News

This week’s topic on the Sorry State blog is “great albums with a glaring flaw.” We’ll see how everyone else here at SSR interprets that idea, but for me I’m going to talk about two great albums that each have one song I don’t really like.

Being a loser is one of the most venerable themes in rock music history… of course we all know that Beck song, but everyone from Motorhead to the Stalin to the Beatles has taken a stab at writing a loser anthem. However, the subject of winning is a lot less common in rock music. Perhaps it’s less common because it’s really difficult to write a cool song about winning. Case in point, two of my favorite records: Leatherface’s Mush and the Sound’s From the Lion’s Mouth.

I’m sure I’ve mentioned before how much time I’ve spent with Mush in my life. There’s a good ten-year stretch during which I would have called Mush my favorite album, and while it doesn’t quite hit as hard for me as it did during my early 20s, it’s still a great album that never fails to bring a smile to my face. That is, with the exception of the track “Winning,” which has always been my least favorite on the album. Admittedly, it would have been hard to keep the cresting wave of the record’s previous three songs—“Not a Day Goes By,” “Not Superstitious,” and “Springtime”—going forever, but “Winning” is a steep drop, particularly since Mush is marred by few other dicey choices. I actually really like the song’s catchy main riff—it’s pretty much classic Leatherface—but something about the way the syllables are drawn out across the chorus has always been like nails on a chalkboard to me. In the chorus, Frankie Stubbs sings the word “Winning” twice in close succession, and he experiments with different phrasings for the lyric throughout the song. Despite the varied approaches, he never really lands on one that works. My least favorite is the iteration that comes at about 1:37, when the two enunciations of the titular word are bridged together with a hissy scream that could have come from a Carcass record, the overdubbed scream overlapping slightly with the words on each side. It’s not an offense against music or anything, it’s just an idea that doesn’t really come together, which only sticks out because pretty much every other idea on this record does come together.

Another great songwriter, Adrian Borland of the Sound, also struggles with prosody as he attacks the theme of “Winning” on the album From the Lion’s Mouth. Like Stubbs, Borland wrenches and stretches the word, often adding in multiple extra syllables in order to bend the word into a melody. As was the case with Leatherface’s track, I have a particular least favorite moment: at about the 1:50 mark, when Borland pronounces the word “win-ay-EEEENG.” Again, the word seems jammed uncomfortably into the melody, and has always struck out to me as a bump in the road on an otherwise outstanding album.

Is there something in the word “winning”—whether it’s the sense of the word or just the sound—that makes it difficult to write a good song around? My only hunch is that winning is usually a transitive verb—meaning that it takes an object, i.e. you have to win something—and both of these tracks omit any discernible object… they’re just about “winning” in general. Maybe if you focused on the winner and/or the spoils you’d be on firmer footing.

---

Neon: Neon Is Life cassette (self-released) It’s only recently that I’ve come to the realization that most of the music that I listen to is extraordinarily stiff and regimented. You’d think that I would have noticed before, but I listened to this kind of music so exclusively that I honestly barely even considered anything that operated outside of the standard rock framework music at all. However, lately I’ve just wanted to listen to music that is really free… I’ve been listening to more jazz, soundtracks, prog, and other forms of music that feel less regimented than punk rock. While these forms operate with their own sets of rules and conventions, the frameworks these groups work within feel wider in scope and more filled with possibility; at the very least, I’m unfamiliar enough with those possibilities that they feel really new and exciting. Anyway, I write about this little personal journey because Neon, to me, sounds like hardcore punk that is completely free. I don’t really understand the way the beats work, the melodies are consistently surprising, and the individual elements clash against one another in ways that feel almost totally chaotic, but it’s played deliberately enough that no one would mistake it for nonsense. Neon shares members with Mozart, and while Mozart sounds loose and wild, Neon sounds almost like they’ve never heard punk rock before, like they’re making it up on the spot. And for that reason listening to it right now is just as exciting as when I first heard punk as a teenager.

EEL: Night Parade of 100 Demons 12” (Beach Impediment) I have to hand it to Mark at Beach Impediment… he has a real ear for bands that take hardcore to some new, weird, and exciting places. While he has a reputation for meat and potatoes ‘core (and I suppose there’s a fair share of that in the catalog with bands like Vaaska, Paranoid, Warthog, and Katastrof), when you look at the discography there are just as many bands that are still hardcore but are just weird… Omegas, Concealed Blade, and Gas Rag are quirky as hell, but EEL are the quirkiest of them all. On the surface they’re a noise-punk band a la Confuse, but their music is hardly limited by the constraints of that genre. It also doesn’t sound like they’re constrained by their own aesthetic in the way that a band like Lebenden Toten is… Lebenden Toten is really distinctive, but they tend to evolve their formula in small, deliberate steps. EEL, however, just sound like they’re doing whatever the fuck they want. The world is a messy and ugly place so most of EEL’s music is messy and ugly, but there are brief moments of triumph in life and those might get articulated here as an Uchida-inspired guitar solo, and there are also moments of pure headbanging fun, so you need to grab a chunk of a Flower Travellin Band song to capture those. It doesn’t feel like EEL want to pin me down and show me who they are; instead, they want me to come with them to their world and look around for myself. It’s a world I definitely haven’t been to before, and it’s one that I’m pretty sure I’ll be revisiting often over the course of the next several weeks and months. In other words, this is undoubtedly one of my favorite records of 2017, and if you like your hardcore freaky you should probably check it out.

Genpop: S/T 7” (Lumpy) There is an invisible line somewhere out there in the music world, and on one side of that line lies bands that are hardcore, and on the other side are bands that are not. While someone who is smarter about music’s formal qualities could probably tell you precisely why some bands lie on one side of the line and some on the other, to me it’s a mystery why bands and tracks that share hardcore’s tempos—the fast songs on Wire’s Pink Flag, Stink-era Replacements, even some Parquet Courts songs—just don’t qualify as hardcore. That’s not meant as a slag on either side, but there’s something in their music that allows me to say unequivocally that those bands are not hardcore. However, Genpop seem completely unaware of this line, or perhaps they’re musical geniuses that have found a way to dance back and forth across it. The first two songs on this EP, at the very least, have moments that are undoubtedly hardcore, but there are moments that definitely aren’t hardcore as well. For the remaining three tracks I’m not really sure if they’re hardcore or not, but they’re really, really good, particularly the closing track, “Dear Jackie,” which is as anthemic, and sing-song-y and memorable as anything by Jawbreaker or Dillinger Four. It’s not so much that Genpop mix hardcore with pop music or post-punk or whatever, but rather that they can magically morph from being a hardcore band into being a not-hardcore (more-than-hardcore?) band in the blink of an eye. As someone who loves, in equal measure, hardcore and whatever kind of catchy, upbeat, and powerful genre you’d describe the rest of this music as, this morphing is exhilarating, and moreover it makes me appreciate both sides of the band’s sound even more than I probably would have otherwise. I really can’t recommend this one highly enough.

Note: the EP contains two extra tracks not in this youtube clip

Urchin: Peace Sign 7” (Roach Leg) Second 7” from this band who I believe is based in New York. The generic description says something like “Stoke-on-Trent via Gothenburg,” but I’m hearing the latter a lot more than the former. In particular, it seems like the legendary Shitlickers 7” is a major influence here. Maybe it’s just because I’ve been listening to that record a lot recently (thanks Negative Insight zine!), but this has a very similar vibe, i.e. faster and more hardcore-sounding (i.e. less d-beat sounding) than Anti-Cimex, but just as noisy and raw. There is a reason that so many bands emulate that 7”, but it’s very rare that anyone even gets in the ballpark… Urchin definitely do though. It’s hard to imagine anything topping this for the title of “most raging record of the month.” Highly recommended.

Rashomon: Demo 2017 7” (Society Bleeds) Vinyl pressing from this DC hardcore band’s demo, and I’m happy for the chance to revisit it and have it on a slightly more permanent-feeling format, because this is one of my favorite demos of this year. Obviously Japanese hardcore is a big influence here given the band’s name and the fact that they sing in Japanese, but you can definitely hear that influence coming through in the music as well. Rashomon are a lot faster than what I typically think of as the burning spirits sound, putting them more in the area of Cry of Truth-era Warhead or perhaps faster Bastard songs like “Dear Cops.” However, they add some really killer lead playing on top that really gives Rashomon a distinctive sound. The leads are kind of squirrely and unexpected, nothing like the more neo-classical metallic leads that Chelsea played, but nearly as earworm-y nonetheless. It’s one of those rare recordings that both gives you that immediate, visceral charge of energy that you want from hardcore, but also has a lot of depth and nuance to keep you coming back for repeated listens. I really can’t recommend this one highly enough.

Humiliation: Laughing Wall 7” (High Fashion Industries) Second EP from this Phoenix band that has a couple of the guys who used to be in Gay Kiss. I mention that not only because you mention ex-members of in these types of things, but also because Humiliation have a very similar sound and vibe. Perhaps if you sucked a little bit of the mysterious guy HC / black metal vibes out of Gay Kiss and turned the “hardcore” knob up just a touch you’d have Humiliation. Fortunately, they also have those dark, quirky, and strange leads that bring to mind Rudimentary Peni, which definitely helps to elevate this a touch above your typical desperate hardcore kind of sound. The production is also huge and powerful… it’s an absolute crusher that will peel the paint off your walls if you turn it up loud enough. Highly recommended.

Permission: S/T 12” (La Vida Es Un Mus) Debut vinyl from this new UK band that—judging by the distinctive guitar sound—features Ralph from No and DiE on guitar. I’ve spent quite a lot of time with this Permission record, and I feel like no description that I can write is really going to do it justice, but I’ll try nevertheless. Part of the reason that I feel stymied is because this record has a very different feel than most hardcore records I hear nowadays. It seems like bands nowadays tend to focus a lot of their attention on nailing a particular style—whether it’s one that they’re directly adapting (less generous people might say copying) from a single band or trying to create something new out of a stew of a handful of influences—but I don’t get that sense with Permission. By contrast, Permission strike me as very expressionistic, that they’re less focused on what the end product of their music sounds like and more on accessing and grappling with whatever emotions, thoughts, feelings, or whatever motivates them to play music in the first place. So, when I say that this record reminds me of Rudimentary Peni, it’s less because any particular formal choice the band has made in songwriting or production reminds me of them (though there are a few that do, notably how the slightly out-of-tune double-tracked guitars remind me of the strange chorus effect on a lot of Rudi Peni records), but rather that this 12” seems to have the weight of deep psychological struggle behind it in a way that’s similar to some of the best Rudimentary Peni records, particularly Death Church. While this is sense of psychological or emotional depth is ostensibly what a lot of us are after in music, ironically it makes the music a little tougher to get into. This is music you have to engage with, that you have to open yourself to in order to receive anything from it. If you’re not prepared to do that, this might go in one ear and out the other, but for whose who take a step toward the band and attempt to enter their universe, the connection you establish to this album is bound to be much deeper and more profound.

Antichrist Siege Machine: Morbid Triumph 12” (Stygian Black Hand) Brief but compelling 7-song LP from this Richmond, Virginia death metal band. While I’m no scholar of metal in general or death metal specifically, I have to say this is a real bruiser. I’ve noticed a bit of a resurgence of old school death metal in the past few years and Antichrist Siege Machine is definitely part of that, though like a lot of other recent bands they seemed informed as much—if only subconsciously—by black metal. While ASM are definitely riff-based and raw—rather than “atmospheric” and deliberate, even pretentious, in their presentation in the way so many black metal bands were and are—you can also sense the specter of black metal lurking in the background. I hear this mostly in the recording quality, which is full, lush, organic, and analog-y; on the surface that’s pretty much the opposite of so much black metal (whether you’re talking about the ornate, symphonic kind or its bedroom-made cousin), but in another way it’s certainly of a piece with it. In other words, I don’t think that the original-era death metal bands—particular during their respective early eras—paid quite so much attention to how they sounded. And it’s really the sound that feels like the focus of Morbid Triumph… more than any particular riff or moment, what I take away from this record is its overwhelming atmosphere of wounded bleakness.

Cruz Somers: UV-B cassette (Big Dunce) I know absolutely nothing about Cruz Somers, but I sure do like this EP. This kind of vaguely garage-y, catchy punk with a drum machine is kind of a thing at the moment with bands like Racecar, S.B.F., and Stake, and if you’re interested in hearing bands like that at the moment then Cruz Somers is certainly worth checking out. It seems like some bands in this style really push the production super hard to the point where the texture of the recording is at least as important as the underlying songs, but these four tracks are extremely song-oriented. While the drum machine rhythms are very robotic and inhuman, the songs and the melodies (the vocal melodies in particular) are so memorable that you often forget about the robotic backing track. The singer’s voice and ear for melody also reminds me quite a bit of Chaz from Stake, so if you checked out that band’s tape on our recommendation and liked it I’d strongly recommend this one as well.

Bore Hole: demo cassette (Big Dunce) Debut cassette from this project out of LA, and I must say I’m really feeling this one. Given the artwork, the recording quality, and the Devo-esque rhythm that the first songs starts with you think this is going to be some pitched-down-the-middle Lumpy Records-type stuff (which is AOK by me, honestly), but this one quickly unravels. The first song, “Time In,” is a perfect case in point. It starts off with what could be a really good intro, but rather than go into something one might call a “song” it just wanders from part to increasingly bizarre part. The rhythms become more and more difficult to parse as the song goes on (I’m sure this is a live drummer because I don’t think drum machines can get this weird, but how does a human count this stuff out?) with the guitars gradually disintegrating into freeform jamming. The second track, “Sultan,” has a different arc, starting with the chaos, transitioning into a truly warped “breakdown” that makes you feel like you’re having a bad acid trip, then ending with another burst of chaos at the end. I won’t go through all of the tracks, but you get the picture. Even though the sound and vibe of this are both utterly different, this reminds me of the Housewives 12” I raved about a few months ago in its complete obliviousness to the unspoken rules that govern most music. But despite the fact that Bore Hole cleverly sidestep so many conventions (cliches?) this somehow still sounds totally punk. If you like your music as freaky as possible I really can’t recommend this one highly enough.

Resource Group: demo cassette (Big Dunce) Another cassette missive of weird punk from the Big Dunce crew, and interestingly this one comes from Savannah, Georgia rather than being based in the Los Angeles area like a lot of the other projects this label has released. I must admit that I don’t hear much of Savannah’s sleepy, swampy vibe coming through here… instead everything has a jittery and skittery vibe that makes this feel kind of cold and robotic even though it sounds like Resource Group is using live drums and guitar plays a much bigger role than it does in some similar bands. So, sound-wise this is more in the vein of stuff like Race Car that still sounds really punk rather than groups that get rid of the guitar entirely and go full synth. Songwriting-wise I’m also hearing a lot going on here… while the tape is quite short, the songs do seem to go places and to pull and push in interesting ways. If you’re into this whole chaotic, synth-based “weird punk” sound you should probably be checking out everything on Big Dunce, and Resource Group is no exception to that rule.

The Brain: S/T 7” (High Fashion Industries) Debut (I think?) 7” from this band out of Toronto. Here you get two long-ish (one four and a half minutes, one six and a half minutes) songs that take two different approaches to the whole idea of “psychedelic punk.” To me, the Brain sound like Hawkwind and Husker Du smashed together, sometimes uncomfortably but often intriguingly. On the a-side the approach is to take the surface-level elements of psychedelia—namely loose and spacey guitar sounds and licks—and apply these to the standard pop template. It’s a tried and true approach and it works here. For me, though, things get more interesting on the b-side, where that conventional song structure dissolves and the Brain embraces psychedelia more deeply, alternating between a propulsive motorik-esque beat and looser parts that sound like they might have been inspired by the jam-ier bits of the first Stooges album. All in all the Brain remind me of some of the bands on the Wharf Cat Records roster… groups like the Ukiah Drag or Cottaging that might have a background steeped in punk and hardcore but have widened their scope to take in influence from 60s and 70s psych, progressive 80s post-punk like the Gun Club or Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, and maybe even a touch of improvisational music. Of course this kind of music is generally more at home on a full-length than a single, but these two songs definitely hold my attention and have me intrigued about what a full-length might hold.

Combatant: Sick Plot 7” (Not Like You) Here’s a record and band that I literally know nothing about, but I have a rule that I’ll check out any record with a be-wigged judge on the cover, and that rule has rarely steered me wrong. Here we have some gnarly early NYHC-inspired stuff… this pretty much sounds like an exact 50/50 mix between the Abused and Antidote. It’s got Antidote’s slightly cleaner production and more metallic guitar sound, but the Abused’s gruffness and cool little stop/start patterns. While there isn’t a lot to surprise you here, if you got a whole lot of spins out of that Chain Rank LP from a while back I think your own wig might get flipped by this one.

USA/Mexico: Laredo 12” (12XU) Debut LP from this gnarly new Texas band featuring King Coffey of the Butthole Surfers / Hugh Beaumont Experience. While die-hard Buttholes fans will certainly find plenty to like here, USA/Mexico are much more straightforward “noise rock,” building most of their songs around a similar combination of impossibly blown out bass, noise guitar that sounds straight off of a Confuse record, and pounding, repetitive drums. The formula is not dissimilar to what the Melvins have done at various points of their career, but I like this SO much better than any Melvins I’ve ever heard. The Melvins have always just sounded like a kind of boring rock band to me, but Laredo sounds like music turned inside-out… it’s as if rock music has had its skin flayed off and is walking around with just exposed muscle and tissue so you can tell it’s human, but it looks like no human you’ve ever seen before. While this is undeniably ugly, it’s also music that pushes me toward a meditative state… the bass is so impossibly deep and thick that it almost seems to be massaging my body with sound waves, and the droning drum beats free my mind to wander. For such an ugly, confrontational record this is a surprisingly enjoyable listen.

