they had nothing usable recorded. A couple days and a rush job later they had The Promise. There’s nothing wrong with it really, but it’s kind of thin sounding, and some of the rerecorded songs sound tighter on their demo. This is also part of the charm, it’s a punk band playing metal loose and simple and if it was different it wouldn’t quite be the same.

The Promise opens with a soundbite of some dude saying “There is no God” and then a quick guitar rev into the “Numb” intro. If Warzone were evil instead of good, maybe this is what their intro would have sounded like. It has some speedy tremolo picking and then eventually goes into a double bass-heavy chugging part. When the intro ends the band rip into Blind To Faith, a pretty straight forward anti-religion number and an all time classic. It cuts with a choppy crunch and thud like Raw Deal’s Tell Tale but again with more of an evil death metal type riffing style. The vocals come with an instantly recognizable and unique style and delivery, I’d expect nothing less from a singer known as The Human Furnace (seriously), and he really proves why he has that name because he spits straight FIRE. The album works its way through a few more tracks peppering the attack with some blast beats and single note tremolo stuff to enhance the death metal vibe, before coming to the title track and centerpiece of the album.

The Promise (the song) works a heavy minor key progression that almost borders on an actual melody. Vocals get some additional echo treatment which is surprisingly sparse for an album that’s this “metal”. A positively murderous breakdown ties this one up nice and neat with a good skank beat. The B-side takes off with Death Do Us Part which opens with a bass line worthy of a Breakdown demo but within about 20 seconds finds itself in Repulsion territory although the blasting isn’t quite as fast. Consumed is a 5 second jam which there’s also a version of on one of the Bleaurgh comps. It goes right into 13 Knots, a Ringworm fan fav. If you weren’t sure where the band stand on religion, I believe the proclamation in this song of “I have touched the face of God/and it is cold and it is dead” should help you along in figuring it out.

The original pressing of this record is on Orange vinyl as seen here, probably out of 1,000. I have seen a couple of black copies, and I recollect that the band seemed to not know about these existing. My guess would be there was an overrun of a couple hundred covers and the label pressed the black vinyl later to fill the covers out and sent them to distributors.

Got a fresh looking copy of Poison Idea’s “Record Collectors Are Pretentious Assholes”here. Original edition on Fatal Erection. For whatever reason I find this to be an unfairly disparaged P.I. release, often cited as being only “so-so” or something like that, and while I do agree that the Fatal Erection pressing is mixed TERRIBLY and sounds like garbage, the songs are still pretty crucial. I mean if A.A. isn’t a classic Poison Idea tune than what is? Or how about Cold Comfort or Thorn In My Side? That’s just the A-Side folks. On the flip you can find jams like Rich Get Richer, or maybe Time To Go will catch your fancy. All in all it’s just a little more rock/metal than Pick Your King, and not quite as tight as Kings Of Punk, but it’s still hot stuff. There’s a reissue with 4 other comp tracks from this session added to it (on Taang), here’s a shocker: they’re all good too. Poison Idea’s success rate in music is unprecedented, the only band comparable is Motorhead.

And now… a list of the records on the cover of this 12″ (via Westbrook & Cooch):

Adverts - One Chord Wonders 7″
Agent Orange - Your Mother Sucks Cocks In Hell 7″
Angelic Upstarts - Who Killed Liddle Towers 7″
Antidote - Thou Shalt Not Kill 7″Anti-Nowhere League - Streets Of London 7″
Avengers - We Are the Ones 7″
B.G.K. - White Male Dumbinance 7″
Bad Religion - S/T 7″
Bags - Survive 7″
Battalion Of Saints - Fighting Boys 12″
Big Boys/Dicks - Live At Raul’s 12″
Black Flag - Nervous Breakdown 7″
Charles Manson - Lie 12″
Child Molesters - Wir Lieben Die Jugendlich Madchen 12″
Cockney Rejects - Greatest Hits Vol. 1 12″
Crime - Hotwire My Heart 7″
Damned - Black Album 12″
Dead Boys - Sonic Reducer 7″
Dickies - Banana Splits 7″
Dickies - Dawn Of the Dickies 12″
E.A.T.E.R. - Doomsday Troops 7″
Elvis Presley - several 45s
Fartz - Because This World Fuckin Stinks 7″
Fix - Vengeance 7″
Germs - Lexicon Devil 7″
Germs - GI 12″
Johnny Moped - Cycledelic 12″
Kangrena - Terorismo Sonoro 7″
Legionaire’s Disease Band - Rather See You Dead 7″
Meatmen - We’re The Meatmen 12″
Menace - Screwed Up 12″
Misfits - Beware 12″
Misfits - Cough Cool 7″
Misfits - Horror Business 7″
Motorhead - S/T 12″
Necros - IQ32 7″
Nikoteens - Aloah-Oehh LP
Noncens - s/t 7″
Out Of Our Heads - Riot EP 7″
Poison Idea - Pick Your King 7″ (crumpled up cover)
Quick And The Dead - Another Violent Night 7″
Rough - S/T 7″
S.O.A. - No Policy EP 7″
Saints - I’m Stranded 12″
Shitlickers - Cracked Cop Skulls 7″
Skrewdriver - All Skrewed Up 12″
Skrewdriver - Voice Of Britain 7″
Subhumans - s/t 12″
Teen Idles - Minor Disturbance 7″
Tesco Vee - Dutch Hurcules 12″
Ultimo Resorte 7″
United Mutations - Fugitive Family 7″
V/A - Tooth and Nail 12″
V/A - Yes L.A. 12″
V/A - Oi! The Album 12″
V/A - What Records comp 7″
Wretched / Indigesti - split 7″
Youth Brigade - Sound and Fury 12″
Touch & Go Fanzine - Issue 21
Skinhead book, Manson book, Elvis book

Found this Die Kreuzen s/t 12″ on red vinyl. I think the red ones are a mid-80’s pressing but they’re definitely hard to come by, and of course T&G has since deleted the vinyl from their catalog.

