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Various: Finnish Drunks: Punks Is Hippies 12” (1995, no label)
As I mentioned at the top of the newsletter, I had a busy week last week. Poison Ruin and Beton Arme played here in North Carolina on Tuesday, we squeezed in a Scarecrow practice on the same night, and first thing the next morning I was off on a trip to buy a collection. The collection was in the northwestern part of Virginia, so of course I made a pit stop in Richmond on my way back. If you follow Vinyl Conflict’s social media, you know they recently bought a huge punk collection, and their bins and walls were lit up with international hardcore punk. I picked up a big stack for myself that I’m still going through, and I’m sure I’ll cover a bunch of my scores in future staff picks.
Since I was writing about bootlegs just a few weeks ago, this compilation LP seems like a great place to start. I’ve always been partial to LPs that compile several rare punk EPs in their entirety. A few of these compilations were crucial in developing my taste: Dischord’s Four Old 7”s on a 12”; the bootleg New York hardcore LP that compiled seminal EPs by Antidote, Urban Waste, the Abused, and the Mob; and the similar 4-way split with Mecht Mensch, Clitboys, Active Ingredients, and the Catatonics. I listened to all these to death when I first got them. At the time, it was the only way to hear these records, other than friends making mixes for you. And while bootlegs typically pale compared to official reissues, they beat the hell out of a dubbed cassette, especially when reproductions of the original artwork are included.
According to Discogs, Finnish Drunks: Punks Is Hippies came out in 1995, and the LP compiles 5 Finnish hardcore EPs: Mellakka’s Ei and Itsenäisyyspäivä EPs, Äpärät’s Häiriköt Tulee EP, Painajainen’s Todistusaineistoa EP, and Rutto’s Ilmastoitu Painajainen. The LP says “Made in Japan,” and while you should never trust a bootleg’s proclaimed point of origin, there could be some truth to this one. Certainly Finnish Drunks is the type of high-quality record I expect from Japan. The sound quality is excellent—as good as I would expect from an official reissue (which is impressive since this bootleg came out before any of these EPs came out on CD)—and the artwork is clean and well-executed, including insert sheets with full reproductions of the original EPs’ layouts. While all these records save the Painajainen EP have been officially reissued, I’m still going to play the hell out of this LP because it’s so convenient and it looks and sounds so great.
Speaking of reissues, if you want to get the music compiled here, it shouldn’t be too hard. I believe Havoc Records’ Mellakka discography CD is still in print, and just a few years ago Svart Records did a box set containing beautiful reproductions of both their EPs alongside a previously unreleased demo from 1986. Mellakka is one of the greatest Finnish punk bands ever, so these songs should be in your collection in some form or another. Äpärät’s EP got a repress in 2022 on Voltage Records, and the Rutto EP’s reissue on Final Doomsday Records is still in stock at Sorry State (along with their reissue of the band’s other EP). As I mentioned, the Painajainen EP hasn’t been reissued… not sure why, but it’s a missed opportunity… I love the unhinged vocal performance and quirky, Rattus-esque sound on this one.
In 2025, a bootleg like this should be obsolete. Just about everything worth hearing has seen an official reissue, and what hasn’t is usually easy to find on youtube. Yet there’s something about the way this record’s creators put it together, the care they put into selecting these five records and presenting them to their audience, that feels significant to me. And assuming this was made and distributed mostly in Japan, to think this LP may have directly inspired some killer Japanese hardcore in the latter half of the 90s is pretty cool, too.