All New Arrivals
Jets to Brazil: Orange Rhyming Dicitonary 12" (Epitaph)
Jets to Brazil: Four Cornered Night 12" (Epitaph)
Jets to Brazil: Perfecting Loneliness 12" (Epitaph)
Mastodon: Blood Mountain 12" (picture disc; Reprise)
Mastodon: Crack the Skye 12" (picture disc; Reprise)
Green Day: Dookie 12" (picture disc; Reprise)
My Chemical Romance: I Brought You My Bullets 12" (picture disc; Reprise)
Mastodon: The Hunter 12" (picture disc; Reprise)
The Flaming Lips: Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots 12" (picture disc; Warner Bros)
My Chemical Romance: Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge 12" (picture disc; Reprise)
Protomartyr: Relatives in Dissent 12" (Domino)
The World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die: Always Foreign 12" (Epitaph)
Alice Cooper: Love It to Death 12" (Rhino)
The Velvet Underground: Loaded 12" (Rhino)
Thin Lizzy: Live and Dangerous 12" (Rhino)
Skid Row: B-Side Ourselves 12" (Rhino)
Testament: The Legacy 12" (Rhino)
Various: Wayne's World OST 12" (Rhino)
Alice Cooper: Pretties for You 12" (Rhino)
Jane's Addiction: Nothing's Shocking 12" (Rhino)
Through the Eyes of the Dead: Disomus 12" (E One)
No Warning: Torture Culture 12" (Last Gang)
Skinny Puppy: Bites 12" (Nettwerk)
Skinny Puppy: Remission 12" (Nettwerk)
Samael: Hegemony 12" (Napalm)
Motorhead: Under Cover 12" (Motorhead)
Of Montreal: Rune Husk 12" (Polyvinyl)
The Replacements: For Sale: Live at Maxwell's 1986 12" (Sire)
Sepultura: Chaos AD (expanded edition) 12" (Roadrunner)
Mastodon: Emperor of Sand 12" (Reprise)
Citizen: As You Please 12" (Run for Cover)
Metallica: Hardwired... to Self Destruct 12" (pink vinyl; Blackened)
Spoon: Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga 12" (Merge)
Bully: Losing 12" (Sub Pop)
Don Caballero: Singles Breaking Up 12" (Touch & Go)
R. Ring: Ignite the Rest 12" (Sofaburn)
Destroyer: Ken 12" (Merge)
John Carpenter: Anthology: Movie Themes 1974-1998 12"+7" (Sacred Bones)
Pageninetynine: Document #5 12" (Reptilian)
Big Huge: Cruel World 12" (Erste Theke)
Rashōmon: Demo 2017 7" (Society Bleeds)
Klazo: Embarrassed of Living 12" (It's Trash)
Various: Killed by Meth Vol 2 12" (It's Trash)
The Brain: S/T 7" (High Fashion Industries)
Humiliation: Laughing Wall 7" (High Fashion Industries)
Brainstorm / Battle of Disarm: Join No Army Police And Politician / Anti-War 12" (Rest in Punk)
Lebenden Toten: Static 12" (self-released)
Discard: Four Minutes Past Midnight 12" (Unrest)
Brainbombs: Obey 12" (Armageddon)
Brainbombs: Singles Collection 12" (Armageddon)
Aus Rotten: And Now Back to Our... 12" (Profane Existence)
City of Caterpillar: S/T 12" (Repeater)
Born Wrong: S/T 12" (Schizophrenic)
LSD: 1983 to 1986 12" (Schizophrenic)
Sons of Ishmael: Hayseed Hardcore 12" (Schizophrenic)
Neanderthal: A History of Violence 12" (Deep Six)
Slam: Wild Riders of Boards 7" (Not Like You)
Combatant: Sick Plot 7" (Not Like You)
Doom: Police Bastard 7" (Profane Existence)
Zellots: S/T 7" flexi (Supreme Echo)
Twitch: Mess with the Bull 7" (Supreme Echo)
Triton Warrior: Satan's Train 7" (Supreme Echo)
Jerk Ward: Too Young to Thrash 12" (Supreme Echo)
Twitch: Dark Years 12" (Supreme Echo)
Sphex: Time 7" (Supreme Echo)
Kid Chrome: Demons / W.A.I.G.D.? 7" (Goodbye Boozy)
bAd bAd: Modern Man / Prepare To Coup 7" (Goodbye Boozy)
Aquarian Blood: Right Between Yer Eyes / Sleep 7" (Goodbye Boozy)
Giantology: Hold Me Down / The Great Refrigerator 7" (Goodbye Boozy)
Sewer Cide: Wire / Vape Escape 7" (Goodbye Boozy)
Fire Heads: Sleep At Night / Hardly There 7" (Goodbye Boozy)
Resource Group: demo cassette (Big Dunce)
Bore Hole: demo cassette (Big Dunce)
Cruz Somers: UV-B cassette (Big Dunce)
Loincloth: Psalm of the Morbid 12" (Southern Lord)
Testament: The Ritual 12" (Metal Blade)
Unsane: Sterilize 12" (Southern Lord)
Ted Leo: The Hanged Man 12" (Super Ego)
Kadavar: Rough Times 12" (Nuclear Blast)
Faceless Burial: Grotesque Miscreation 12" (Iron Lung)
Condition: Subjugated Fate 7" (Iron Lung)
Antichrist Siege Machine: Morbid Triumph 12" (Stygian Black Hand)
Barrow Wight: Kings in Sauron's Service 12" (Stygian Black Hand)
Plague: Silenced by Death 7" (Stygian Black Hand)
United Void: Doomsday Clock 7" (Babysworld)
Slender: Walled Garden 7" (La Vida Es Un Mus)
Permission: S/T 12" (La Vida Es Un Mus)
Warwound: Burning The Blindfolds of Bigots 12" (Unrest)
The DSS: Temple of Heat cassette (self-released)
Urchin: Peace Sign 7" (Roach Leg)
Jackal: demo cassette (self-released)
Nightfall: Deadly Game 7" (Ryvvolte)
BETOE / Besthoven: Tribute to Shitlickers 7" (Ryvvolte)
Eye Jammy: Live at the BBQ cassette (self-released)
Judy & the Jerks: Alive at the Skatepark cassette (self-released)
Active Minds: The Age of Mass Distraction 12" (SPHC)
Dendö Marionette: 傀儡電伝 12" (Bitter Lake)
Extended Hell: S/T 7" (Brain Solvent Propaganda)
Glorious?: Neverending Butchery 7" (Brain Solvent Propaganda)
Aspects of War: A Look Into the Nightmare cassette (Brain Solvent Propaganda)
Mujeres Podridas: S/T 7" (Symphony of Destruction)
Lubricant: 2017 flexi 7" (Symphony of Destruction)
Kold Front: S/T 7" (Symphony of Destruction)
Black Dahlia Murder: Nightbringers 12" (Metal Blade)
Haemorrhage: We Are the Core 12" (Relapse)
Primitive Man: Caustic 12" (Relapse)
Birds of Avalon: Operator's Midnight 12" (Third Uncle)
Last Sentence: Solitude cassette (Doomed to Extinction)
Massacre 68: Sembrando Muertos cassette (Doomed to Extinction)
Romanticne Boje: 1983-84 cassette (Doomed to Extinction)
Patsy: LA Women 12" (La Vida Es Un Mus)
Neon: Neon Is Life cassette (self-released)
Publique: Outlying Self 12" (Burning Rose)
Collate: Material Inspection cassette (self-released)
EEL: Night Parade of 100 Demons 12" (Beach Impediment)
Altarage: Endinghent 12" (Season of Mist)
Blink 182: Enema of the State 12" (SRC)
Enslaved: E 12" (Nuclear Blast)
Lillingtons: Stella Sapiente 12" (Fat Wreck)
Stick to Your Guns: True View 12" (Pure Noise)
Gen Pop: S/T 7" (Lumpy)
U-Nix: S/T 7" (Lumpy)
Vanilla Poppers: S/T 12" (Lumpy)
The World: First World Record 12" (Lumpy)
Trash Knife: TK 7" (FDH)
Ydinaseeton Pohjola: Synny, Kärsit, Kuolet, Unohdut 12" (Nightstick Justice)
Darfür: 8 Tracks E.P. 12" (Nightstick Justice)
Wound: S/T 12" (Nightstick Justice)
Uncle Acid: Vol 1 12" (Rise Above)
Death: Individual Thought Patterns 12" (Relapse)
Brand New: Science Fiction 12" (Procrastinate! Music Traitors)
GWAR: The Blood of Gods 12" (Metal Blade)

Restocks
Rash: Skinner Box 12" (High Fashion Industries)
Life's Blood: Hardcore AD 12" (Prank)
Accused: The Return of Martha Splatterhead 12" (Unrest)
World Burns to Death: A Dream Dies Every Day 12" (Analogue Violence)
X: Los Angeles 12" (Porterhouse)
Dicks: Hate the Police 7" (1234 Go!)
Zero Boys: Livin' in the 80s 7" (1234 Go!)
Marduk: Fuck Me Jesus 12" (Osmose)
DAUÐYFLIN: Ofbeldi 12" (Iron Lung)
Flesh World: The Wild Animals in My Life 12" (Iron Lung)
Iron Lung: Life.Iron Lung.Death 12" (Iron Lung)
Mozart: Nasty 7" (Iron Lung)
Total Control: Typical System 12" (Iron Lung)
Crisis: Kollectiv 12" (La Vida Es Un Mus)
The Nurse: Discography 12" (La Vida Es Un Mus)
Sacrificio: Pulidores de Tumbas 12" (SPHC)
Exit Hippies: Dance Maniac 12" (SPHC)
Warthog: S/T 7" (Beach Impediment)
Fried Egg: Back and Forth 7" (Beach Impediment)
Concealed Blade: S/T 12" (Beach Impediment)
Blood Pressure: S/T 12" (Beach Impediment)
Entombed: Left Hand Path 12" (Earache)
Iron Maiden: Number of the Beast 12" (Sanctuary)
Iron Maiden: S/T 12" (Sanctuary)
Iron Maiden: Killers 12" (Sanctuary)
Can: Tago Mago 12" (Spoon)
Hawkwind: Space Ritual 12" (Parlophone)
Green Day: Kerplunk 12" (Reprise)
Joy Division: Closer 12" (Rhino)
David Bowie: Ziggy Stardust 12" (Parlophone)
David Bowie: Hunky Dory 12" (Parlophone)
Motorhead: Iron Fist 12" (Sanctuary)
Motorhead: Ace of Spades 12" (Sanctuary)
Operation Ivy: Energy 12" (Epitaph)
The Cure: Disintegration 12" (Rhino)
The Cure: Three Imaginary Boys 12" (Rhino)
The Replacements: Let It Be 12" (Rhino)
Metallica: Ride the LIghtning 12" (Blackened)
Parquet Courts: Human Performance 12" (Rough Trade)
Celtic Frost: Morbid Tales 12" (Noise)
Celtic Frost: To Mega Therion 12" (Noise)

Well, our “Turned Out a Punk” series on the Sorry State blogs were a big success, so we’re going to attempt to keep the ball rolling with another set of posts on a unified topic. This time around we’ll be talking about game-changing records… records that might have changed the way that you think about a scene or a genre and opened up new vistas in your listening habits. I’m actually going to talk about two different records that played this kind of role at two different points in my life.

The first record I want to talk about is the Koro 7”. Now, it probably seems obvious that this is a record I really like since Sorry State reissued it as one of our earliest releases, but more than just a good record it was really a catalyst for me getting into hardcore on a deeper level.

As I wrote about in my previous post, I spent my teen years in the mid- and late 90s testing out different tribal affiliations within the punk scene. While I listened almost exclusively to music that came out of the punk scene, it seemed like punk’s umbrella was much wider in those days, and around 1999 when I first heard Koro I was checking out everything from Converge and Cave In to youth crew revival to tougher bands like Right Brigade to melodic bands like Saves the Day, and I was also heavily interested in the nascent screamo scene with bands like Pg. 99 and City of Caterpillar. And parallel to all of this I was starting to get really into researching older bands and learning about music from the 70s and 80s. This was pre-social media, so I did most of my research with actual books. I remember John Savage’s book England’s Dreaming introduced me to a lot of stuff. I actually brought a copy with me the first time I went to England. I distinctly remember reading it on the plane, boning up on all of the ’77-era punk bands so that I would know what to look out for as I scoured the used bins. I believe that trip was in 1999, so vinyl was cheap and the 99p bins were overflowing with ’77-era punk singles. When I got back home and started going through them all—some I’d learned about from England’s Dreaming and other sources, and some I just bought because they looked cool—I started to get a sense of the depth of the ’77 punk scene and how many bands there were to check out once you scratched below the surface. I’m guessing that I probably heard my first Killed by Death compilation around this time as well, which made me realize that this wasn’t a phenomenon limited to the UK.

Around this time was when I first discovered the Kill from the Heart web site, which showed me that the depth I’d found in ’77-era punk extended well into the hardcore era (and, of course, I’ve since discovered that just about every music scene is full of similarly-sized rabbit holes). I’m not sure how the conversation got started, but eventually I started emailing with Chris, the main guy behind KFTH. He sent me a mix tape full of great early 80s hardcore, but the band that really stuck out for me was Koro, whose entire 7” was on the tape.

I wrote before about how Minor Threat was such a special band for me, and despite the fact that I’d heard plenty of other early 80s hardcore bands by that point no one quite did it for me like Minor Threat did. That is, until I heard Koro. It was even faster than Minor Threat, and if it wasn’t quite as tight then it was certainly close. These were songs that were performed at the speed with which my brain worked, and consequently filled me with a strange sense of comfort. While I recognized that the music was amazing pretty much right off the bat, once I delved deeper into the record I was only intrigued even more. The band was from Knoxville, Tennessee, which was not only in the south, but it was an even smaller city than Richmond, where I was living at the time, and the Norfolk / Virginia Beach area where I grew up. The lyrics had little of Minor Threat’s earnestness, instead dealing with kind of frivolous teenage topics (“Blap!”) or very dated political topics (“700 Club”). While one would think that these dated political topics would keep me from connecting with the record, truth be told they only intrigued me more. I grew up in the land of Pat Robertson (whose organization was headquartered in Virginia Beach) and The 700 Club was a show that I flipped past a million times when channel-surfing as a kid. Knowing that such a great piece of music grew out of a context that felt so incredibly familiar was a real rush.

After hearing Koro, it was pretty much on. The Koro EP was proof positive that there was gold in the boxes and boxes of used 7”s that littered pretty much every used record store that still existed, and I set about panning, using Kill from the Heart, print sources like old issues of Maximumrocknroll and the Flex guidebooks, illegal file sharing networks, and ebay as essential tools in my arsenal. For the next several years—honestly, for the next decade or more—it was all about diving as deep as possible and seeing what I could come up with. I would hear lots of gems over the next several years, but I can’t think of any record as perfect as that EP.

The second record I want to talk about is a more recent discovery, Amon Düül II’s Yeti LP, which I also wrote about in a previous edition of All Things to All People. In that post I struggled to articulate precisely what intrigued me so much about all of the Krautrock stuff that I was discovering, and when my friend Danny read that column he put it more succinctly and eloquently than I could: I was transitioning toward music that had a kind of cinematic scope. In other words, in retrospect I realize that the way I approached listening to music was very much grounded in the traditions of folk and pop music. In other words, I listened to music in order to sing along, and “digesting” records essentially meant memorizing them closely enough that I could sing along (or play air guitar or drums or whatever) and take a kind of participatory pleasure in experiencing the music. I still listen to plenty of music in that mode, but what Yeti in particular showed me is that there are other ways. It’s possible to surrender yourself to music, to let it take you wherever it wants to go. That pop listening mold is predicated on a kind of mastery… you have to learn the song—to tame it in a way—in order to listen to it in that way. However, listening to a record like Yeti is like just floating in a river or the ocean and letting the current take you wherever it may. The pleasure here is not in taming something outside of you, but of releasing what is inside of you, letting go of your ego so that you can experience what the musicians want you to experience.

While Yeti was the record that made me really crave this mode of listening, I think that getting really into Can prepped me for the experience of Yeti. Can’s music is strange in that it has the circularity of pop music and the linearity of this more “cinematic” music in equal measure. People often remark upon the “gradually evolving repetition” motif in their classic work, and I think that the repetition provided me a kind of safety net to fall back on as I became increasingly interested in that wider scope.

Anyway, once Yeti clicked with me I was all about finding this sensation in as much music as possible. It was like I had developed a new muscle that allowed me to do things I didn’t know were possible… listening to and appreciating music really are skills, and I had just upped my level. Entire categories of music were newly accessible to me, like jazz (70s Miles Davis has been a particular favorite, including both funkier stuff like On the Corner and more atmospheric things like Bitches Brew), soundtracks (including the Japanese artist J.A. Ceasar, one of my favorite recent discoveries), and prog (which, for all of its Krautrock-y tendencies, is ultimately the category that I would place Yeti into). I even came back to some records I already loved with fresh ears, like the psychedelic concept albums of the 60s. Previously I listened to records like Sgt Pepper’s or Arthur as collections of pop songs, but nowadays I appreciate the over-arching, album-level dynamics more. And when it comes to albums like the Pretty Things’ S.F. Sorrow or Pink Floyd’s early stuff where those album-level dynamics are even more important, I’m listening to and loving those records more than I ever have before.

Interestingly, this new way of listening has also pushed me toward a different attitudes toward discovering music. There was a kind of neuroticism to the way that I searched for 80s hardcore in the years after hearing Koro… the drive to hear everything created a nice little feedback loop with my naturally high anxiety level. That neuroticism has served me well in a lot of ways… honestly, a lot of Sorry State’s success has grown out of my insatiable desire to hear everything. By contrast, I’m not so worried about hearing every single Krautrock or jazz record. I know those are deep, deep rabbit holes, but I’m pretty much content just to enjoy whatever crosses my path. In order to pursue hardcore so single-mindedly I had to close myself off to a ton of great music, and nowadays I just want to be open and enjoy whatever the universe offers up to me.

---

Is anyone out there on Apple Music? Obviously Sorry State is vinyl-centric and sitting in front of my stereo with a vinyl record is still my preferred way of listening to music, but I listen to a lot of digital music as well. I’ve long preferred Apple Music over Spotify because it allows me to upload songs from my own library and fold them in with the songs on Apple’s service… I couldn’t rely solely on Spotify and not have access to all of the stuff that’s on my computer but not on that service. Anyway, enough shilling for Apple… they have enough of everyone’s money.

I bring up this topic because if anyone out there uses Apple Music and has upgraded to iOS 11, feel free to follow my profile @sorrystate and eavesdrop on what I’m listening to. Even better, let me follow you back! I’ve long been jealous of Spotify’s social features, so I’m eager to make some contacts on Apple Music and have some people introduce me to cool stuff I wouldn’t have heard otherwise.

In other Daniel news, I have a new band! We’re called Scarecrow. I play bass, Jeff from Skemäta plays guitar, Usman from Skemäta plays drums, and our friend Red (who hasn’t been in a band before) sings. Our first show is October 7 at the Bunker in Raleigh (Facebook event here). If you’re in the area you should try to make it… Haircut is killer and Bunker shows are always a good time.

The day after that I’ll be at the VG- Record Fair at Hardywood Brewery in Richmond slinging that hot wax. I’ll probably be very sleepy. Hopefully I can get someone to come with me so that we can trade off making coffee runs, and so that they can watch the table while I browse the other sellers’ wares!

No Love also has a few shows coming up. We’ll be playing with the Cowboys (which I’m very stoked about!) at the Pinhook in Durham on October 15 (Facebook event here). It sounds like we’ll also be getting to play with both C.H.E.W. and Trash Knife this fall as well, and I’m super stoked about both of those shows too. It’s shaping up to be a very punk-filled fall here in North Carolina.

