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What the fuck is wrong with people? This is not even a real record. It’s a toy. Also the same seller (Max Ward - of Spazz) is selling a bunch of other Spazz stuff. My rule of thumb: buy any Spazz record for $5 or less, there will be a good riff on it, but there will be some samples from school house rock every 15 seconds. I still dig La Revancha. 

I’m surprised the goons in that band Straight Edge Kegger haven’t tried to release a 7″ bootleg of the Spazz 1″ yet. I’m sure they will.

Funfact: Derek Scace’s wife released the mysterious Spazz/Slobber split. I heard there was some 90’s beef over it.

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…

Dropdead/Crossed Out split ep. One of the gasps of greatness from the original power violence wave, and one to foreshadow awful 2nd wave trends. For one this is a 5″. The funniest looking, worst sounding format there is. For another it’s a three-way label split. YIKES.

Regardless this is some of the finest material by both bands. Actually in the case of Crossed Out its some of the ONLY material. Kind of a mind melter, but the Crossed Out 7″ was recorded in September of ‘91, this split in February of ‘92, and their second split in October of ‘92. In other words the output of one of the most influential bands in extreme music was all laid to tape at various intervals over about 400 days (unless you count the demo where they’re not really full formed yet). One of the more striking aspects of this Crossed Out material is that it’s much more muddy and lofi than their previous 7″. It’s full of tape hiss, and has almost no treble whatsoever. The vocals are high in the mix and distorted as hell, with the guitar and bass making a thick wall of mud, and the drums sounding like a cave man beating on animal skins. 

Dropdead has been a little more prolific but I’m pretty sure their tracks on here are still in the live set. About 2 minutes and change of high speed, lo-fi crusty grind core… or power violence, or whatever, and it sounds pretty much how they’ve sounded ever since. A blitzkrieg of simple speedy riffs, shrieking throat ripping vocals, and a collision of d-beatish parts, and SSD at double speed. It’s great how much the original hardcore paradigm is just simplified and compacted into the simplest most streamlined form here. Yea there’s bands that have taken it further or gone more extreme, but this is still fully recognizable as hardcore, even though every track runs like 15 or 20 seconds. Only thing that’s kind of annoying - it’s impossible for me to play this side without it starting a couple seconds into the first song, but I’m sure people have been griping about that since it came out.  

Brian if you’re reading this please post about smoking pot and playing sonic the hedgehog with Crossed Out on tour w/ Dropdead. That would be sweet. Only 1000 made ever, and a handful of 7″ versions in the form of test pressings.  

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Early in my hardcore career I heard Infest’s classic Slave and Mankind records and of course fell in love. It was soon thereafter that I heard the legend of the lost Infest lp that was supposedly recorded in 1995, and had languished, unfinished, and unreleased ever-since. It seemed to good too be true, but there was a real-audio file (HA!) of one song from it (Nazi Killer) posted on the Deep Six website for ages. Still nothing could prepare me for the fateful week in August of 2002 when an album titled “Infest - No Man’s Slave” showed up in the weekly Ebullition distro update. When I finally got my paws on No Mans Slave I couldn’t even believe it. The wait was over.

I remember there were copies at a show in New Jersey (courtesy the Dead Alive Distro - Jon Collins R.I.P.) that Think I Care was playing (back when they had some Infest in their sound) and I found the whole band standing in a circle with a copy of the lp. I bought one and took it home to my parent’s empty house in Virginia the next day, cued up my Dad’s stereo, and blasted it about 6 times straight through, which wasn’t too hard, because the running time is less than 15 minutes. No Man’s Slave is a funny record in some ways. Like the other Infest records it has a picture on the cover that’s been used on other records before, and after. The live photos in it are all of a late 80’s/early 90’s vintage (Joe Denunzio decked out in a sick Larm shirt). Most of the songs have 2 different titles. One on the back cover, and a different one in the lyric sheet. I still haven’t figured out the reason for any of this other than, “it’s Infest”. But that aside, this is simply one of the best “comeback” lps ever made in hardcore, or otherwise.

