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Hey what’s up everybody? I’m stoked to be writing my first Sorry State Newsletter staff pick. My name’s Kestrel AKA Grubbs. I lived in Raleigh for around 7 years playing in different bands and then I moved to the northwest, bouncing around Oregon, northern California and Washington. I’m now staying on a land project in Siler City with some cool people. I decided to make the hour long drive to Raleigh four days a week to work at Sorry State because I love working and hanging with these psychos. I’ve been slowly learning how to balance Sorry State work with my night classes at Alamance Community College. I enrolled this semester for the welding program, and I’ve been loving every second. When I started this metalworking trade a few years ago, I was listening to a lot of bands that, I would say, have a natural congruence with metalworking like Sabbath, Dokken and of course Metallica... duh. I swear Tooth and Nail was on repeat for an embarrassing amount of time. As far as Metallica goes, there truly is nothing like forming and melting steel while blasting Ride the Lightning. It’s like time travel. Anyway on to my first staff pick. I’m going with A D-beat Odyssey by Wolfbrigade this week. I’ve been jamming this on headphones while I’ve been in welding shop class and it just gets me cooking... know what I mean? I’ve listened to a lot of different albums while welding, but this one just FITS. The super epic crust chorus on the second track puts me in a totally different time while I’m melting steel. I totally get why Rob Miller of Amebix became a swordsmith. As an added bonus to this stellar record, Poffen from Totalitar joined up to do guest vocals because Micke of Wolfbrigade lost his voice and found out he had a tumor on his throat. I really like the back-and-forth vocals, but to be perfectly honest I wouldn’t mind if Poffen did vocals for the entire record. Although I would say I really do like the handful of times where Micke has these crazy vocal rhythms that just sound straight up EVIL. That’s a weird thing to say... A vocal rhythm sounding evil.. I don’t know how to explain it further, but maybe it’s also just that the evilness is more than the sum of its parts. Anyway this Swedish crust/punk group kills it and I applaud them for continuing to release solid raw punk records into the early 2000s.