---

C.H.E.W. / Rash: Split 7” (Slugsalt) Well, this is quite a corker… two of the best current bands from Chicago teaming up for a split 7”! C.H.E.W.’s material so far has pretty much blown me away, and these three songs do very little to change my mind about how great they are. This time around I’m not hearing the Rudimentary Peni-isms quite as much… the production is a little heavier and the playing is a little tighter and more straightforwardly hardcore, but there are plenty of little quirks for those of you who like it weird. The second track, “Submission,” in particular has some really cool, wild vocals that fly off the edges of the song’s rhythm and some wonky whiplash tempo changes that make my face erupt in a grin every time I hear them. As for Rash’s contribution, they give us two tracks that pretty much pick up where their recent releases left off. They’ve always played in the fertile area between hardcore and AmRep-style noise rock, but these two tracks are definitely a bit more on the hardcore end of the spectrum, albeit with the dense and rich textures of the best noise rock kept fully intact. You don’t see too many split 7”s in hardcore these days, but this one makes a great argument for the format. Highly recommended!

Major Conflict: S/T 7” (Antitodo) Reissue of this 1983 NYHC 7” which is probably most famous for being “the post-Urban Waste band.” If you’re coming to Major Conflict looking for Urban Waste you’ll be a bit disappointed as this simply isn’t nearly as raw or as feral as that record (but then again, how many records are?), but it’s a nice little vintage slice of NYHC nonetheless. The three tracks here are quite different from one another. It begins with an instrumental called “How Do Ya Feel” that’s built around a cool little metallic riff that reminds me quite a lot of the Abused, then segues into a mid-paced street punk song called “Outgroup,” which seems to me to betray the influence of punkier bands like Kraut and the Stimulators, or perhaps even Subliminal Seduction-era Heart Attack. On the b-side you get a lengthier song that seems more Bad Brains-influenced, particularly the epic, “Right Brigade”-esque mosh part. While it’s kind of weird that the three tracks are so different from one another, this 7” really works, and even if it doesn’t quite make that top tier of NYHC alongside Antidote, the Abused, Urban Waste, et al, it’s solidly in the second tier alongside bands like Crucial T, the Mob, and the Nihilistics, and if you’re familiar with those records (all of them rippers) you know that’s no slight. And of course Antitodo has already established a reputation for doing great quality repro editions, so you shouldn’t worry yourself on that front.

Flesh World: Into the Shroud 12” (Dark Entries) Well, the new Flesh World album is finally here. They’ve shifted labels for this one, moving from the world of small DIY hardcore labels (their previous releases were on La Vida Es Un Mus and Iron Lung) to Dark Entries, who are honestly probably a better fit for their sound. When there’s a change in labels there’s usually some corresponding changes in the music, and that’s the case to an extent here. Flesh World are still writing brilliant pop songs, and structurally the songs on Into the Shroud are very much of a piece with the band’s earlier work, though honestly I think the melodies are more memorable and the arrangements much more dynamic and interesting. The main difference is that they’ve scaled back radically on the noise. While Into the Shroud is probably still a fairly noisy record by indie rock standards, if you loved their previous releases you’ll immediately notice how much cleaner this record is, which is hardly a bad thing, just a noticeable difference. Flesh World have always reminded me a bit of Lush, and the transition from The Wild Animals in My Life to Into the Shroud is not unlike Lush’s transition from their earlier, more chaotic stuff to the more streamlined pop of Lovelife. I love both periods of Lush, and I’m fully on board with this new phase of Flesh World. If you enjoyed this band’s earlier stuff I strongly recommend this new one as well.

Spray Paint & Ben Mackie: Friendly Moving Man 7” (12XU) Not a split release, but a collaborative 7” between these two artists. I’ve heard Ben Mackie’s group Cuntz (even seen them live once), but I’m not sure if his reverb-drenched vocals are going to be enough of a selling point for the legions of Cuntz fans out there. It’s unclear if he did more than sing on this 7”, but I do feel like there could be a little bit of Cuntz’s noise rock injected into Spray Paint’s sound for this release… it’s hard to say for sure. However, if you’re coming at this release from the Spray Paint end of things I dare say you’ll be very pleased. Spray Paint are one of the most unique-sounding bands out there… it’s hard to say precisely what it is that sets them apart, but they have such a unique voice as a band that you can hear just a couple of notes and immediately know that it’s them. The a-side in particular is extremely quirky, and it’s the kind of song that it’s hard to imagine anyone other than Spray Paint managing to capture on tape. The only bad thing I can say about the record is that it feels like it’s over before it starts, but if you’re interested in this odds are you have a stack of Total Punk 7”s in your collection that you could say the same thing about, so no biggie.

Performing Ferret Band: S/T 12” (Beat Generation) Reissue of this UKDIY LP from 1980, and it’s a real gem. I don’t claim to be the most knowledgeable about this particular scene, but it’s crazy to me that something as good as this could fly under my radar for so long. Sonically, this is just about as on the nose as the UKDIY sound gets… take some bits from the early Fall catalog, add in some of the vibe from genre classics like Desperate Bicycles or the Homosexuals and you should be pretty much in the ballpark as to what this sounds like. It also bears an almost uncanny resemblance to the Total Punk band Suburban Homes in places… I’m not sure if they’re a conscious influence on Suburban Homes or not, but I think it’s pretty much guaranteed that if you like one band’s records you’ll really like the other’s as well (unless, of course, you strictly avoid either new or old bands). For me, a lot of the pleasure of UKDIY music is in the way that they balance their poppier impulses with their more experimental ones, and Performing Ferret Band have pretty much the perfect mix for me. So, if this style if up your alley you know what to do…

Reptoides: Nueva Especie 7” (World Gone Mad) 2nd 7” from this Mexican band, not to be confused with Andy Human & the Reptoids from California, who are an entirely different group. If you liked what they did the first time around I’m pretty sure you’ll be on board with this as well, as it continues in a similar vein. As before (and as with their labelmates in Haldol) there’s a distinct Rudimentary Peni influence here, which manifests itself in the claustrophobic, chorus-y guitar tone and the general sense of dread, but like Peni they also manage to pull hook after hook out of this rather imposing shell. I can see fans of Blazing Eye being super into this as well, but it also reminds me of some of the more out-there Japanese punk and hardcore sounds by bands like G.I.S.M. or Mobs. I haven’t seen Reptoides getting a ton of hype in the US, but maybe it’s about time that changed because this—like their last EP—is totally killer.

Beyond Peace: S/T 7” (Hard Art) Debut 7” from this band out of Iowa. We had their demo a while back, but they really made an impression when I saw them live a few weeks ago. Like a lot of bands from off-the-beaten-path locales, Beyond Peace don’t sound totally in sync with the hottest trends in the underground today, but as someone who is naturally attracted to bands that fall between the cracks I think that’s an asset rather than a drawback. The foundation here is definitely straightforward 80s USHC, and it’s fast, raw, and gruff in all the right ways. The vibe is somewhat earnest and political in a way that reminds me both of 90s bands like Crudos or Born Against and 80s bands like Articles of Faith or Everything Falls Apart / Metal Circus-era Husker Du. And like all of those bands, Beyond Peace are musically adventurous as well; while they can write a mid-paced part worthy of any NYHC band (“Wearing Thin”) they can also dish out some jaggedly beautiful lead lines that could have come from Articles of Faith’s Give Thanks LP (“Big Man”). If the above references intrigue you I would highly encourage you to check this out, as Beyond Peace pretty much precisely fit my definition of real hardcore.

UVTV: Go Away 7” (Emotional Response) Latest 4-song EP from this Florida band who have quietly been maturing into one of the most distinctive punk bands out there. To me, UVTV’s music sounds like a hardcore-informed take on C86 pop like the Shop Assistants… in other words, while they have the sprightliness and heft of a band like Brain F≠, but their dreamy vocals, pop songwriting chops, and distinct Ramones influence seem to come from the mid-80s UK (which they kind of confirm here with a cover tune by the Primitives). Punk with dreamy vocals is a pretty untapped well—the only bands I can think of that do it as well as UVTV are Flesh World and Earth Girls, both of whom who have a very different overall vibe—which serves to UVTV’s advantage because they sound so totally fresh. I’m not sure why the hype machine hasn’t latched onto this band yet, but maybe someone should take some initiative and get that started. Or just pick this up and enjoy your own little secret.

ISS: Endless Pussyfooting 12” (Erste Theke Tontraeger) So, I wrote a description of this back when it was a tape and then the label actually used it as the generic marketing description for the vinyl release, so obviously I like this a lot. However, I thought I’d write something again since this record has only grown in my esteem since the tape version came out. I wrote before (and other people like Vincent have also mentioned) that the sampling-based technique that ISS uses is totally awesome, but I feel like the focus on their technique—which admittedly, is pretty exciting—detracts attention away from how absolutely brilliant these songs are. Sure, it’s fun to unpack all of the references and try to identify all of the samples, but these songs would be great no matter what instruments were used to create them. There’s such a mastery of songwriting, lyric-writing, arrangement, and production on display here that it honestly makes a lot of the other music that I listen to look bad by comparison. However, even if you don’t come to this as some kind of grand artistic achievement (and believe me, I think that’s the last thing ISS wants anyway), these are just great, fun pop songs that you can sing along to with the windows down on a warm summer day… indeed, the fact that they function so well as pop songs is exactly what makes them so great. So, at the risk of continuing to not make any sense, I’m going to wrap this up and say that it’s one of my favorite things in the world right now and that you should probably check it out if you haven’t already.

B.D.: Over 30 Singles 12” (Emotional Response) 30(!!!)-track compilation from this long-running California punk band. I’m not sure if we’ve carried every single B.D. / Bad Daddies record, but I’ve checked in with them often over the years and this band is always doing something surprising. That eclecticism is very much on display here, as songs waver between hardcore, 90s-style noise-rock and straight up pop-punk. I suppose that if I had to draw a common thread to all of the music collected here, it’s that there’s a very 90s sensibility at work, both in that a lot of the genres that B.D. dabble in sound kind of retro and in the eclecticism itself, which is jarring within the context of the current scene, where bands seem very hesitant to step outside a narrow range of influences. While there is a metric ton of awesome music here, I think my favorite thing about Over 30 Singles might be the zine booklet, which is super thick and features detailed contextualizations of every track here (and, crazily enough, many others that aren’t compiled here!) and interviews with each individual member of the band. Everything about this package is really overwhelming, but in kind of a neat way. I think one of the reasons that a lot of modern punk feels so disposable is because the audience has so little time to make room for more / richer media content in our lives. However, Over 30 Singles is a throwback to when records were one of your key media resources and not only did bands try to convey as much information as possible, but also the audience also spent a lot of time digesting all of that information. So, while it’ll definitely take some work to make time for this given the lifestyles we live nowadays, there are corresponding rewards for your expenditure of time.

All New Arrivals
Chris Bell: I Am the Cosmos 12" (Omnivore)
Mogwai: Every Country's Son 12" (Temporary Residence)
Twin Peaks: Music from the Limited Event Series OST 12" (Rhino)
METZ: Strange Peace 12" (Rhino)
Various: Warfaring Strangers: Acid Nightmares 12" (Numero Group)
The Afghan Whigs: Up with It 12" (Sub Pop)
The Afghan Whigs: Congregation 12" (Sub Pop)
The Afghan Whigs: Uptown Avondale 12" (Sub Pop)
Satyricon: Deep Calleth Upon Deep 12" (Napalm)
Godspeed You! Black Emperor: Luciferian Towers 12" (Constellation)
Tortür: No Surrender, No Survivors 7" flexi (self-released)
Amgdala: Population Control 12" (Dead Tank)
Meatwound: Trash Apparatus 7" (Dead Tank)
Vacancy: Empty Head cassette (Dead Tank)
Lunglust: War at Home 7" (Dead Tank)
Lunglust: War at Home cassette (Dead Tank)
Mrtex / Kelut: Split LP 12" (Dead Tank)
DS-13: Umea Hardcore Forever 12" (Havoc)
Kaaos: Riistinnaulittu Kaaos 12" (Havoc)
Major Conflict: S/T 7" (Antitodo)
Flesh World: Into the Shroud 12" (Dark Entries)
Mr. Wrong: Babes in Boyland 12" (Water Wing)
Pikacyu-Makoto: Galaxilympics 12" (Upset the Rhythm)
Chain & the Gang; Experimental Music 12" (Radical Elite)
Neon: Neon / Nazi Schatzi 7" (Water Wing)
Wolves in the Throne Room: Thrice Woven 12" (Artemesia)
Dorothy Ashby: Hip Harp / On a Minor Groove 12" (Doxy)
Flower Travellin Band: Satori 12" (Phoenix)
Flower Travellin Band: Anywhere 12" (Phoenix)
Harald Grosskopf: Synthesist 12" (Bureau B)
Performing Ferret Band: S/T 12" (Beat Generation)
Genius / GZA: Liquid Swords 12" (Universal)
Chaos UK: One Hundred Percent Two Fingers in the Air Punk Rock 12" (Harbinger Sound)
Nachthexen: S/T 10" (Harbinger Sound)
Voigt/465: Slights Still Unspoken 12" (Mental Experience)
Atelier du Mal: Noblesse Oblige 12" (Mannequin)
Silverhead: S/T 12" (Vinilissimo)
Osiris: S/T 12" (Pharaway)
Aragorn: Night Is Burning 12" (Sommor)
Bruno Spoerri & Reto Weber: The Sound of UFOs 12" (We Release Whatever the Fuck We Want)
Bruno Spoerri: Voice of Taurus 12" (We Release Whatever the Fuck We Want)
Pretty Things: Parachute 12" (Madfish)
Pretty Things: SF Sorrow 12" (Madfish)
C.H.E.W. / Rash: Split 7" (Slugsalt)
Spray Paint & Ben Mackie: Friendly Moving Man b/w Dumpster Buddies 7" (12XU)
USA/Mexico: Laredo 12" (12XU)

Restocks
Broken Bones: A Single Decade 12" (Havoc)
Final Conflict: Keep It in the Family 7" (Havoc)
Sacrilege: Time to Face the Reaper 12" (Havoc)
Willful Neglect: S/T + Justice for No One 12" (Havoc)
Blitz: Voice of a Generation 12" (Radiation)
Blitz: All Out Attack 7" (Ugly Pop)
Newtown Neurotics: Beggars Can Be Choosers 12" (Nada Nada Discos)
Partisans: S/T 12" (Havoc)
Wretched: Libero E Selvaggio 12" (Agipunk)
Against Me: Reinventing Axl Rose 12" (No Idea)
John Coltrane & Alice Coltrane: Cosmic Music 12" (Superior Viaduct)
Dicks: Kill from the Heart 12" (Alternative Tentacles)
King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard: Flying Microtonal Banana 12" (Flightless)
King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard: I'm Your Mind Fuzz 12" (Castleface)
King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard: Quarters 12" (Castleface)
Thee Oh Sees: Mutilator Defeated at Last 12" (Castleface)
Radioactivity: S/T 12" (Dirtnap)
Radioactivity: Silent Kill 12" (Dirtnap)
Rubella Ballet: Ballet Bag 12" (Dark Entries)
Sonic Youth: Evol 12" (Goofin')
Spits: 19 Million AC 12" (Slovenly)
Spits: First Self-titled 12" (Slovenly)
Spits: S/T 12" (Slovenly)
Spits: Third Album 12" (Slovenly)
The Fall: Slates 10" (Superior Viaduct)
King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard: Nonagon Infinity 12" (ATO)
Wicked Lady: The Axeman Cometh 12" (Guersson)
Wicked Lady: Psychotic Overkill 12" (Guersson)
Bad Brains: S/T 12" (ROIR)
Brand New: Deja Entendu 12" (Triple Crown)
Brand New: I Am a Nightmare 12" (Triple Crown)
Electric Wizard: Dopethrone 12" (Rise Above)
Hatebreed: Satisfaction Is the Death of Desire 12" (Victory)
Joey Bada$$: All Amerikkkan Bada$$ 12" (Cinematic)
Parquet Courts: Light Up Gold 12" (What's Your Rupture?)
Power Trip: Manifest Decimation 12" (Southern Lord)
Run the Jewels: S/T 12" (Mass Appeal)
Run the Jewels: RTJ 3 12" (Mass Appeal)
Slayer: Show No Mercy 12" (Metal Blade)
Swans: Filth 12" (Young God)
C.H.E.W. / Penetrode: Split cassette (Slugsalt)

My 11th grade school photo; my hair is dyed the color of grass and you can see my skater image starting to merge with the then-current straight edge / youth crew look.

Indeed, my remaining epiphanies are definitely more social rather than being purely focused on the solitary experience of hearing a single band or record. Once I got a driver’s license in 1995 I was able to get myself from my very, very small hometown to the bigger cities of Norfolk and Virginia Beach, Virginia, where I quickly recognized flyers whose graphic design sensibilities were lifted straight from the flyers in the Minor Threat CD insert. Going to these shows was my first inkling of the real DIY punk subculture, and like a lot of teenagers I spent years exploring different tribal affiliations among factions in the scene. Youth crew revival was really big when I was a teenager so I went to a lot of those shows, but I also liked more straightforward punk like Blanks 77 or the Casualties, was really fascinated with international hardcore (especially given that G.I.S.M. and Gauze were the first two non-Anglophone bands I heard), still had one toe in the commercial punk world of bands like Bad Religion and Propagandhi, and even went to metal shows now and again when I band I thought was legit (like, say, Cryptopsy) would come through town. I’m not sure whether it was that I was omnivorous or just that I couldn’t figure out who I really was, but I listened to a lot of different stuff and I’m the better for it. At some point, though, I stopped going wide and started going deep. This started happening 1998 or 1999, which is not coincidentally just when downloading music became a wide practice. I remember the first piece of music I ever downloaded was an advance rip of Bad Religion’s No Substance a month or two before it came out. At this point I’d never even heard of a CD burner, so I ran a cable from the headphone output of the computer to a cassette recorder and made a tape of it. Looking back that was a real hybrid of old and new technology, but I bet I’m not the only person my age who did it. And as more people got online and started ripping older vinyl and cassettes, downloading the new Bad Religion album quickly progressed to checking out every single band I’d ever heard of but couldn’t acquire CDs or records by, and when you follow that rabbit hole to where it ends eventually you’re listening to some pretty gnarly stuff.

A video clip from the first Cross Laws show, which is also the first show I ever played. I was 26 years old... a lot later than most people start their first band!