Die Kreuzen’s s/t 12″ was a life changer for me. I hadn’t really heard a hardcore album that had so much unsettling atmosphere and creepiness, and found the tightness of everything rather disarming too. The vocals are an unearthly shriek, later copied on the first Rorschach lp, although not really with the same level of all out ferocity. The drumming rhythmic and churning, often staccato resulting in a more precise interplay between the drumming and the guitars than was common in hardcore in 1984, at others, getting lost in vengeful hardcore freak outs. The guitars buzz and ring with liberal amounts of chorus and echo applied so that they’re left sounding alien and disharmonious. It’s almost mechanical the way the band is locked into eachother. I think this is the kind of syncronized experience Ginn always strived for with Black Flag, but never quite picked the right people to execute. Not to say this is a Black Flag clone, although maybe it is the alienated small town midwest issolation version of their seedy Hollywood creepy crawl.

The sound of Die Kreuzen is just an unhealthy one. It’s feel-bad. It’s kind of the sound of someone who’s thinking too much put to music. Your mind races and spirals around and around and then gets stuck in slow motion for a minute before spiraling down again. You feel slow and stupid, suddenly you’re manic, you feel hot and dizzy and sweat, then it turns cold and your chest feels tight. It’s hard to breathe, you feel nauseous and your surroundings look dim.  They’re paranoid and intense, unearthly and almost hyper real. It’s a fever dream sucked into a chorus pedal.

Michigan… what the hell would you possibly want to go there for? Maybe to find some “tasty HC rippers”. The racket that started as the Stooges and MC5 in the late 60’s begot plenty of interesting hardcore and punk by the late 70s.

The Fix - “Jan’s Room”. It’s not as legendary as the Vengeance 7″, and really not as good either but Jan’s Room is still a stone cold killer. This one has the cool spray painted insert too. While originally they kind of had a vibe like 3-chord rock ‘n roll  gone over the edge on speed, this one is more brutal and less tuneful. Starting with “Cos The Elite” they kick into high gear like an Americanized factory-town Discharge. The drums lead the song off sounding percise and muscular, betraying their rock ‘n roll roots but when the guitar comes in it’s ugly as hell. They’re a thick overdriven wash that sits on top of everything else and just drills into your ears. The bass is nice and muddy (no twang) and the vocals bark a harsh monotone like an improved version of S.O.A. era Rollins. Truth Right Now continues along the same lines, but side B opens with Signal, a total pace change. First of all they’ve tuned down to C for this track, I guess in order to sound heavier as they play through a couple minutes of slow chugging dirge, building tension with an ominous circular pattern on the toms. The end of the song provides the tension release that’s more in line with the rest of the record’s icy and angry smash and bash sound, that continues into the closer Off To War (the most obvious Discharge style jam).

Aside from test pressings and whatnot, this is the rarest H-100’s item that I know of the Dismantle 7″ on clear vinyl w/ a clear cover. Supposedly there’s 25 that are numbered and another 25, like this one that aren’t numbered. Ignorant, raw, and violent as fuck, the H-100’s rep has grown and grown since their brief existence, and the members have gone on to be in almost every subsequent hardcore/punk band from Cleveland worth caring about. As I’ve said in a previous Inmates entry, this is practically the only thing from the mid-90s in the USA that actually still matters. While everyone else was into who knows what (Screeching Weasel? Submission Hold? Outspoken?) these demented boys were rabidly devouring and regurgitating the best thrashing hardcore from Japan (Systematic Death - who they later covered, Gauze, The Comes, etc.) and chasing it with the self destructive hi-jinks (and sounds) of some of the most classic and low-brow American bands (Poison Idea, Battalion Of Saints, the Nihilistics). Oh there was also copious amounts of drug abuse and violent live shows I’ve only heard about involving various projectiles, weapons, and general misanthropic activity. I mean this is how legends are made, you do something cool, you mix it with something crazy, and then you break up. I believe in total there were something like 15 H-100’s shows over a couple years, maybe someone can confirm this in the comments section.

Dismantle remains my favorite, and their most collectible record, self released on Bloodclot Records with a graphic of a giant syringe stuck in a dude’s back on the front and tracks with titles like “Gonna Knock Your Teeth Out”, “Ain’t Too Young To Die”, and “Panic Attack” it really doesn’t leave much to the listener’s imagination. So many bands kick a specific image on their records, they sing about politics they have no involvement in, or personal ideals no human being could live up to, in other words they stretch the truth and lie. Well reader, here is a record that tells the truth. It tells it like it is. Every word, and every sound is the truth. The violence and depravity and buzzsaw guitars and skull bash drums - it’s not fake. Even the recording itself is just as direct and truthful. There’s no absurd over production or studio trickery, nor is there any excess distortion or noise pumped into the mix to make it sound “more raw”. You just hear 4 men getting sweaty in a room together making noise for themselves and anyone else who might “get it”.

“I was born/so now I suffer…”