In the Infest cannon it has its own place too. For one the production sound is updated a bit, but doesn’t lose what made the band great to begin with. It still uses just one guitar and one bass track (like the Mankind 7″), presumably run direct, accounting for how saturated they sound. They’re a bit crisper than earlier recordings, but it gives the record a certain sharpness that Infest never had before. Gone is the original rhythm section, with Visual Discrimination journeyman R.D. Davies holding down the drums quite swimmingly, and founder Matt Domino doing the bass tracks Dale Nixon style. Joe Denunzio returns essentially the same, although some of his lyrics like “Sick Man” and “Contact” get into darker waters than previous releases. Many of the songs are the shortest, most direct numbers Infest ever dreamed up, in some ways answering the extremities other bands had gone to since they dissolved.

All of this is part of what makes No Man’s Slave its own unique entity. While it’s true to the classic Infest releases, it keeps its own flavor which helps it to be more than just a reunion record, and of course has kept it in my rotation since it dropped 7 years back (well 6 and a half). Some of these tracks have even become, ehh I guess you could say, fan favorites. I’ve seen cover renditions of Cold Inside and  Peace Test more than once in recent years. Even heard of some band named after the album. Of course I don’t think you could dispute the finest track being My World My Way. Originally it was played as a slow Melvins/Gore style instrumental on Infest’s 1991 KXLU radio appearance (later released as a live lp on Deep 6), but it takes on a new level of power on No Man’s Slave, with Denunzio adding a touch of lyrical accompaniment. This is probably the longest Infest song ever, and the perfect way to end their final record. 5 minutes of crunching sludge, and long sustained notes.

When this record came out there were supposedly 100 copies on blue for mailorder and 100 band only copies on yellow. I’ve never seen a yellow one, but I’ve been assured they exist. Anyway this thing has been getting more and more expensive over the years. Glad I have one.

Chopping Block’s - Grizzley Fetishis one that almost slipped through the cracks. I didn’t know about it til a few years ago when a couple of superior Toronto collectors started telling me about this band that sounded just like Infest that had a self released 7″ w/ TX Chainsaw art on the cover. Sounded far too good to be true, but after some work I managed to track a copy down, and I was stunned by just how much it did sound like the classic Infest sound. The main difference was the more technical double bass drumming, and the more metallic guitar tone and rather showy solos. Still this was undeniable power core with meaty riffs and faux-Joe Denunzio vocals, overall better than Lack Of Interest attempting to do the same. I enjoyed it and even wrote about it on a former blog, in search of a copy on red vinyl.

 Then things got kind of weird. I started poking around the net trying to find info on band members and somehow came upon Dave Keck, the main man behind Chopping Block. According to him, he’d grown up with the Infest guys, attending the same schools and parties and had maybe had some involvement in one of those mysterious pre-Infest bands (Death-Dose maybe?). Somewhere in the early days of Infest he was a member, but soon found himself ousted, and while he remained friends with Domino and co. he went on to form his own version of the band, Chopping Block. Now I may be misquoting the facts. Due to my poor correspondence abilities I lost touch with Mr. Keck, but it was some weird shit to hear. Not like Infest ever had a rep for being particularly trustworthy (undelivered mail-orders, sketchy ltd editions).

All I know is Grizzley Fetish is hot top to bottom and the record looks cool. My only complaint aside from the aforementioned guitar solos is the absurd amount of samples. I think there’s one before EVERY song. 90’s style.

Every time one of these gets sold it goes a little higher. I think in a few more years people will really be onto it, so even if Infest is guilty of the crimes they’re accused, eventually Chopping Block will get their due.

Well, few sub-genres have started with as much promise and more quickly devolved into tepid worthlessness than “power violence”, but to this day, the records that originated the style still have an impressive sound and delivery, as well as a magnetic mystique. Just last week I heard that Bastard Noise is planning to incorporate drums and guitars for the first time ever in their live set, essentially reconstituting as maybe the first true PV nostalgia act, unless you want to count Low Threat Profile. I’m just being real here.