The next big signpost is when I moved from being a consumer of punk culture to being a participant in it. This is harder to pinpoint in the timeline, but sometime around 1999 I started writing things and posting them on the internet. While I’ve become more confident in my old age, at this point I was extremely shy, which prevented me (or, more accurately, allowed me) to have almost no friends in the punk scene… and honestly not really too many friends at all. However, once I started throwing things online people would figure out who I was and talk to me at shows about the photos I took or the things I wrote, and with the ice broken I actually started making some friends and becoming acquaintances with members of the local bands who played around Richmond like Municipal Waste and Strike Anywhere. Brandon from Municipal Waste (and later Direct Control, Government Warning, and many others) was the kind of person who would walk right up to you and start talking and then make sure you were properly introduced to everyone in the room that he knew, and his gregariousness gave me the push I needed to let my art school-honed, unwavering dedication to artistic work really cut loose. I started writing more and photographing more, and eventually I started a label and picked up the guitar that had been gathering dust in the corner since I was a teenager. Which pretty much leads me to where I am today.

It’s only started to occur to me recently how deeply I rely upon punk. For whatever reason—whether it’s because I’m a true freak and lifer or just because I was subconsciously following the punk script—I always hated social institutions like churches, schools, sports teams, and cliques. Eventually I joined the group of non-joiners, and now that group—the world of DIY punk and particularly my local scene in Raleigh—are my support network. They’re not just people I bullshit about bands with, but the people I call when I need someone to watch my cat while I’m out of town, the people whose kids I see as nieces and nephews, and the people who I hit up when someone close passes away and I need someone to talk to. My life story has been a long process of giving more and more of myself to punk and the more I give it the more it seems to give back to me.

---

Booji Boys: Sweet Boy 7” (Cruel Noise) We here at Sorry State have been following Booji Boys from the very beginning (as well as all of their many adjacent bands and projects), and it’s been cool to see them grow and refine their sound over their past couple of releases. There aren’t any big stylistic shifts on Sweet Boy… as on their previous records, Booji Boys to me sound like a bunch of people who probably grew up on hardcore and were shaped by its aesthetics, but have given themselves permission to do things like write songs in major keys and add in catchy little Undertones-esque lead parts (they even cover the Undertones here, confirming the influence). As Seth very astutely pointed out, the result is something like a much rawer, more immediate version of Hidden World-era Fucked Up, i.e. that period when they started to venture outside hardcore’s defined lines but hadn’t quite entered the period where they became deliberately psychedelic. In case you’ve heard their earlier releases and are wondering, the “underwater” effect is still on the vocals and it’s still very much a love-it, hate-it, or tolerate-it proposition, but if you’re on board with what the Booji Boys do you definitely won’t be disappointed, as Sweet Boy is more concise and ultimately even more memorable than their killer recent LP.

Agari: demo cassette (No Need for a Logo or Anything) Second cassette release from this band featuring members of Scumraid and Bloodkrow Butcher. As you might guess, this is hardcore, but it has a really interesting and unique vibe. The singer actually sounds quite a lot like the guy from Institute, but the music is rawer, more direct, and more hardcore. You can’t really pin a particular style on it as there are elements of Negative Approach’s oi!-influenced swagger, d-beat, and more intricate USHC in the vein of Minor Threat. However, it’s totally catchy and memorable, made all the more so by perfect, warm production. A real standout demo… I hope this band makes it to vinyl soon!

Aburadako: S/T 7” flexi (Crowmaniax) So, I should probably preface this by noting that I’m something of an Aburadako super-fan… my friend Joel first played me this flexi sometime in the early 00s and I fell completely in love. While I was already familiar with a lot of the burlier Japanese hardcore as well as a few more punk things like the Stalin, the particular mix of weirdness and aggression apparent on this flexi was pretty much exactly what I wanted to hear, and honestly it still is. It’s raging, quirky, and catchy all at once in a way that sounds like no other record I’ve ever heard. I’ve had an original copy of this flexi as well as a rip of the officially-released early discography for some time and I was hoping that this version would be able to replace my flexi in regular rotation as I’m always worried about the sound gradually deteriorating or—worse yet—getting a dent or other problem that would affect play. There is no one I would trust with the task of making a quality bootleg more than the folks at Crowmaniax (the party behind not only the several recent Crow reissues, but a few others like the Clay as well)… both their sound reproduction as well as their presentation of the physical product is 100% on point. That’s the case here as well, as the jacket and center labels replicate the original release almost exactly. My only issue is that they’ve clearly sourced the audio from the official discography CD, which has a very clear and well-mastered sound, but there’s also some audible tape warble / distortion. I’m not sure if the original tapes were damaged or what, but I can’t hear this distortion on my original flexi. In general, the version from this record and the CD sounds better—clearer, louder, and punchier than my flexi—but the presence of that tape noise keeps this from being absolutely perfect. So, what I’ve found myself doing is listening to this bootleg, then putting on my flexi, then imagining a non-existent version that combines the best qualities of both. That’s some real nerdy shit and usually I don’t tend to be such a snobby audiophile, but this is a very important record to me and I just want to hear it in the best light possible. However, if you aren’t such a stickler and you just need a hard copy this will absolutely get the job done, and if you aren’t familiar with this record then get ready to have your face melted. And let’s all pray to the gods that Aburadako’s first 12” EP is next up on the Crowmaniax agenda because I’ve never been able to snag an original of that one.

Negative Insight #3 w/ Skitslickers: GBG 1982 7” (Negative Insight) So, I think it probably makes sense to talk about these two items separately even though they’re sold together and obviously very linked. First up, the 7”: I’ve had several different versions of this recording over the years (bootlegs, semi-official reissues, mp3 rips from various sources), but it’s definitely never hit me with the impact that this reissue has, which is due mostly to the incredible sound. Apparently they were able to make new pressing plates from the mothers used for the original pressing, and as I’ve often noted they just don’t cut records that sound as loud and as thick as this anymore. When the first track, “Warsystem,” starts the guitar alone feels like a punch in the gut even without the backing of the other instruments, and once they come in it’s pretty much all over. The whole thing is only a few minutes long, but it’s one of the purest expressions of nihilistic rage that I have ever heard in my life. Jah bless Negative Insight for allowing me to get this onto my turntable without hocking half of my worldly possessions.

As for the zine, hopefully you’re familiar with the depth of the content and the precision of the execution from the previous two issues. #3 doesn’t slow down at all (even the ads seem designed to look at period as possible), and if you’re a fanatic for Gothenburg punk you’ll be wallowing in this issue like a pig in slop. While there are features on Absurd and a short interview with Anti-Cimex’s drummer, the two centerpieces are the extensive Skitslickers interview and the Anti-Cimex tour diary. The Skitslickers interview sheds a lot of light on a very mysterious band. From what I can gather, it seems like they were less interested in the musical or political sides of punk and more interested in pure nihilism, which makes sense given what ended up on the GBG 1982 EP. Beyond that, there are a ton of interesting little details about the band’s tenure that shed a lot of light on what it was like to be a punk at that place and time. The other big piece is the detailed dissection of Anti-Cimex’s infamous “Chainsaw Tour” of the UK. Each date is recounted in detail from multiple different perspectives (save one date where they couldn’t track down anyone who attended), and if there’s anything you ever wanted to know about that tour I’m guessing that it’s either in this piece or it’s totally lost to the sands of time.

All in all, this record-and-zine package has to be one of the essential must-buys of 2017. So if you can get your hands on one, don’t hesitate.

Neo Neos: The Hammer of Civilization 7” (It’s Trash) Debut vinyl from this Canadian project that has put out a slew of cassettes over the past few months… we still have a bunch of those in stock, so if you’re digging on this I’d encourage you to check out this band’s surprisingly deep discography. Anyway, Neo Neos’ tapes were kind of in the vein of that sloppy, jittery punk that’s been popular with people who follow labels like Total Punk, Neck Chop, and Lumpy, and I think it’s fair to say that if you dig bands like S.B.F., Race Car, Janitor Scum, and the like this will hit your sweet spot as well. It’s not quite as robotic-sounding as Race Car or as Fall-influenced as Janitor Scum… instead, its distinguishing factor is a heaping dose of the nihilism that I associate with Total Punk-type bands like Buck Biloxi and Sick Thoughts. Four tracks, and none of them are duds, so if this is up your alley I’d highly encourage checking it out.

Suck Lords: Demonstration cassette (Edger) Demo cassette from this new band out of Portland. I don’t know much about them, but I can tell you not to expect any of the crust or noise-punk that that city is known for… this is pure hardcore. It is quite fast, though… more in the vein of the Neos, Larm, or Deep Wound (or if you’re looking for a modern reference point they sound an awful lot like Alienation at times). I’m SUPER picky about when bands reach this tempo, as most groups either turn into a sloppy mess or start to sound more like grind / power violence than hardcore, but Suck Lords pretty much nail it perfectly, and if the above-mentioned groups strike your fancy I think it’s safe to say this’ll be right up your alley. Throw in some mega-snotty vocals and a couple of interesting little musical touches (the drummer has a really interesting way of emphasizing un-expected beats) and you have a very intriguing demo. Here’s hoping this band sticks around long enough to make it to the vinyl stages and doesn’t lose their rawness or energy in the process.

All New Arrivals:
The Dream Syndicate: Live at Raji's Complete 12" (Run Out Groove)
Fifteen: Buzz 12" (Real Gone)
Monster Magnet: Spine of God 12" (Napalm)
Monster Magnet: Tab 12" (Napalm)
The Slits: Return of the Giant Slits 12" (Real Gone)
The War on Drugs: A Deeper Understanding 12" (Atlantic)
Forced Order: One Last Prayer 12" (Triple B)
Self Defense Family: Wounded Masculinity 12" (Triple B)
Neil Young: Hitchhiker 12" (Reprise)
The National: Sleep Well Beast 12" (4AD)
Zola Jesus: The Spoils 12" (Sacred Bones)
Zola Jesus: Okovi 12" (Sacred Bones)
Hot Water Music: Light It Up 12" (Rise)
Burn: Do or Die 12" (Deathwish)
Olho Seco: Botas, Fuzis, Capacetes 7" (Nada Nada Discos)
Svart Städhjälp: Avveckla Dig Själv 7" (Halvfigur)
Napalm Raid: Wheel of War 12" (Rust and Machine)
Sonic Order: S/T 7" (Doom Town)
Death from Above 1979: Outrage! Is Now 12" (Warner Bros)
Neo Neos: The Hammer of Civilization 7" (It's Trash)
Public Eye: Relaxing Favorites 12" (Best Before)
Unix: demo cassette (Best Before)
Sore Points: Don't Want To 7" (Hosehead)
White Pigs: Hardcore Years 1983-1985 12" (Vomitopunkrock)
ISS: Endless Pussyfooting 12" (Erste Theke Tontraeger)
Booji Boys: Sweet Boy 7" (Cruel Noise)
Joey Cape: One Week Record 12" (Fat Wreck)
Paradise Lost: Medusa 12" (Nuclear Blast)
Paradise Lost: One Second 12" (Nuclear Blast)
Barcelona: Un Último Ultrasonido Nació Y Murió En Barcelona 12" (La Vida Es Un Mus)
Rainer Maria: S/T 12" (Polyvinyl)
Reptoides: Nueva Especie 7" (World Gone Mad)
Autopsy: Fiend for Blood 12" (Peaceville)
Cannabis Corpse: Left Hand Pass 12" (Season of Mist)
Exterminator: Total Extermination 12" (Greyhaze)
Crucifix: Dehumanization 12" (Euro Import)
Blitz: The Other Side of... 12" (Vomitopunkrock)
Crux: War 12" (Vomitopunkrock)
GISM: Detestation 12" (Euro Import)
The Exploited: Punks Not Dead 12" (Vomitopunkrock)
Morbid: Disgusting Semla 12" (Die 669)
The Execute: The Antagonistic Shadow 12" (Harto De Toto)
Aburadako: S/T 7" (Crowmaniax)
Mr. Epp: Of Course I'm Happy, Why? 7" (Full Contact)
Negative Insight #1 w/Varukers: Blood Money 7" (Negative Insight)
Negative Insight #2 w/Chaos UK: Studio Outtakes 81-83 7" (Negative Insight)
Negative Insight #3 w/Shitlickers 7" (Negative Insight)
UVTV: Go Away 7" (Emotional Response)
Natterers: Toxic Care Cassette (Emotional Response)
Bad Daddies: Over 30 Singles 12" (Emotional Response)
Enisum: Seasons of Desolation 12" (Avantgarde)
Artillery: Fear of Tomorrow 12" (Wax Maniax)
Abbath: S/T 12" (Season of Mist)
Darkthrone: Dark Thrones and Black Flags 12" (Peaceville)
Wode: Servants of the Counter Cosmos 12" (Avantgarde)

Restocks:
Bad Posture: C/S 12" (Mono)
Last Rights: S/T 7" (Taang!)
Suss Cunts: S/T 7" (Emotional Response)

Well folks, another week has gone by, and now you're about to get marginally wiser about some of the physical products that have been recently foisted upon the punk scene. For whatever reason, I feel like the things that I wrote about this week skewed toward the artier end of the spectrum. That's certainly, at least in part, a function of what happened to come in to the store this week, but it's also where my head has been at lately. Last week a friend played me this Turkish rock LP and it really split my head open in the way that it combined eastern musical motifs with the rock format I grew up on, and I've been on a kick of actively searching out music that does that. One thing that's really caught my ear is this compilation of Islamic jazz that was released as part of the Rough Guide series. Of course I'm still listening to plenty of hardcore, punk, and metal, but I also notice that in the past week my musical world has gotten considerably wider.

Housewives: Ff061116 12” (Rocket) Housewives’ previous 12” was one of my big surprises of the past year or so; a gritty, heavy, yet still very accessible no wave-informed record that I’ve found myself returning to again and again despite its release date fading ever further into the past. So, I was excited to hear this new one, but it’s kind of a different beast than the last one. It’s always been clear that Housewives are artistes, but they really go out there on this one, as you might be able to infer based on the stark, gallery-worthy packaging design or the cryptic title. Musically, there are fewer rock-informed rhythms this time around… instead, this release seems to be exploring ideas in atmosphere and harmony rather than rhythm (at least for the most part… there are some tracks with drums). Acoustic and electronic elements weave in and out of one another, sort of like Merzbow jamming with a horn player with an expansive, panoramic sense of space a la Grachan Moncur III or someone like that. The early Sonic Youth / Swans thing comes back on the two side-ending tracks (and these will almost certainly be your favorite tracks if you just have to have drums), but honestly the whole thing strikes me as extremely worthwhile and interesting. This might be a tad out there for the typical Sorry State audience, but something about this band just does it for me.

Anti-Sex: Un Mejor Futuro 12” (Thrilling Living) Debut LP from this Mexican band, and it’s a co-release between Thrilling Living, Cintas Pepe, and World Gone Mad… I don’t think that I could create a more compelling trio of labels for a co-release if I tried. And, as expected, this LP is a real burner. When I think of recent Mexican punk my mind tends to go to bands like Sacrificio and Muerte who are raw, ugly, visceral, and just REAL in a way that very few other bands are. Anti-Sex definitely have that element to their sound, but it’s also not hard to see why they attracted the attention of two American labels, as there’s something a little more palatable about them than, say, the sheer ugliness of Inservibles. It’s not a million miles away from New York bands like La Misma or Exotica, but rawer, heavier, and nastier. Throw in some pretty darn exceptional cover artwork and you have a record worth buying. Get on it!

No Sister: S/T 12” (self-released) As was the case with the great Banshee LP from last month, the first I’d heard of Australia’s No Sister was an unsolicited email asking me if I would carry their record. We get a lot of those types of emails and working my way through them usually feels like panning for gold, but fortunately every so often something shiny lifts its way out of the mud. Case in point, No Sister, who aren’t really the type of band that I tend to listen to these days, but have really caught my ear nonetheless. I’ve been trying to turn people on to this record, and the way that I usually describe it as sounding like mid-period Sonic Youth (circa records like Bad Moon Rising and especially Daydream Nation) augmented with a little bit (and JUST a little bit) of the groove and dance-ability of something like Gang of Four or Liquid Liquid. I know that Sonic Youth experiment a lot with alternate (especially open) tunings, and I feel like No Sister must have discovered one of the key tunings that SY relied on during that period, because something about the texture of this LP is such a dead ringer for Sonic Youth that it’s almost uncanny. But at the same time it’s clear that No Sister aren’t trying to ape those records, because the compositions—the structures of the songs themselves—are so different, even if the wide-angle, sun-bleached vibe of the LP as a whole arrives in a quite similar place. This is quite a long record too, and I really enjoy the way that it seems to take me to a whole bunch of different places over it’s 40+ minute running time. It’s funny, even though the ease of distributing digital music has promoted physical product to a kind of privileged position, listening to this LP makes a lot of current releases feel like throwaways by comparison. If you’re looking for something with a real sense of gravity and ambition I really can’t recommend this highly enough.

Enamel: Complete the Lie cassette (self-released) 7-song cassette from this ripping hardcore band out of Philadelphia who you might remember from a pretty killer earlier demo. This time around they’ve recorded at the Braddock Hit Factory and the recording is appropriately beefy yet raw, with lots of clarity in the guitars in particular. I’m glad for that because (as was the case on the demo), the guitar-player is a real standout, cramming these short-and-fast hardcore tunes full of clever and memorable little touches that expand on the hardcore template without losing the concision or the aggression. The vocals are also really cool… not a lot of people these days sing in the kind of authoritative but not raspy hardcore shout—that’s particularly true when it comes to women who front bands—but Enamel’s singer nails it. This is clean and catchy enough that I could see Enamel being the rawest band on a youth crew-ish show, but it’s heavy, raw, and nasty enough that I wouldn’t be surprised to see them playing with heavier / crustier Philly bands like Dronez or the Brood either. They also remind me a little of No Statik or Look Back and Laugh in the particular stew of influences that seem to bubble to the surface. Definitely well worth checking out if the above references pique your fancy.

Napalm Raid: Wheel of War 12” (Rust and Machine) Latest full-length from these crusty Canadians who have been around for a few years now. I’m not sure if I’d forgotten exactly what they sound like or if Wheel of War represents a major shift in the band’s sound, but I’m really taken aback at how heavy and metallic this release is. That can be a bad thing for crust bands, but I think it’s working great for Napalm Raid. While this is definitely a crust record, it seems to border on death metal a la the Bolt Thrower demos or something like that… but of course without guitar solos and with more of an in-the-pocket, d-beat-type drumming style. While the production is clear and very heavy, it never sounds like modern metal—when a band does that they’ve almost certainly lost me—but instead the clarity of the recording reveals a lot of depth and texture in what, with inadequate production, could have been a record that ended up almost incoherently chaotic. While this is perhaps a hair more traditionally crusty than something like Pollen, ultimately it has a similar sensibility and if that’s in your wheelhouse this probably will be too.