You can’t take away that Neanderthal’s Fighting Music e.p. is still a one of a kind twisted brain crusher. Totally apart from anything else happening in 1990, though it does make some sense they did a split release with Rorschach, who are maybe the closest thing to their madness. And still no collection of their tiny output has been released. How long would it take to make those 8 songs available again?

No Comment’s Downsided ought to see a repressing too. I think at this point their discography is out of print, and frankly someone ought to do a straight re-release of this classic with the giant poster sleeve, and perfect 11 song running order. For hardcore very few things come close to this one.

Both of these are “bonzer status” rarities. 300 Neanderthals on purple, only about 15 No Comments on pink. Both I expect to go for a high price. Seller is none other than the man that released them, Chris Dodge. He will certainly ”take this to the fucking bank”.

What’s to say when talking about the most important records in your life? When I was 17, I got my brain ripped out by Infest’s “Slave” lp, and when they picked it up off the floor and stuck it back in a bunch of the wires were crossed. After that it was a long chain of events that got me to here. Siege, Deep Wound, Drop Dead, Citizen’s Arrest, Voorhees, No Comment, Crossed Out, Negative FX. It was before everything was a click away on Soulseek, and so it took about a year of borrowing, and scouring to hear most of it, but I feel like Slave was the first time really thrashy brutal hardcore left a lasting effect on me.I’ve already kind of done an entry on this album, because I did an entry on the abridged version of it - the Machismo 7″. Slave is the same recording, but with 8 additional songs and was released in Europe on Off The Disk.  It was Highly Collectible (™ B. Mastrobuono) and hard to get even when it was released, and now with the revived interest in this sort of hardcore, it’s become all the more valuable and high priced. I picked up most of my copies of this lp in the early 2000’s when interest was relatively low, although a couple years ago I paid an exorbitant amount for a pink vinyl copy of which there’s supposed to be less than 50. After that, the next rarest version is allegedly the one I’ve linked here, which is a different color on each side of the record. I’ve seen a few different variations, but this one is blue and sea foam looking. Who knows if the price will ever drop on this stuff again? Might as well pay up now, you couldn’t do it for a better album. Even the repress with alternate cover art is fetching some loot these days after all.

Well here’s one from back in the day -
Man Is The Bastard / Capitalist Casualties split 12″. By that I mean: 1994. Possibly the worst year for hardcore. Certainly one of them anyway. This is a pretty cool record though, a career highlight for both Man In The Bastard, and Capitalist Casualties, both synonymous with so many patch distros from years past (ALL PATCHES ARE PRINTED ON RECYCLED FABRIC…specifically my mom’s curtains). This thing is starting to fetch some cash and is quite outta print. I actually need a vinyl copy if someone wants to trade. It’s one of 2 or 3 MITB recs I still need to get.

Cap Cas on this one still sound pretty good, if not much different from a lot of their other releases. At this point they’d started to lose their 80’s sound which was basically a copy of the first Cryptic Slaughter lp, and started incorporating more of the normal and expected aspects of “power violence”. It wasn’t really that much different, but I feel like stuff such as The Art of Ballistics was just more straight up hardcore. It’s weird they’d already been a band for 7 or 8 years at the point this was released. For mid-90’s Cap Cas though this is some of the best. My favorite will always be their earlier Raised Ignorant 7″ though. These guys like speed. There’s not really a whole lot I can say about them because they’re so simple. Kind of like the way Out Cold or someone is, although they sound way different. They’re just content to get fucked up and write really ripping hardcore forever. Mucho respect.

Man Is The Bastard side on this one is night to Cap Cas’ day. I’d rank this maybe in their top 5 recordings if I was going to make a list (and last time I counted there’s 19 or 20 that I know of). It’s from a time when Eric Wood was cool, as opposed to now where he’s into arbitrarily dubbing random myspace-violence bands as “getting it”… oh and he wears a Locust shirt (I’m saying the party was over when that Locust MITB split came out…what a bummer). I’m sorry I just can’t let it slide. This is why people don’t like me. What I’m getting at though, is that at one time anyway, the dude was a genius and surrounded himself with equally sharp collaborators. This release is even from the MITB phase that included No Comment’s Andy Beattie on additional vocals (you can check my previous No Comment posts to see what I think of Mr. Beattie). Foot Binding (first song) rips it out like a deconstructed PCP fueled thrash metal nightmare. The riffing is dizzying and it’s a perfect summation of the insane rage and power that the hardcore aspect of Man Is The Bastard’s sound delivered. Typical MITB protocol was flipping the shit on you just when you’d got your footing with them. Track 2, Feeding The Octopus, does just that, busting out a 4 and a half minute instrumental workout augmented by various creepy electronic buzzes and hums. As a band they’re a total exploration of “brutality” (a word dulled by its overuse in reference to HC at this point) and as such, it seems like they can’t not juxtapose a hardcore rager like the first song with this kind of sludgy progressive shred fest - they want you to make that connection, or they know you already have.  There’s 3 other “career bests” on here too. MITB wins the cup for best side of this release, and that’s not meant to be a slight on Cap Cas, but there’s just more for me to sink my teeth into here.

As an after thought, I do wanna say I have a lot of respect for Mr. Wood, I’m just not seeing eye to eye with his current interests, which is alright, such is life. Anyway, he took the time to drop The Crumbsuckers in a recent interview as a favorite record, and for that alone I give him a pat on the back, a tip of the hat, and maybe a “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” too. Love/Hate mail can be addressed to cc@bidhardcore.com.

All who know me are aware of my absolute admiration for the music of Infest. For me, only Minor Threat and the Bad Brains ever made more of an impact on my mind. The first time I heard Infest was in art class senior year of high school. My friend James had bought a bootleg CD discography and I popped it in while doing classwork. It was one of those moments of total paradigm shift. I’d seen plenty of shirts and patches with the Infest logo on them, but I really couldn’t have been more blindsided by how they sounded. The singer sounded crazy, like the burliest thing I’ve ever heard, the music was blindingly fast but definitely hardcore, and with constant changes of tempo. Actually it was the tempo changing that stuck out to me early. I’d heard bands play at hi-speed before, but introducing new riffs and constantly stopping and starting again every few seconds was new to me. Break The Chain (the first song on the CD which had the Slave lp first) managed 5 or 6 different parts in about 25 seconds. At the time this seemed so impressive.

Early on I noticed Infest was a band that anyone could like. Dirty punks, straight-edgers, grind-core dudes, you could see any of them repping the same Infest gear at any given time - a rare occurrence in the segregated worlds which each inhabits. Within a year I picked up the Slave lp and Mankind 7″, which were easily findable on Deep 6 at the time. Freshman year of college I used to mosh around my room to Mankind when my roommates were out, or jam along on guitar. Some of my more purist straight edge friends occasionally gave me shit for listening to some “crust punk grindcore shit”, but it never held much water with me. Sick-O nullified any possible criticism that someone might level, anyway their logo had some positive dude in sneakers and a flat top breaking the chains.

I was pretty confused at first what the deal with the first Infest 7″was, but in a nutshell, they recorded an lp’s worth of songs, issued 10 of them on a s/t 7″ (also referred to as the Machismo 7″) on their own label (Draw Blank), and then around the same time licensed the whole session to Off The Disk records from Switzerland who issued all 18 songs as the Slave lp. Same songs, same recording, just one has more. Machismo was run off in an edition of 1,000, with clear and purple vinyl copies being extremely scarce variations. Even the black vinyl though goes for around $50 nowadays. It’s been bootlegged a few times, but some changes were made to the layout so that it’s easy to tell. This copy also seems to have a couple stickers included which is pretty cool.

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.