Ond Tro: S/T 7” (Spaghetti Cassetti) Brand new 6-song 7” from this new Danish band that features former members of Under Al Kritik, a band that longtime followers of the Sorry State label might remember. While Ond Tro don’t sound too much like Under Al Kritik (aside from being a fast hardcore band), a similar balance of catchiness and intensity is apparent on this EP. While it’s a raw, fast, and straightforward hardcore record, there are slight melodic touches to the riffing that puts it in a category with other subtly melodic but still very intense bands like Headcleaners (particularly circa The Infection Grows), BGK, or something like that, with a couple of moments that are more straightforwardly melodic. In a lot of ways this a real throwback to the K-Town / Kick N Punch scene from a few years ago (particularly the more hardcore bands like Amde Petersens Arme), and this record sounds very fresh in the same way that those releases did at the time. Thanks to its import price and very small pressing run this will fly under most people’s radars, but if you’re into searching out these obscure little hardcore bands that fall between the cracks this is a real gem.

Olho Seco: Botas, Fuzis, Capacetes 7” (Nada Nada Discos) New pressing of this Brazilian hardcore monster on the great Nada Nada Discos label, who not only brought you a repress of this record a few years ago (well, 2010… time really flies!), but also those recent Anti-Cimex reissues that were done so well. That’s the case with this one as well, reproducing this gem with the respect and care it deserves. I’m not really sure what to say about this, except that if you haven’t heard it already you should rectify that post-haste. It’s one of the great 80s hardcore 7”s, particularly if you like it raw, primal and direct (i.e. if you like hardcore). It has the same raw, feral quality as records like the Negative FX LP or Agnostic Front’s United Blood, but with an added level of tightness that those bands were never able to lend to their hardcore-era material. A true collection staple for anyone who follows international hardcore.

All New Arrivals
Queens of the Stone Age: Villains 12" (Matador)
Queens of the Stone Age: Villains 12" (deluxe edition; Matador)
Turnover: Good Nature 12" (Run for Cover)
Iron & Wine: Beast Epic 12" (Sub Pop)
Liars: TCF 12" (Mute)
Superchunk: S/T 12" (Merge)
Mark Lanegan: I'll Take Care of You 12" (Sub Pop)
Mark Lanegan: Field Songs 12" (Sub Pop)
Firewalker: S/T 12" (Pop Wig)
The War on Drugs: A Deeper Understanding 12" (Atlantic)
No Sister: S/T 12" (self-released)
Ond Tro: S/T 7" (Spaghetti Cassette)
Anti-Sex: Un Mejor Futuro 12" (Thrilling Living)
Enamel: Complete the Lie cassette (self-released)
Abhorrent Decimation: The Pardoner 12" (Prosthetic)
Nunslaughter: The Devil's Congeries Vol 2 12" (Hell's Headbangers)
Marduk: Fuck Me Jesus 12" (Osmose)
Marduk: Opus Nocturne 12" (Osmose)
Marduk: Those of the Unlight 12" (Osmose)
Gogol Bordello: Seekers and Finders 12" (Cooking Vinyl)
Der Weg Einer Freiheit: Finisterre 12" (Season of Mist)
Livid: Beneath This Shroud, the Earth Erodes 12" (Prosthetic)
Dion: S/T 12" (Agitated)
Housewives: Ff061116 12" (Rocket Recordings)
Mind Spiders: S/T 12" (Dirtnap)
David Nance: Negative Boogie 12" (Ba Da Bing!)
Neurosis: The Word as Law 12" (Neurot)
Oh Sees: Orc 12" (Castle Face)
Patsy's Rats: Rounding Up 7" (Dirtnap)
The Rebel: Poems with Water Trilogy 12" (Monofonus)
Rubella Ballet: Ballet Bag 12" (Dark Entries)
The Side Eyes: So Sick 12" (In the Red)
Skip Church: Out of Tune, In Touch with... 12" (Randy)
The Fall: Perverted by Language 12" (Superior Viaduct)
Witch Vomit: Poisoned Blood 12" (20 Buck Spin)
Wolfsheim: The Sparrows and the Nightingales 12" (Dark Entries)
Mardou: Cold Grasp 12" (Moniker)
Secret Machines: Now Here Is Nowhere 12" (Run Out Groove)
Modern Baseball: Holy Ghost 12" (Run for Cover)
Death Worship: Extermination Mass 12" (Nuclear War Now!)

Restocks
The Sexual: Discography 12" (Euro Import)
Niku-Dan: Discography 12" (Euro Import)
Belgrado: Obraz 12" (La Vida Es Un Mus)
Crisis: Hymns of Faith 12" (La Vida Es Un Mus)
Crisis: Kollectiv 12" (La Vida Es Un Mus)
Good Throb: S/T 7" (La Vida Es Un Mus)
Kriegshog: S/T 7" (La Vida Es Un Mus)
Nurse: Discography 12" (La Vida Es Un Mus)
Alain Goraguer: La Planete Sauvage OST 12" (Superior Viaduct)
Hot Snakes: Audit in Progress 12" (Swami)
Hot Snakes: Automatic Midnight 12" (Swami)
Marked Men: Ghosts 12" (Dirtnap)
Marked Men: Fix My Brain 12" (Dirtnap)
Marked Men: On the Outside 12" (Dirtnap)
Charles Mingus: The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady 12" (Superior Viaduct)
Sonic Youth: Daydream Nation 12" (Goofin')
Subhumans: EPLP 12" (Bluurg)
The Fall: Dragnet 12" (Superior Viaduct)
The Fall: Slates 10" (Superior Viaduct)

I'm back at you with another roundup of what's been on my turntable lately. This is a small list (it seems like fewer records come out at this time of year for whatever reason), but man are there some scorchers on it! In particular I've been really stoked on the return to the fold of no-bullshit USHC by bands like Dagger, Nosferatu, and Testa Dura... it's been a while since that style was in fashion, and all three of the bands really do a great job with the style.

Aside from that, I don't really have much to report. We're still here trying to weather the summer at Sorry State, packing up orders and listening to all of the hot new releases as we always do. As the summer winds down and everyone returns to work and school I hope we can give you some cool new stuff to listen to!

Dagger: Writhing in the Light of the Moon 7” (Lengua Armada) Debut EP from this young band out of Northwest Indiana. I’m not sure if my radar for new hardcore releases is slipping or if this band has just deliberately avoided the internet, but this EP is the first I heard of them and I’m downright blown away. Combining the brute force of SOA or early Agnostic Front with the complex playing and song structures from Koro, Dagger is pretty much exactly what I want to hear from a hardcore band. The production is also perfectly analog and old school, raw and in your face but also clear and powerful. It seems as though lately there is a new wave of young bands returning to records like the EPs from Negative Approach, Koro, Mecht Mensch, Youth Brigade (DC), and the like and attempting to do something similar. I’m thinking specifically of bands like Nosferatu and Testa Dura, but Dagger absolutely belong on that list as well, not only because they play a similar style but also because they rip just as hard. Highly recommended.

Note: I can't find a stream of this one anywhere online... you'll just have to trust me that it rips!

Stake: demo cassette (Vinyl Conflict) Debut 3-song demo (though at 11 minutes it’s pretty lengthy for a demo) from this Richmond, Virginia band. Chaz from the band Nervous Ticks is on vocals, and it’s good to hear him again because I always thought Nervous Ticks were terribly underrated, even though they never managed to convey how great their live show was on a recording. Additionally, their whole vibe of combining 50s rockabilly and raw black metal (no, I’m not joking) was just too weird for this world and had the effect of alienating people from both scenes, which in turn scored them major points with a much, much smaller audience of people like me who tend to get bored once anything starts to feel too familiar. Anyway, enough eulogizing the Ticks… this is a new thing, and it RULES! If you happened to check out the band Race Car that we were pushing hard a few months ago, Stake has a very similar setup with a manic-sounding, distorted drum machine powering some nervous, antsy, and densely layered punk rock. There are touches of Chaz’s rockabilly-informed guitar style in the riffing, but what really makes Stake stand out is the subtle sense of pop songcraft running through the whole thing, but reaching particular heights on the opening track, “Pray for Death.” It’s really hard to put my finger on what it is, but something about that song reminds me of the Chameleons or Bauhaus at their best, simultaneously dark, sombre, and strangely weightless and maybe even uplifting. All 3 tracks are really different from one another—“Planned Obsolescence” is like a robot version of manic, rockabilly-inspired Fall tracks like “Container Drivers,” while the epic closer “Always Down” stretches out and rides its heavy, almost Stooges-esque groove right into the abyss. I hear the band now has a full live lineup and is playing shows… I can’t wait to see them, but I also hope they manage not to lose the magic captured on these tracks, because it’s really special. Highly recommended.

Odio: Ancora 12” (Agipunk) Debut from this new-ish California band featuring Giacomo from Torso on drums. If you couldn’t tell from the Sugi artwork, Odio evince a strong predilection for Japanese hardcore, but they aren’t afraid to step outside of the established boxes for that genre. The singer has a very convincing Sakevi-esique growl, the production is huge a la Death Side or Bastard, and the guitarist occasionally does some pretty epic leads (though the style is a little more metallic and less melodic than Chelsea himself). However, a lot of Odio’s fast songs use a manic pogo beat rather than the d-beat / Motorhead rhythms a lot of Japanese bands relied on, and as a result a lot of Odio’s faster songs sound like Blazing Eye, but with bigger production and much more complex riffing. However, Ancora’s real surprises are on side two, where Odio gives us (among a handful more fast songs) a pair of darker numbers that sound like they’re more influenced by Amebix and Killing Joke than any Japanese hardcore that I can think of. These songs are totally killer, but even beyond how enjoyable they are in and of their own right, they give the LP a sense of balance and confirm that Odio is more than just a tribute band. I think a lot of people slept on Odio’s 7” because it was super limited and kind of expensive, but hopefully the same thing doesn’t happen with this LP because it is a legit scorcher.

False Figure: Cardinal Cross 7” (self-released) Debut EP from this San Francisco post-punk band. False Figure play in that big-guitar post-punk style that I associate with the Chameleons (particularly their less poppy and more brooding moments) as well as more recent bands like the Estranged and Lost Tribe. While I’m generally a fan of the poppier stuff in this vein, I think that False Figure hit a sweet spot, with rich production, propulsive rhythms, and atmosphere in spades. Honestly, this reminds me just as much of the Wipers circa Youth of America as it does the Chameleons or Bauhaus, and that’s a high compliment indeed. Only two songs, but it doesn’t feel too short. I’m not sure how many of you goth-rockers out there mess with 7”s, but this is a good one for sure.

Geros: Razor Dog 7” (Secret Mission) Second single from this Japanese band that plays in that familiar, distorted-yet-catchy style of bands like Teengerate and the Registrators. It seems like the market will never really get saturated with bands like this because so few bands can do it well, and you pretty much have to be Japanese for it to sound right. Anyway, Geros stick closely enough to the style that if you like the aforementioned groups (or similar ones like Louder) you’ll almost certainly like them, but they also have their own distinctive voice. The a-side here is the straightforward rocker with big riffs and big choruses, while the b-side is a little more melodic and 60s-inspired with its surf-y / spy movie guitar riff and nimble lead playing. I hope this band sticks around long enough to make a 12”, because I have no doubt it’ll be a real scorcher.

Lebenden Toten: At the Window 7” (self-released) Brand new limited, 1-song flexi from this long-running band, and while it’s been a while since I’ve checked in with LT I feel like it has a slightly different vibe than their previous releases. I remember LT being pretty much straight up total Confuse / Gai-style noise punk… sure, they’ve always been on the artsier end of that spectrum, but At the Window seems much more measured and deliberate than I remember them being. What’s particularly interesting is that not much has changed about their sound. The guitar still sounds like a dentist drill, the bass still carries the melody, and the vocals still punctuate everything with short, percussive bursts of sound, but rather than the music sounding wild and unhinged it now sounds measured, atmospheric, and downright creepy. It’s not really goth, but something else entirely, a melding of genres I don’t think that I’ve heard before. Maybe some of the best Deathcharge stuff is broadly in this vein, but the application of noise-punk production and dynamics to this style strikes me as really original and exciting. This has me very, very intrigued as to what the band’s upcoming full-length is going to be like, but regardless I have a feeling “At the Window” is going to be a track I return to often.

Rixe: Collection 12” (La Vida Es Un Mus) This pretty much does what it says on the tin, i.e. collects Rixe’s previous 3 7” onto one slab of 12” vinyl. There’s a new cover and a pretty sweet poster, but really the only question here is, “do Rixe’s 3 EPs work together as a full-length album?” Well, yes they do! I guess everything has been remastered to keep the levels in line with one another and whatnot, and it all sounds great to me. If you already have the 3 7”s I can’t see a ton of reason to pick this up, but if you’re not really a 7” person then it’s time to get on board with one of the very few modern oi! bands out there worth listening to.

All New Arrivals
Morbid Angel: Blessed Are the Sick 12" (Earache)
Terrorizer: World Downfall 12" (Earache)
False Figure: Cardinal Cross b/w Exhale 7" (self-released)
Dagger: Writhing in the Light of the Moon 7" (Lengua Armada)
Fatal: Soul Burning Still 12" (Hammerheart)
Warning: Watching from a Distance 12" (Svart)
Paradise Lost: Gothic 12" (Peaceville)
Rixe: Collection 12" (La Vida Es Un Mus)
The Fall: New Facts Emerge 10" (Cherry Red)
Haim: Something to Tell You 12" (Columbia)
Crow: The Crow 12" (Crowmaniax)
Serquet: demo cassette (Vinyl Conflict)
Stake: demo cassette (Vinyl Conflict)
Geros: Razor Dog 7" (Secret Mission)
Thou: Peasant 12" (Robotic Empire)
Odio: Ancora 12" (Agipunk)
World Burns to Death: Here a Dream Dies Every Day 12" (Analogue Violence)
Battery: For the Rejected by the Rejected 12" (Revelation)
Dicks: Hate the Police 7" (1234 Go!)
Zero Boys: Livin' in the 80s 7" (1234 Go!)

Restocks
Sheer Mag: Compilation 12" (Wilsuns)
Sheer Mag: Need to Feel Your Love 12" (Wilsuns)
Career Suicide: Machine Response 12" (Deranged)
Agnostic Front: Victim in Pain 12" (Bridge 9)
Extreme Noise Terror: Phonophobia 12" (Agipunk)
X: Los Angeles 12" (Porterhouse)
Zounds: The Curse of Zounds 12" (Overground)
Cock Sparrer: Shock Troops 12" (Pirates Press)
Drive Like Jehu: S/T 12" (Headhunter)
Drive Like Jehu: Yank Crime 12" (Headhunter)
Kombat: In Death We Are All the Same 7" (Hysteria)
Beastie Boys: Licensed to Ill 12" (Capitol)
Miles Davis: Bitches Brew 12" (Capitol)
Funkadelic: Maggot Brain 12" (Westbound)
Misfits: Collection 12" (Caroline)
Misfits: Collection II 12" (Caroline)
Misfits: Legacy of Brutality 12" (Caroline)
Misfits: Static Age 12" (Caroline)
Pink Floyd: Dark Side of the Moon 12" (Pink Floyd)
Slayer: Reign in Blood 12" (American)
Slayer: Seasons in the Abyss 12" (American)
Slayer: South of Heaven 12" (American)
A Tribe Called Quest: Low End Theory 12" (Jive)
Velvet Underground: VU & Nico 12" (Vinyl Lovers)
Weezer: Pinkerton 12" (Geffen)
Zombies: Odyssey & Oracle 12" (Varese Vintage)
Black Sabbath: Sabotage 12" (Rhino)
Black Sabbath: Sabbath Bloody Sabbath 12" (Rhino)
Black Sabbath: S/T 12" (Rhino)
Black Sabbath: Paranoid 12" (Rhino)
Black Sabbath: Master of Reality 12" (Rhino)
The Stooges: Fun House 12" (Rhino)
Metallica: Kill 'em All 12" (Blackened)
Iron Maiden: The Number of the Beast 12" (Sanctuary)
Iron Maiden: S/T 12" (Sanctuary)
Iron Maiden: Killers 12" (Sanctuary)
Sunny Day Real Estate: Diary 12" (Sub Pop)
Gang of Four: Entertainment! 12" (Rhino)
Beach House: Depression Cherry 12" (Sub Pop)
David Bowie: The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust 12" (Parlophone)
Motorhead; Iron Fist 12" (Sanctuary)
The Cure: Disintegration 12" (Rhino)
Metallica: Master of Puppets 12" (Blackened)
Institute: Subordination 12" (Sacred Bones)
Metallica: Ride the Lightning 12" (Blackened)

Not much to report this week in terms of my personal life and non-new-record news. I've been spending a bit of time going through old records and flyers and stuff and thinking about all of the memories associated with them... I guess I've been feeling a bit nostalgic, which is something I've actively resisted in the past. I've always been scared that looking backward will keep me from looking forward, but thinking about how stoked I am on some of the stuff in this little roundup makes me realize that remembering good times past only makes me more dedicated to creating good times now.

The Cowboys: Volume 4 12” (Drunken Sailor) Second album from this band out of Bloomington, Indiana, but don’t go judging by the record’s title and think they’ve integrated some heavy Sabbath vibes… this pretty much picks up right where their brilliant previous LP left off. In my mind, the Cowboys have access to some kind of time machine that has allowed them to get a job as the house band at a lake resort somewhere like upstate New York or the Poconos, playing two 3-hour sets per night of rock and soul standards sprinkled with their own well-crafted homages to said style. There’s simply no other explanation for how a band can come to sound like this… while the label’s description references Thee Mighty Caesars (which is not out of the ballpark, I suppose), the essential difference between the Cowboys and neo-garage bands is that nothing really sounds neo- about them at all… they seriously sound like a relic from a long-lost past. I mean, listen to the track “After Sunset.” It could just BE a Buddy Holly song… it doesn’t sound like an approximation of a Buddy Holly song by someone who grew up on Weezer; it sounds like the real thing. And even more impressively, the Cowboys aren’t just one-trick ponies… Volume 4 suffers from none of the same-iness or near-sightedness that plagues so much modern music, punk rock in particular. While this LP is a total no-brainer if you’re a fan of 60s garage like the Seeds or ? and the Mysterians, I really think it transcends that style. There’s some invisible x factor here that makes me think this will appeal to just about anyone who likes rock and roll. Seriously, I can’t recommend this one highly enough.

Limp Wrist: Facades 12” (Lengua Armada) Brand new 12” from Limp Wrist, following nine years after their last record. Limp Wrist have proven themselves to be a remarkably flexible entity, not simply trudging along fighting the same fight year after year, but rather changing with and adapting to the times. In particular, I’m really interested in how their stance and message have evolved with this latest release. I remember first hearing about them in 2000 or 2001… if I remember correctly, they were billed as a “gay straight edge” band (I’m not sure if that’s actually true or not, but there’s a big x’ed up hand on the cover of their first EP, so I suppose, at the very least, that they were playing with that image), and musically they fit in extremely well with the then-current “Y2K thrash” scene. I remember seeing them play in Richmond with Das Oath right around that time, and I’m pretty sure it’s the first time I saw one of Martin’s bands, as I just missed Los Crudos the first time around. Anyway, I remember their message and image being much more confrontational back then, with songs like “Punk Ass Queers” and “Recruiting Time.” This was just before the period when the internet enabled the giant data dump of primary material (records, zines, flyers, anecdotes, etc.) that would result in the constant historicization that has characterized the punk scene since then. Punk still felt like a current thing rather than a re-enactment of a bygone era, and as a result Limp Wrist’s image and rhetoric were a lot more straightforward and direct… people weren’t necessarily expecting or looking for subtlety in punk and hardcore. Fast forward fifteen years and things are a lot different. Thanks to the internet, I think that anyone who is even mildly curious can quickly get a sense the rich history of queer punk, and simply being gay isn’t as shocking a thing as it was even a decade ago. It seems like Limp Wrist have adapted to this changing landscape, in particular by reassessing who their audience is. Facades comes with a thick, content-rich zine directed, at least in part, at, “the rural queens, dykes, trans kids, and punk weirdos, especially those who have not ‘figured shit out yet’ who crave to be a part of some dream community, but can’t.” This feels really fresh and exciting to me because so many of the bands I listen to these days seem to be addressing such a niche audience… I mean, I’m a giant nerd so when a new punk band references some obscure detail from punk history I get really stoked and feel very smart, but Limp Wrist are trying to say something broader and something far more important. In particular, I really like how their overall message seems to be about not being limited by identity… you can be gay and still be into really aggressive hardcore (and vice versa, obviously), you can like both hardcore and minimal synth / dance music (oh yeah, I should probably note that the entire b-side of this record is devoted to the latter genre), etc. As they put it in the zine / insert, “when we think we have really clear definitions, especially of who and what we are, we find that those definitions may trap us, and may allow spectators to flatten us.” Much like G.L.O.S.S., Limp Wrist seem to be keenly aware of where the punk community is at in the year 2017, what their expectations and priorities are, what they want to hear and what they really need to hear. Where am I going with this? I guess this is just all to say that Facades feels like a very significant and important record, one that is both a response to and a prescription for the times in which we’re living at this very moment.

Prom Nite: Dancing to This Beat 12” (Barfbag) Debut LP from this Toronto band and it’s a real standout. This brings together a lot of different threads, including the quirky punk of the Northwest Indiana / Lumpy scene, DIY hardcore, and something a little more straightforward and poppier than either of those. The label’s description says “Dangerhouse meets Die Kreuzen” and I think that’s perfectly apt, though if I were to come up with my own “this meets that” I think I’d probably go with “CCTV meets Brain F≠.” Like those bands, this has this sort of effortless catchiness that is really powerful and endearing, and keeps things interesting and direct no matter how weird the band attempt to get with their quirky rhythms (of which there are plenty here). Really, though, this doesn’t sound too much like anything I’ve heard before, and I can’t think of a better compliment for a record released in punk’s 41st year of existence.

Voight-Kampff: The Din of Dying Youth 12” (Deranged) Latest record from this long-distance project featuring Joe from Q on vocals and Colin from Davidians playing all of the instruments. While they started off sounding a bit like the Observers, they’ve continued to move in more of a post-punk direction, and there’s very little of the band’s early melodic hardcore left in their sound. I’m pretty sure I mentioned this when I wrote about their last single for Deranged, but Voight-Kampff these days remind me quite of Merchandise, both because Joe’s voice bears more than a passing resemblance to Carson’s, but also because their releases tend to have a similar pacing. As with a couple of different Merchandise records, The Din of Dying Youth is centered around one standout uptempo pop track, “Victim of Desire.” Like Merchandise songs such as “Anxiety’s Door,” “Victim of Desire” careens along at a similar pace to Smiths songs like “This Charming Man” or “Bigmouth Strikes Again,” with an absolutely brilliant vocal melody to match. Starting off with such an obviously strong track can be a bit of a gamble, but that initial shot of adrenalin carries me through the EP’s other five tracks, which have a lot of variation in tempo and instrumentation, but tend to have a more brooding, introverted vibe. If you’re like me and you need a heaping helping of pop sugar to get your modern post-punk medicine down I’d highly recommend a dose of this album.

Sacrificio: Pulidores de Tumbas 12” (SPHC) After an excellent 7”, here’s the debut 12” from Mexico’s Sacrificio. One of the things that I really like about contemporary Mexican punk is that it seems largely oblivious to American trends. If Sacrificio were white suburban teenagers playing VFW hall shows or whatever they would probably be mocked for having kind of sloppy blast beats and bouncy, (dare I say it?) almost nu-metal-inflected mid-paced parts, but it definitely works for them. I worry that the previous sentence will come off as racist, but what I’m trying to get at is that punks seem to have a different way of going about things in Mexico. While, in the US, there’s an unstated but mutually agreed-upon ideal of what is “cool” at any given moment that everyone is striving for (while, paradoxically, trying to appear as if they’re not striving for it at all), bands like Sacrificio and Inservibles and lots of their associated bands seem willing to use whatever tools they have at their disposal to express themselves. Perhaps they’re just striving for an ideal that I’m not familiar with, but I get the sense that it’s about something a little different, that it’s self-expression and catharsis in a much purer form. Like the Limp Wrist LP I wrote about above, this is one of those records that seems weightier than most, that the members’ unique perspectives allow them to make music that matters because it adds things to the discussion that people like me wouldn’t know otherwise. So, if you’re going to turn this off the second the band goes into a blast beat then you might as well not bother, but if you like your punk raw, visceral, and unpretentious this is well worth checking out. Oh, and as with their last EP, the artwork and layout are ACES.

Andy Human & the Reptoids: Refrigerator 7” (Total Punk) Latest single from Andy Human & the Reptoids, who has been releasing a string of scorchers that I have not been shy about hyping. “Refrigerator” is one of their best songs yet, even if the premise is a little thin. As far as I can tell the lyrics don’t really make any sense, and are just an excuse to rhyme as many words as possible with “Refrigerator.” However, I don’t really need any high concept poetry… if you can write hooks as beefy and memorable as the several that populate “Refrigerator” you can sing about pretty much whatever you want and I’ll still pay attention. The b-side isn’t quite as monstrous, but that’s what b-sides are for, right? It’s still a hot track and I don’t think it’ll get any less play than the A-side. I absolutely love to follow a band when they’re on a hot streak, and Andy Human & the Reptoids is on a real tear.

Ausencia / Narcoestado: Split 7” (Todo Destruido) Split 7” between these two bands, Ausencia from LA and Narcoestado from Mexico, who recently toured together. They’re a great pairing as both bands have this way of sounding super punk while still being extremely melodic. On the surface Narcoestado play something like traditional oi!, but I think that the songwriting is a lot more interesting. The first track in particular, with its soaring chorus, reminds me of the countless gems in the latter half of the Ramones’ catalog, but with obviously much rawer and nastier production. As for Ausencia, they’re faster and more punk, and I’m sure lots of people will compare them to the Spanish classics (which is appropriate given the way they balance melody and aggression), but to me this also has a lot in common with the Peligro Social / Ruleta Rusa school, though as was the case with Narcoestado this is much rawer than the bands it sounds like. I could see either of these bands losing me if they got too polished, but with both bands employing raw but very clear and straightforward production (both bands sound like they were recorded on an analog 4-track) this sounds like some long-lost punk artifact from the early 80s in the best way possible.

Rut: Attraction 7” (Digital Regress) Debut vinyl from this California band who, I believe, has a connection to Acrylics. I dare say that if you like Acrylics that you’ll really like this, as it’s very much along the same lines… hardcore that is both raw and in your face, but densely packed with ideas and played with care and precision. Rut reminds me of bands like Torso and Blackball in that the songs sound slightly deconstructed, like the band started with something like a bunch of standard hardcore songs but tweaked and modified them until they were something different, meticulously going through every riff and every transition and thinking to themselves, “well, it would be a little bit more interesting if we made this very subtle adjustment.” So, while the overall structure and form feel very familiar (not in a bad way! More like a comfortable way), the details are where the real action is at. It’s like a masterfully executed painting where you’re not really too concerned with the overall concept or composition, but you can get lost all day in looking closely at the brushstrokes.

All New Arrivals
Running Wild: Port Royal 12" (Noise)
Running Wild: Under Jolly Roger 12" (Noise)
Downtown Boys: Cost of Living 12" (Sub Pop)
Narcoestado / Ausencia: Split 7" (Todo Destruido)
Mane: Alpha Female 12" (Digital Regress)
Preening: Beeters 7" (Digital Regress)
Rut: Attraction 7" (Digital Regress)
Sacrificio: Pulidores de Tumbas 12" (SPHC)
Exit Hippies: Dance Maniac 12" (SPHC)
Illya: In Adversity 7" (SPHC)
Thisclose / Sludge: Split 7" (SPHC)
Remnants: Accomplices Not Allies 12" (Discos MMM)
Durs Coeurs: Dur Dur Dur 12" (Discos MMM)
Amon Amarth: Fate of Norns 12" (Metal Blade)
Amon Amarth: With Odin on Our Side 12" (Metal Blade)
The Lurking Fear: Out of the Voiceless 12" (Century Media)
Moral Void: Deprive 12" (Translation Loss)
No Use for a Name: Rarities Vol 1 12" (Fat Wreck)
Poison Blood: S/T 12" (Relapse)
Venom Inc: Avé 12" (Nuclear Blast)
Limp Wrist: Facades 12" (Lengua Armada)
The Cowboys: Volume 4 12" (Drunken Sailor)

Restocks
Radiohead: Kid A 12" (XL)
Motorhead: Bomber 12" (Sanctuary)
Operation Ivy: Energy 12" (Epitaph)
Bathory: Under the Sign of the Black Mark 12" (Black Mark)
Death: Spiritual Healing 12" (Relapse)
Earth Crisis: Destroy the Machines 12" (Victory)
Earth Crisis: Firestorm 12" (Victory)
Electric Wizard: Dopethrone 12" (Rise Above)
Geto Boys: We Can't Be Stopped 12" (Rap-A-Lot)
Joey Bada$$: All-Amerikkkan Bada$$ 12" (Cinematic)
Modest Mouse: Building Nothing Out of Something 12" (Glacial Pace)
Modest Mouse: Sad Sappy Sucker 12" (Glacial Pace)
Modest Mouse: This Is a Long Drive 12" (Glacial Pace)
Municipal Waste: Slime and Punishment 12" (Century Media)
Parquet Courts: Light Up Gold 12" (What's Your Rupture?)
Parquet Courts: Sunbathing Animal 12" (What's Your Rupture?)
Power Trip: Manifest Decimation 12" (Southern Lord)
Slayer: Live Undead 12" (Metal Blade)
Sleep: Dopesmoker 12" (Southern Lord)
Sunn O))): Kannon 12" (Southern Lord)
Sunn O))): Monoliths and Dimensions 12" (Southern Lord)

It's been a few days since we've posted anything new to the blog, so I'm sure all of you are jonesing for some new tunes. Here's where we point you toward some!

First up we have a couple of new demos out of the fertile Northwest Indiana punk scene. Though it's been on Bandcamp for a while, we just grabbed physical copies of the demo tape from The Pornography Glows, a new band featuring members of Big Zit, among many other bands. Porno Glows has a lot of Big Zit's quirkiness, but rather than applying it in a hardcore context, this is more like jittery and fairly minimalist punk in the vein of the Urinals or even (in places) something like the Dead Milkmen:

Next up we have a band that shares a member with Porno Glows, Jean Jam. Jean Jam are a little more straightforward, playing that style that falls right on the border between punk and hardcore, which is one of my favorite subgenre spaces:

While we're hanging around the general Chicago area, let's check out this demo by Blystex. This demo was released on Foreign Legion Records, who has been putting out some really cool oi! over the past few years, but Blystex have more of a raw early punk sound. The fact that the singer sings in Spanish makes this recall the cadence of early Spanish punk like Ultimo Resorte, though I wouldn't be surprised if these folks had their fair share of UK82 classics in their collections as well.

Next we go full hardcore with the debut 7" from Testa Dura, a new band featuring Giacaomo, the drummer from Torsö, on vocals. The obvious inspiration here is classic Italian hardcore... it's a little more on the punk end of things than, say, Wretched... I'm getting a real Peggio Punx vibe personally, but if you like raw and nasty old Italian hardcore I would strongly recommend giving this a listen, as it's about as authetnic a take on the style as you're likely to find:

Next we head to Finland (which sounds good right about now as we're in the midst of a brutal heat wave here in North Carolina) for the demo from Puhelinseksi. Playing melodic punk with touches of oi! as well as the dark quality of Swedish bands like Masshysteri and Allvaret, this might be a little earnest for some of you out there but I think it sounds really fresh:

Next let's head out to Australia and get freaky with the debut EP from Spotting. Continuing the long string of great synth-punk bands coming out of that country over the past few years, this seems to bridge the gap between the swooshing synth sounds of Ausmuteants or UV Race with the songcraft of more '77-inspired bands like Helta Skelta:

We'll finish things up with a couple of new singles on the almighty Total Punk level. I guess that I wasn't the only one who noticed that Andy Human & the Reptoids have been steadily getting better and better, and I'm stoked that they've moved to a label that will get the right people listening to them. And of course a track as great as "Refrigerator" is going to help that process along:

And finally, the new EP from Cleveland's Rubber Mate. Dark, weird, and uncomfortable, yet totally punk (naturally), if you're a fan of the demented sounds of Darvocets or Homostupids this should be a band you are watching very, very closely...

Apologies for the blog being a little quiet lately. Not only did I miss last week’s post, but Jeff and Seth were also both MIA for their scheduled posts this week… maybe we’ll just forget that week existed and move on from there? I feel like the lack of activity is a combination of it being really oppressively hot and muggy here in Raleigh—weather that makes you want to sit around and do absolutely nothing—and the store being really busy. We’re still not out of the cash crunch I mentioned last time by any stretch of the imagination, but we’ve been managing to fill up all of our time nonetheless, mostly pricing killer used stock for the store and bringing in a bunch of extremely cool new releases, many of which will be discussed below.

For the past few weeks my personal listening diet has been focused heavily on the new Sheer Mag and Impalers albums—both of which I like a whole lot—but when I’m not spinning the two of those relentlessly I’ve been spending a lot of time listening to looser, jam-ier and more experimental music. The reissue of Yoko Ono’s Fly that came out last week prompted me to sit down with that album for the first time in a while, and then at the Kombat show the other night Matt from Public Acid / Menthol mentioned that he’d been really into Miles Davis’s On the Corner lately, which prompted me to pull out that album. Man, what a record! It’s kind of Miles’s homage to Sly & the Family Stone and James Brown, but the density of rhythms on it (there is a LOT of percussion… like maybe even more than a Fela Kuti record) surpasses those records, and a lot of the playing and soloing on it is completely wild. This kind of improvisation has become really interesting to me… hearing how far bands and players can take a melody to where it’s virtually unrecognizable. But, then again, On the Corner doesn’t really have melodies, just groove, but somehow your ear makes sense of it anyway and interesting things are happening in your ears and brain pretty much constantly. It’s a real joy. Thanks so much, Matt, for reminding me about that record.

Sheer Mag: Need to Feel Your Love 12” (Wilsuns) Like a lot of people, I’m sure, I wondered how Sheer Mag would navigate the transition to full-length, but it doesn’t appear to have been much of a hurdle. My experience with Need to Feel Your Love was pretty much exactly the same as it was with the band’s previous EPs. On the first listen I have a hard time hearing the hooks and I wonder if I’m over the band. On the second listen I start to hear some of the hooks, and I think to myself “there are some pretty good songs on this, but also some I don’t get it.” Then on the third listen I’m pretty much in love with every moment, and I play it to death over the next several weeks. Need to Feel Your Love is, however, quite stylistically different than the band’s earlier stuff, but it’s something you really only realize when you reflect on it, because the band still plays to their same basic strengths, but they take those strengths into new areas. “Meet Me in the Street” and “Turn It Up” are pure 80s radio rock… while radio-friendly hair metal isn’t a bad comparison, what those songs really remind me of is what Jeff likes to call “cowboy boot metal,” i.e. bands like Dangerous Toys and Junkyard that injected a distinct Skynyrd / southern rock vibe into the hair metal formula. I love both of those songs, but the real gems on this album, for me, are the tracks where Sheer Mag goes full Jackson 5. The disco-funk of the title track is up there with the very best songs that Sheer Mag has written, and is the clearly highlight of the album for me. While I tend to prefer the hard-hitting a-side tracks over the spacier, country-inflected songs on the b-side, there isn’t a track here that I want to skip. This honestly far exceeds my (pretty lofty) expectations for a Sheer Mag full length, and I’ve already played it so much that this will probably be the record that I associate with the summer of 2017 for many years to come. I’m sure this band will continue to have its haters, but for me they remain one of the most vital and exciting bands to come out of the punk scene for the past several years, but even more than that Need to Feel Your Love is just a blast to listen to.

Vittna: demo cassette (self-released) I’m not sure how much Jeff is going to hype his own band’s demo, so I wanted to make sure that everyone knows how hard this rips. Vittna features much of the core of the sadly-departed Blackball, along with new face Sea Bass on vocals, but you can tell that Vittna is a concerted effort to do things a little bit differently. While Blackball felt largely like a “back to basics” affair, Vittna seems to push forward into something a little more distinctive and original, primarily by incorporating the quirky rhythms and more complex chords of bands like Die Kreuzen and Nog Watt into the foundation of straightforward, US-meets-Sweden hardcore. Yeah, there are plenty of riffs that are blistering, crushing, et al, and the vocals are completely savage, but what really stands out about this demo is the overall vibe, which is slightly dark and spooky… again, sort of like the first Die Kreuzen album, but with an added layer of claustrophobia and misanthropy. Additionally, while a lot of punk demos can feel very tossed-off, this feels fully conceptualized in every respect, from the density of the songwriting (both musically and lyrically), the subtlety of the recording (which is excellent, but still raw and in your face), and even the artwork, which uses a cool little transparent overlay to give it a slight 3D effect. This is, without a doubt, one of the standout demos of 2017.

Judy & the Jerks: 3 Songs from Us to You cassette (self-released) Brand new 3-song cassette from this band out of the unexpectedly fertile (for punk rock, at least) land of Hattiesburg, Mississippi. I remember being blown away by Judy & the Jerks’ first tape, but we under-ordered it and it went out of stock before I really got a chance to let it sink in. I rectified that problem with this new tape, and of course immediately grabbed a copy for myself so that I can play it into the ground. If you haven’t heard Judy & the Jerks before, they play hardcore punk, but rather than (like a lot of bands) being grounded in heavier stuff and noisy d-beat, Judy & the Jerks seem more like the sped-up, sarcastic punk of bands like the Circle Jerks and the Dead Kennedys. Like those bands, the playing is tight, fast, and unexpectedly melodic, and the vocals have a ton of personality and character rather than just being someone yelling at you in the same pitch and timbre for a few minutes straight. The closest comparison that I can think of in terms of the overall approach is Warm Bodies, but Judy & the Jerks aren’t nearly as musically out there as Warm Bodies… they’re certainly not as musically irreverent, and they even have a pretty straightforward hardcore breakdown in one track. If your tastes extend across the divide between the more straightforward hardcore scenes and Lumpy / Neck Chop Records-style quirkiness then I would say this is a no-brainer (and will probably be one of your favorite new bands as well!), but even if you’re solidly in one of those camps or the other I would highly recommend checking this out… it’s really something special.

Pollen: Fear of Another War 7” (Brain Solvent Propaganda) I remember when Pollen’s last EP came out I listened to it twice, in its entirety, at 33RPM rather than 45, being blown away by what I thought was the best death metal record I’d heard in years. While it was still really good on 45, I honestly kind of preferred it on 33. Well, I wonder if the folks in Pollen did the same thing, because what I liked so much about the slowed-down version of their last EP actually comes across pretty well on Fear of Another War when played at the correct speed. At this point, Pollen are so raw and so gross-sounding that they’ve transcended d-beat… while their foundation (particularly in terms of their visual aesthetic) is clearly still grounded in that scene, I feel like Fear of Another War sounds way more like Napalm Death’s Scum than any d-beat record that I can think of, even super noisy stuff like D-Clone or Zyanose (though it is actually comparable to some of the very rawest Disclose stuff). For me, there’s some kind of invisible line between music that is, at its core, rock and roll, and stuff that is more like industrial music… it’s not about dancing, but rather about reflecting a bleak reality. Pollen are definitively on the other side of that line… when I listen to this record I don’t want to thrash around, I just want to lie on my back and let the fucked-ness of it all wash over me. If you come to this record looking for riffs you are going to be sorely disappointed, but if you like hardcore that teeters on the edge of industrial and noise music (i.e. you’ve checked out Merzbow and not immediately thought “this isn’t for me”), then you need to check this out. It’s definitely one of the most extreme and punishing records I’ve heard in some time.

Impalers: Cellar Dweller 12” (540) The day that this thing hit Bandcamp I remember asking Jeff, “have you heard that new Impalers yet?” and we both just looked at each other purely flabbergasted at how great it is. After their last record it’s kind of hard to imagine how Impalers could have gotten better… Psychedelic Snutskallar was already such a perfect hardcore record, and there really wasn’t anywhere to go in terms of getting faster, meaner, tighter, or whatever. So it seems, from my perspective at least, that Impalers didn’t even really try to do any of those things; they just made some more songs that just happen to be even better than their last batch of songs. I mean, not much has changed… this is still a pure hardcore record, and if anything it’s a more straightforward one than the last LP. However, there are all of these incremental improvements that are hard to put your finger on, but just make everything better. The one thing that really jumps out at me about Cellar Dweller is the vocals. For heavy hardcore bands like this, the vocalist is usually just fighting to be heard, screaming and yelling as loud as they possibly can in order to compete with the electronically-enhanced bashing of the other instruments. However, on this record Chris’s vocals have a real sense of dynamics… not only are there different approaches (like on the instantly-memorable “Technology”), but also there are all of these smaller moments where the vocals do something really memorable and exciting, whether it’s a perfectly-timed grunt or an unhinged, cathartic scream a la Barney from Napalm Death. And then there’s the epic closing track, which is a reworked version of the title track (which appeared on an earlier tour tape) with no vocals and an epic, 3-minute-long guitar solo. So, while those are the things I like about it, at the end of the day all I can really say about this record is that it’s a perfectly realized statement. That also extends to the details of the physical product… the mastering on the vinyl is crushingly loud and powerful, the jacket artwork is beautiful (and as subtly innovative as the music), and it also comes with a huge poster with full-color illustrations for every single track. Cellar Dweller is such a next-level statement that it’s bound to be near the top of everyone’s year-end list, so you might as well just go ahead and get it so that you can have something to talk about when all of your friends start jibber-jabbering to you about how great this record is.

Kombat: S/T 7” (Hysteria) This EP had a little bit of hype behind it, so I checked it out despite not having listened to the band’s previous demo tape, and honestly on that first experience it was kind of in one ear out the other… but really, that probably had more to do with me than the record, because a few nights later Kombat played in Raleigh and blew the doors off the place. Their set was, without a doubt, the single best set of live hardcore that I’ve seen in years. I mean, we have some seriously great bands in North Carolina and I see killer touring bands regularly, but Kombat felt like they were playing exactly my vision of what hardcore should be. There were no breakdowns, they were playing as fast as they could possibly play, and while the music was stripped-down and raw, they also were clearly pushing themselves to play at the very edge of their ability as players. They kind of reminded me of a band trying to play along to the SOA 7” at 78RPM, but they were also more than that, the guitarist in particular throwing in all of these complex but non-shred-y bits that elevated the songs to another level. So, after that experience I revisited this EP and of course I liked it a lot more. I do wish that the drums were a little more up front in the mix and I could do without the chorus effect on the guitar, but by and large I hear the band that I saw at that show on this record. It’s really cool to hear a band without a bunch of obvious reference points… it doesn’t sound like they’re trying to recreate any particular era of hardcore or rip off any band’s sound… it sounds really authentic, like the genuine and spontaneous expression of the people in the band. I guess that’s why it sounds like an old hardcore record to me… not because it sound’s particularly vintage-y (it doesn’t), but rather because it’s free of pretense and exudes authenticity in a way that’s very similar to the hardcore bands from the 80s that I love. Highly recommended.

Criaturas: Ruido Antisocial 7” (Todo Destruido) Has it really been four years since the last Criaturas record? That just seems so wrong! Maybe it’s because I still revisit their records so often, but it feels like Criaturas hasn’t dropped off the face of the earth like most bands seem to when they go for several years without a new record. At any rate, despite my warped perception of time I could not be happier to have this record in my hands, particularly since it is the best Criaturas record yet! As with the latest LP from Impalers (with whom Criaturas share their guitarist), not much has really changed… any of these songs could have appeared on any other Criaturas record without sticking out, but everything has been fine-tuned. This is particularly true of the production, which is beefy and raw, but still clear and powerful, particularly on the vinyl (which is cut LOUD). I’m not really sure what else to say… Criaturas have long been one of my favorite hardcore bands, and this record is their best one, so what are you waiting for?

Glue: S/T 12” (self-released) So, I actually wrote the label’s description for this record, so I’m not really sure what else I have to say about it. I’ve been on board the Glue bandwagon ever since their demo, and I’m still here. They had a pretty great formula from the get-go—basically marrying the heaviness of prime-era SSD with the upbeat catchiness of pogo-punk—but they’ve also consistently shown a willingness to mess with that formula. Nowhere is that more apparent than on the track “Flowers of Friendship” on this record, where they fuse their sound with something akin to melodic oi! music. Altogether, this 12” is probably the rawest and nastiest thing that Glue have done (excepting their tour tape, which was REALLY raw), and they manage to sound raw and feral without losing any of the power that made them stand out in the first place.

All New Arrivals
Taking Back Sunday: Louder Now 12" (Warner Bros)
Radiohead: OK Computer OKNOTOK 12" (XL)
Chainshot: demo cassette (self-released)
Black Lips: Satan's Graffitti or God's Art? 12" (Vice)
STRFKR: Vault Vol. 2 12" (Polyvinyl)
Modern Baseball: MOBO Presents: The Perfect Cast EP Featuring Modern Baseball 12" (Lame-O)
Various: Gettin' Together: Groovy Sounds from the Summer of Love 12" (Rhino)
The Electric Prunes: S/T 12" (50th anniversary edition; Rhino)
Love: S/T 12" (50th anniversary edition; Rhino)
Grateful Dead: Smiling on a Cloudy Day 12" (Rhino)
Neo Neos: Neo Neo Neo Neo Neo Neo Neos cassette (self-released)
Neo Neos: Type V cassette (self-released)
Neo Neos: Oen Night in Basement cassette (self-released)
Neo Neos: Unit 02: In Punk for the Culture Set cassette (self-released)
Neo Neos: Puke Girl Anthology cassette (self-released)
Shabazz Palaces: Quazarz vs. The Jealous Machines 12" (Sub Pop)
Shabazz Palaces: Quazarz: Born on a Gangster Star 12" (Sub Pop)
Silverstein: Dead Reflection 12" (Rise)
Yoko Ono: Approximately Infinite Universe 12" (Secretly Canadian)
Yoko Ono: Feeling the Space 12" (Secretly Canadian)
Yoko Ono: Fly 12" (Secretly Canadian)
Psychic TV: Allegory & Self 12" (Sacred Bones)
Psychic TV: Pagan Day 12" (Sacred Bones)
Waxahatchee: Out in the Storm 12" (Merge)
Missy Elliott: Supa Dupa Fly 12" (Atlantic)
Weaks: Flamenco 7" (Strong Mind Japan)
Tigress: S/T 7" (Not Normal)
Cherry Death: Saccharine 12" (Not Normal)
Liquids: Hot Liqs 12" (Not Normal)
Humanoids: demo cassette (self-released)
Mania for Conquest / Svaveldioxid: Split 7" (Brain Solvent Propaganda)
Vagra: Refuse 7" (Brain Solvent Propaganda)
Pollen: Fear of Another War 7" (Brain Solvent Propaganda)
Melvins: A Walk with Love and Death 12" (Ipecac)
Nightbringer: Ego Dominus Tuus 12" (Season of Mist)
Pandemix: Scale Models of Atrocities 12" (Boss Tuneage)
Flowers of Evil: Cities of Fear 12" (Deranged)
Hurula: Vapen Till Dom Hopplosa 12" (Deranged)
Sheer Mag: Need to Feel Your Love 12" (Wilsuns)
Hygiene: Hypocrite cassette (self-released)
Hygiene: Soylent Clean cassette (self-released)
Geiger Counter: S/T 12" (Desolate)
GG King: Another Dimension 7" (Scavenger of Death)
Caesium Mine: God's Messenger to Fukushima cassette (Scavenger of Death)
Bloodclot: Up in Arms 12" (Metal Blade)
Expulsion: Nightmare Future 12" (Relapse)
Integrity: Howling, for the Nightmare Shall Consume 12" (Relapse)
Shit Blimp: Good Natured Friends of the Scene 7" (Shit Blimp Inc)
Criaturas: Ruido Antisocial 7" (Todo Destruido)
Glue: S/T 12" (self-released)
Impalers: Cellar Dweller 12" (540)
Innocent: demo cassette (Side Two)

Restocks
Blue Dolphin: Demo 2016 cassette (self-released)
Blue Dolphin: Earth Day 2017 cassette (self-released)
Blue Dolphin: 2 New Songs cassette (self-released)
Cryptopsy: Blasphemy Made Flesh 12" (War on Music)
Tarantula: S/T 7" (Lengua Armada)
Rank/Xerox: M.Y.T.H. 12" (Adagio)
Life's Blood: Hardcore A.D. 1998 12" (Prank)
Municipal Waste: The Fatal Feast 12" (Nuclear Blast)
Nurse: 2nd 7" (Scavenger of Death)
Kombat: In Death We Are All the Same 7" (Hysteria)
ISS: Endless Pussyfooting cassette (State Laughter)
Kurraka: Otra Dimension cassette (Todo Destruido)
Breakdown: 87 Demo 12" (540)
Warhead: S/T 12" (540)
Rakta: S/T 12" (540)
Section Urbane: The Final Program 7" (540)
Merchandise / Destruction Unit / Milk Music: Split 12" (540)
Big Boys: Fun Fun Fun 12" (540)
Breakdown: Runnin' Scared 12" (540)
The Clean: Oddities 12" (540)

So, I guess I missed last week’s update. Honestly, it’s been a rough few weeks for me. I’m not sure what it must seem like to be part of Sorry State from the outside, but from my end of things it’s a ton of work with extremely infrequent and erratic payoff. Lately a ton of people have been selling us records of all quantities, values, and coolness levels, and while that’s very, very cool, the combination of paying out for all of these collections and the typical sales lull that comes when the weather gets hotter means that our cash is stretched pretty thin and I’m left fretting about whether I’ll be able to pay our bills. I’m a worrier by nature, so this is really not a great position for me to be in, and circumstances like this can put my mental and physical health in a tailspin. I’ve really been running myself ragged, which eventually resulted in a 2-plus week illness, at least 10 days of which included a fever and simultaneous throat, sinus, and ear infections. And of course just because I’m sick doesn’t mean things stop being added to the to do list, which creates more worry and further feeds the cycle. This whole situation makes it very tough for me to step back, relax, and see the bigger picture, but I’m doing my best. However, enough complaining…

Before I get to the proper descriptions, I wanted to write a little bit about the Celtic Frost reissues that just came out. I don’t really feel the need to go through album by album and give you my thoughts on each, but I did want to touch on the topic because I’ve been thinking a lot about Celtic Frost lately. My friend Scott lent me Tom Warrior’s autobiography a few weeks ago and it was a very interesting read. While much of it comes off as brazenly revisionist (not to mention whiny and self-pitying), it was great to get a more thorough chronology of Celtic Frost’s career and get some insight into why they underwent the changes they did (even if you have to read that insight between the lines of Warrior’s then-current take on his own past). One of the things that I find so fascinating about Celtic Frost is how they navigated the dumb/smart axis differently than any other band I can think of. I love it when smart people play dumb (the Ramones being the prime example), but honestly I have no idea whether Celtic Frost are dumb people trying to be smart, smart people trying to be dumb, or something else entirely. They were simultaneously one of the most primitive and neanderthal-like metal bands of all time, but at the same time one of the genre’s most ambitious and least myopic. They were so daring, and the fact that the risks they took failed as often as they succeeded only makes retracing their every step even more thrilling.

It seems like Tom Warrior was closely involved in these reissues, and his meticulous attention to detail is apparent throughout. First and foremost, these records sound incredible, possibly even better than the originals. One of the reasons that I’m often wary of reissues (except when the original pressing is cost-prohibitive) is because most newly-pressed vinyl doesn’t have the depth, clarity, or power of my old records. I have so much 70s and 80s vinyl that blows the doors off of most anything pressed in the past few years. I assume that’s because the fields of vinyl cutting and manufacturing were no longer attracting first-rate engineers and that the art of cutting a loud and powerful record was slowly dying. However, with vinyl’s rise in popularity over the past few years—to the point where it’s once again seen by most music aficionados as the default physical format—it seems as though bigger labels are more willing to invest the time and money to make records sound really good, resulting in things like the recent 50th anniversary pressing of Sgt. Pepper’s (with it’s newly-created stereo mix) and these Celtic Frost reissues. And of course in addition to the superior sound, they also come with a heap of extra stuff. Each LP has a full disc of bonus material, a few poster inserts, and a full-color, 10”x10” booklet featuring a ton of vintage photos, lyrics, and liner notes, all of which are printed with the care and gravity of a big-name museum exhibition catalog. They’re really something to see.

As far as the actual music, I have to admit that Into the Pandemonium may now be my favorite Celtic Frost album. Of course I still love the early stuff, and I think that one could make a good argument that heavy metal has never been more intense than the Morbid Tales album. However, Into the Pandemonium is so artistically uncompromising that the end product has this slipperiness and un-knowability about it. The band’s craft is moving in so many new and unique directions that it’s impossible to know what they were going for or if they achieved it. All you can do is marvel at a track like “Rex Irae…” what is it? Is it metal? Classical music? Opera? How the hell did they make it? Is it just the sound of classical musicians doing their best to play over top of a primitive metal song, or is this exactly what the members heard in their head when they conceived the track? Do the performers appreciate how odd and dissonant the harmonies are, or are they just going for it blindly like Johnny Knoxville trying to skateboard? While there are, perhaps, bigger head-scratchers on the album (“I Won’t Dance” remaining the biggest… were CF really trying to fuse their primitive metal with something like Janet Jackson’s defiant R&B?), “Rex Irae” remains the most fascinating moment to me, not just because the band was bold enough to throw together that bizarre stew of influences, but moreso because it actually works.

Various: Horrendous New Wave 12” (Lumpy) Lumpy’s first compilation LP! I think that I say this every time we get in a halfway decent 12” compilation, but I have the utmost respect for anyone who is able to pull off one of these things, because the amount of work involved in coordinating all of the different contributors is really excruciating. Anyway, I’ve been listening to Horrendous New Wave a lot and the thing that sticks out to me is how it kind of undercuts the very idea of what a compilation LP is. The compilation is, at its core, a marketing tool… it’s a way to introduce people to new bands, a function that reached its most brazen incarnation with the budget-priced label sampler compilation. However, Horrendous New Wave doesn’t introduce you to any new bands, because none of the bands listed on the jacket actually exist. If you’re in the know, you might be able to identify contributions by certain people (Joe Sussman of Muff Divers / Dangus Tarkus / Nancy, Scott Plant of Droid’s Blood / Broken Prayer, folks from Lumpy-affiliated acts like Natural Man and Ms. Lady, Warm Bodies, Gibbous, and Janitor Scum), but the packaging on the record is absolutely no help in figuring out these connections, nor does said information seem to be accessible anywhere online. You don’t even really know what the conceit or point of this compilation is… are the artists giving us their interpretation of “new wave,” or is that something that was added after the fact to tie it all together? It’s altogether unclear, and while I’m sure some people will find this frustrating, I actually think it’s really cool. It reminds me of listening to compilations in the pre-internet era, when you couldn’t just Google a band you were interested in and check them out on YouTube or buy their record on Discogs. I remember getting a copy of the American Youth Report compilation when I was in high school (mail ordered from the catalog that came with my copy of Bad Religion’s Recipe for Hate), but it was another ten years before I would hear more tracks by Modern Warfare, Legal Weapon, or the Flesh Eaters. I guess that what I’m trying to say is that, as a person who is kind of addicted to contextual research, the fact that Lumpy has taken away my ability to gratify that impulse leaves me free to take each of these tracks solely on their own merits, of which they have many.

Blank Spell: Miasma 12” (World Gone Mad) After a handful of tapes and a 7”, Philadelphia’s Blank Spell hits us with their first big vinyl, and man is it a stunner! I think that my favorite thing about Blank Spell is the fact that you can’t really pin down their music to a certain genre. Blank Spell somehow bring together the creepy punk vibes of bands like 45 Grave or early Christian Death with much faster, tougher-sounding hardcore without losing what makes either genre great. The riffs and song structures can be, at times, almost dizzyingly complex, but the singularity of the vibe that Blank Spell creates across these tracks holds it all together and makes it sound unified and composed. The chorus-drenched guitars (something I usually hate, but not here) and herky-jerky rhythms make me think of Davidians and Warm Bodies, but Blank Spell have neither the cold artsiness of the former nor the loose and earthy quality of the latter, instead landing on a kind of confident propulsion that reminds me of well-oiled hardcore bands like Exit Order or Blackball, bands that seem to march relentlessly forward rather than side-stepping or zig-zagging. I know that this is all very vague and I’m getting a real (and, alas, unfortunate) “dancing about architecture” vibe from this description, but the point is that Blank Spell have created a really powerful and singular record, and one that seems destined to become a staple of my summer 2017 playlist. Highly recommended.

The Bug: Humbug; or, So Many Awful Things 7” (Not Normal) I’ve been a big fan of the Bug since they started, but this new 7” brings things to a whole different level, quickly catapulting the Bug to “one of my favorite current bands” status. It’s funny, when I’ve tried to describe this record to people I generally compare it to the Mozart 7”, early Wretched, or call it something like “anti-music” because it’s so loose and wild, but on the other hand I think that what makes Humbug by far the best release from the Bug so far is that they’ve managed to capture things with just a hair more coherence and clarity. Previous, the Bug were so wild and anarchic that at times their expressionistic bursts could sound like a bunch of people wildly banging on their instruments. However, the clarity of the production on Humbug makes it clear that there’s some order to the chaos, if only an incredibly idiosyncratic one. My favorite part of Humbug is listening to the guitar and bass play off of one another… actually “play off” might be too strong of a word, because it often sounds like they’re playing completely different songs. Just listen to my favorite track on the EP, the expertly-titled “Late Lunch Sogged with Grease,” and try to figure out what on earth the bass and guitar lines have to do with one another. I’ve listened like ten times and I can’t figure it out, but I absolutely LOVE it. As with the Mozart 7”, here the Bug manage to combine the almost innocent sense of experimentation of free jazz with the manic energy of hardcore… something that’s actually really, really hard to do in practice. If you love Mozart, or if you tend to gravitate toward hardcore bands with a left-of-center aesthetic (Mystic Inane, Lemonade, Warm Bodies) this should be at the top of your list of stuff to check out.

Pierre et Bastien: Musique Grecque 12” (SDZ) Latest record from this French band who have been around for a couple of years. It’s been out for a few months now, but due to a shipping mis-hap we’re only just now getting our copies. I think it’s worth the wait, though, as Pierre et Bastien play some of the catchiest and most memorable garage-punk around. While the punchy and clear production can make this sound at first glance like some of the standout modern garage bands like Marked Men, Radioactivity, Video, etc., when you listen to these songs closely there’s a real Euro-punk vibe to them, particularly the marriage of dense, catchy riffs that recall the Stooges or Radio Birdman with a detached, almost robotic vocal style that sounds a bit like Devo or Kraftwerk, though perhaps not quite as inhuman as either. Complimenting those low-affect vocals is the way that every song seems to bob along at roughly the same tempo, giving this album a hypnotic quality that you don’t typically hear from stuff in this genre. If you’re looking for that big, catchy chorus this might not be for you, but if you like ’77-style punk as well as heartbeat-steady rhythms this one just may catch your ear.

Mikey Young: Your Move Vol 1 12” (Moniker) Solo debut from Australian Mikey Young, who you may know as the guitarist of Total Control, Eddy Current Suppression Ring, the Ooga Boogas, and others I’m sure. While Young’s work with bands spans a pretty wide breadth, this solo project seems to extend the line of thought begun on Total Control tracks like “Liberal Party” and “The Hunter.” However, since none of these tracks have vocals, the overall vibe is quite different. I really like how it’s tough to pin a genre tag on Your Move Vol 1… though there’s a steady pulse, the beat isn’t insistent enough to call it dance music, and though the instrumentation is largely similar the lack of vocals keeps it from being classified alongside new wave and minimal synth music like the early Human League. Instead, the closest thing that I can think of vibe-wise is non-heavy Krautrock like Neu!, Kraftwerk circa Autobahn, or maybe Harmonia. The layering of sounds is quite dense (mostly synth and drum machine, though I do hear a little bit of bass and I think even a heavily treated guitar at one point), but that steady pulse holds it all together as you listen to the different sounds swoop in and out of the mix. This is the kind of album I can have on in the background while I’m reading, or it can hold my sole attention if I’m listening to it while I’m working out. It’s really a beautiful little record, and if you’re a fan of any of the aforementioned I think this is well worth your time.

Wiccans: Sailing a Crazy Ship 12” (Dull Tools) This new full-length from Texas’s Wiccans is a nice surprise… I’m not sure I even realized they were still together, but as is the case with similarly unexpected recent full-lengths from other Texas bands like Glue and Institute, I’ll certainly take it. Wiccans have always seemed to have one toe in the garage scene (which makes sense as they’re from Denton and share members with several garage-ier bands like Bad Sports, Video, and Radioactivity), but Sailing a Crazy Ship is pure hardcore, if somewhat quirky. It’s actually kind of tough to pin down precisely what is so quirky about it, because Sailing a Crazy Ship is almost uniformly fast and loud, but it just doesn’t sound like any other hardcore record. The production and mix emphasize aspects of the music that most hardcore bands don’t tend to place the focus on, particularly quirky, angular guitar riffs that would be just as at home in a Video song if they were played about 3/4 as fast and didn’t have the snarling, manic vocals (which, as Jeff pointed out to me, sound quite a lot like the singer for Glue). And like Video’s best stuff, this LP feels like a real journey… not just a sequence of riffs or songs, Sailing a Crazy Ship seems to go somewhere, and better yet goes somewhere I didn’t expect to go and didn’t even really know existed. That Wiccans manage to be so original while keeping pretty much everything I love about hardcore in the first place is a real achievement.

Entombed: Left Hand Path 12” (Earache) I was born in 1979, so I’m old enough that my journey toward underground music started a little bit before Nirvana broke, but not quite early enough that I was a full-on metalhead in the 80s. As I entered my tween years, I searched out the most intense and weird music I could find, groping around in a number of different directions… Metallica, Faith No More, Guns N Roses, Sonic Youth… whatever I could get my hands on. And even after Nirvana kind of changed everything in 1992, some metal still slipped onto my playlist here and there… Biohazard, Pantera, Slayer… basically anything that could match the intensity of the punk rock I was discovering at the time. However, sometime around 93 or 94 (when I was 14 or 15) I learned enough about the punk rulebook to understand that metal was verboten, and I pretty much stopped listening to it (with the exception of bands like Converge, Cave In, and Dillinger Escape Plan, who at the time weren’t really classified as metal, at least to me) for a very long time. I give you this long introduction because when I finally got metal-curious again (I’m guessing this is sometime in the mid-00s, after a solid decade of listening to pretty much nothing but punk and hardcore), Entombed’s Left Hand Path was one of the things that really grabbed my ear. I remember my bandmate Matt from Cross Laws giving me a big stack of metal CDs by bands like Celtic Frost, Asphyx, Sodom, Bathory… stuff that was a little too underground for me to have come across it when I was a teenager in the pre-internet age. While I have come to really love all of those bands, at the time Left Hand Path was the record I couldn’t stop listening to, and sitting down with it again now that this reissue is available, I’m still struck by how punk rock it sounds. Despite the fact that it is indisputably a death metal record—there’s nothing a death metal record should have that it doesn’t, and nothing that it has that would be out of place on any other death metal record—there’s something about this record that really appeals to a punk/hardcore sensibility. What is that? I have absolutely no idea, and no one I’ve talked to about it has really been able to articulate it any more precisely. So, this whole long, rambling biographical treatise is basically to say that if you’re into hardcore but you’re metal-curious, check out Left Hand Path. It may just be the record that turns you.

Haldol: The Totalitarianism of Everyday Life 12” (World Gone Mad) Haldol’s previous LP (their second) was one of my absolute favorites of 2015, and it’s one that I still revisit frequently. Everyone at Sorry State loves it, and I’d be willing to wager that it’s one of the all-time most-played pieces of vinyl on the shop’s turntable. So, to say that I was anticipating this new album was something of an understatement. However, as with most great bands, Haldol don’t quite give us exactly what we expect. While the overall sound and vibe haven’t really changed, The Totalitarianism of Everyday Life strikes me as a much more complex and perhaps even difficult record. It’s not so much that it’s off-putting or difficult to listen to, but rather it’s so dense with ideas and so original that you can’t really wrap your head around it quickly. I’ve probably listened to this LP a dozen times already in the 5 days or so since it showed up in the mail, and each listen still provokes the same feelings of discovery and slight disorientation as the first. It reminds me of a Rubik’s cube… when one idea twists into place and starts to make sense, it means that another one that you weren’t paying attention to shifts out from underneath you and when you return to it it’s not quite what you remembered. Sound-wise, this is very much in the “death rock” meets hardcore vein… if you like the sound of bands like Rudimentary Peni, Part 1, or early Christian Death you will like the sound of this record. But for me, it’s not so much about the sound as about the songs themselves, and I feel like these songs would retain their cryptic beauty no matter what kind of window dressing you put on them. It’ll be interesting to see how the scene reacts to this record… I could see its complexity causing it to pass by with little notice, or I could see Haldol becoming a huge punk band off the back of this record. I suppose time will tell, but I can assure you that, like their previous LP, The Totalitarianism of Everyday Life is a record that I will remain captivated by and continue to treasure for a long time.

All New Arrivals
Echo & the Bunnymen: It's All Live Now 12' (Run Out Groove)
Saccharine Trust: The Great One Is Dead 12" (Recess)
Fifteen: Extra Medium Kickball Star 12" (Dead Broke)
The Cure: Greatest Hits 12" (Elektra)
The Cure: Greatest Hits Acoustic 12" (Elektra)
Carcass: Necroticism: Descanting the Insalubrious 12" (Earache)
Celtic Frost: Vanity / Nemesis 12" (Noise)
Celtic Frost: To Mega Therion 12" (Noise)
Celtic Frost: Morbid Tales 12" (Noise)
Celtic Frost: Into the Pandemonium 12" (Noise)
Entombed: Left Hand Path 12" (Earache)
Beach House: B-sides and Rarities 12" (Sub Pop)
of Montreal: Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? 12" (Polyvinyl)
John Holt: 1000 Volts of Holt 12" (Trojan)
The Coathangers: Parasite 12" (Suicide Squeeze)
FREE: Ex Tenebris 7" (Triple B)
Swans: The Great Annihilator 12" (Young God)
Judy & the Jerks: 3 Songs from Us to You cassette (self-released)
The Snails: Demos 7" (Neck Chop)
Process of Elimination: S/T 7" (Neck Chop)
Sick Thoughts: Songs About People You Hate 12" (Neck Chop)
Mark Cone: Now Showing 12" (Neck Chop)
Various: Horrendous New Wave 12" (Lumpy)
Various: My Meat's Your Poison 12" (Euro Import)
The Teenage Graves: S/T 12" (Ken Rock)
The Smiths: The Queen Is Dead 7" (picture disc; Rhino)
The Smiths: The Queen Is Dead 12" (Rhino)
The Idylls: Why / White Lies 7" (Richmond; dead stock)
Gloria Balsam: Fluffy 7" (Richmond; dead stock)
Video Rouge: Little Red Book / Total Destruction 7" (Richmond; dead stock)
Earth Quake: Mr. Security / Madness 7" (Berserkeley; dead stock)
Paranoid: Live At HAGL Fest 7" flexi (At War with False Noise)
Rash: Midnight Crooner 7" (IFB)
Landbridge: Autarch: Split 12" (IFB)
Various: Eight Feet Under Vol 1 12" (IFB)
The Bug: Humbug; or, So Many Awful Things 7" (IFB)
Lion's Share: Demo II cassette (self-released)
Jietai: Demo 1979-1980 12" (pre-the Stalin; Euro Import)
Selkäsauna: Pyromaani 12" (Punk Off)
Blank Spell: Miasma 12" (WGM)
Haldol: The Totalitarianism of Everyday Life 12" (WGM)
Iron Bars: demo cassette (self-released)
Rotting Christ: Non Serviam 12" (Peaceville)
Goatwhore: Vengeful Ascension 12" (Metal Blade)
Tracy Bryant: Parachute 7" (Volar)
Chain & the Gang: Best of Crime Rock 12" (In the Red)
Modern Art: Oriental Towers 12" (Color Tapes)
Fred Schneider & the Superions: The Vertical Mind 12" (HHBTM)
Bad Posture: C/S 12" (Mono)
Male Gaze: Miss Taken 12" (Castleface)
Nots: Cruel Friend 7" (Goner)
Wiccans: Sailing a Crazy Ship 12" (Dull Tools)
Mikey Young: Your Move Vol 1 12" (Moniker)

Restocks
Nosferatu: S/T 7" (Lumpy)
Q: S/T 7" (Lumpy)
CCTV: S/T 7" (Lumpy)
Lumpy & the Dumpers: Huff My Sack 12" (Lumpy)
Perverts Again: Our Big Party 12" (Non Commercial)
Swans: The Great Annihilator 12" (Young God)
Niku-dan: Discography 12" (Euro Import)
Ghost Bath: Moonlover 12" (Season of Mist)
Alabama Shakes: Boys & Girls 12" (ATO)
Alabama Shakes: Sound & Color 12" (ATO)
Country Teasers: Secret Weapon Revealed 12" (In the Red)
Crass: Feeding of the 5,000 12" (Southern)
Feederz: Ever Feel Like Killing Your Boss 12" (Broken)
Alain Goraguer: La Planete Sauvage 12" (Superior Viaduct)
Hot Snakes: Audit in Progress 12" (Swami)
Hot Snakes: Automatic Midnight 12" (Swami)
Jawbreaker: 24 Hour Revenge Therapy 12" (Blackball)
Jawbreaker: Unfun 12" (Blackball)
Jawbreaker: Bivouac 12" (Blackball)
Charles Mingus: The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady 12" (Superior Viaduct)
Thee Oh Sees: Mutilator Defeated at Last 12" (Castleface)
Sleep: Volume One 12" (Tupelo)
The Sound: From the Lion's Mouth 12" (1972)
The Sound: Jeopardy 12" (1972)
Sonic Youth: Daydream Nation 12" (Goofin')
King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard: Murder of the Universe 12" (Castleface)

Can: The Singles 12” (Spoon) I’ve you’ve been paying attention to my writings over the past few months, then you already know that I’ve been on a pretty big Krautrock kick, but I think that the thing I like so much about this singles collection from Can is that it really casts their music in a totally different light than what I’m used to. In the last volume of the All Things to All People blog I wrote about how all of these Krautrock bands that I’ve been discovering put me into a different mode of listening, allowing me to enjoy songs that are longer and have a wider, more cinematic scope. That’s definitely true of Can’s classic albums, but that isn’t really the Can that you get on The Singles. While there are a handful of rare non-LP tracks (the most noteworthy being the excellent “Turtles Have Short Legs”), for the most part what is collected here are 7” single edits of songs that appear in longer, more fully-realized versions on Can’s albums. You would think that this would completely neuter Can’s power, but what it actually does is reveal that there are great little pop songs sitting at the core of Can’s extended psychedelic jams. If listening to albums like Tago Mago and Ege Bamyasi is like watching an old French film, then listening to The Singles is like a highly-compressed montage, and an incredibly enjoyable one at that. The joy of listening to these tracks is only enhanced by the absolutely stunning physical product that they have put together. The jacket is beautifully-designed with a stylish spot-gloss finish (and the inner gatefold is even more beautiful), and these LPs sound GREAT, with deep, full bass and punchy drums that actually match the clarity and power of the original pressings (something I can say about a very, very small percentage of current reissues). Like the record that got me into Can, Cannibalism, The Singles is a great entry point if you’re curious about the band but haven’t really checked them out before, and if you’re already a fan it exhibits a side of the band that most of us haven’t really engaged with before.

Niku-Dan: S/T 12” (Fan Club) Fan club release from this obscure Japanese punk band from the early 80s. Despite the fact that they had several releases during their life as a band (including a split 8” with the great Japanese band Gas) I hadn’t really spent much time with them before, which ultimately made this LP hit with even more impact than it would have otherwise. While their releases came out in 1983 and 1984, Niku-Dan’s sound was much more grounded in 70s punk, and at times they bear an almost uncanny resemblance to the Stalin circa Trash and Stop Jap. While they don’t have any songs that rise to the anthemic level of the Stalin’s best tracks, they have a similar combination of speed and power, and the clear and punchy production (which, again, reminds me of the Stalin) makes this a real treat to listen to. Like the recent Sexual fan club release that popped up, this looks and sounds great (it’s almost certainly sourced from the official CD reissue, given that the insert is a scan of the CD booklet, staples and all), and if you’re fascinated with the 80s Japanese punk scene I wouldn’t hesitate to call it an essential purchase.

Skull Cult: Vol. One and Vol. Two 7” (Erste Theke Tonträger) Another gem from the fertile Indiana scene, and if you like stuff like Coneheads, CCTV, and Liquids it’s probably more or less a given that you’ll be into this as well. Skull Cult have elements of a lot those bands’ sounds as well as some of their own tricks. The claustrophobic, direct-in-the-board guitar sound and manic rhythms remind me of Coneheads and the big melodies paired with hardcore tempos reminds me of Liquids, but Skull Cult’s 60s-sounding synth work (which often sounds kind of like a farfisa organ) is all their own, as are the almost demonic screamed vocals (which, despite their harshness, manage to carry more than a little bit of melody). I’m kind of amazed that they managed to cram so much music on this 7”—it could have been pressed as a 12” and I doubt that anyone would have batted an eye—but the value you for money that you get here makes this record feel weightier and even more worthwhile than it would have otherwise, and personally I find the listening experience of vinyl a lot more pleasurable than shuffling out a couple of short tapes. Throw in some downright iconic cover artwork and you have a real standout EP… grab this one now before it becomes another one of those things with shocking Discogs price tags.

Liquids: More than a Friend 7” (Drunken Sailor) So, this latest 3-song EP was originally released on Drunken Sailor Records in a criminally small edition of 111 copies on gold vinyl, which was only available through the Drunken Sailor store, and of course sold out basically instantly. While they originally made it sound like that was going to be it, thankfully they’ve repressed another, probably still too small, edition of 390 copies on black vinyl that we were able to get a few copies of. I still listen to Hot Liqs regularly, but anyone who follows Liquids knows that they have some total gems scattered across highly limited, hard to find releases, and More than a Friend contains some of their best stuff. The title track in particular is an absolute scorcher… it sounds like a long-lost gem from the Lookout! Records catalog, though it’s also noisier and more aggressive than just about anything else I can think of on that label, and the melodies might even be better too. Seriously, this track is right up there with early Green Day in the way that it seamlessly melds punk rock with a delicate pop sensibility. If you like Liquids, you simply need this song, no two ways about it. As for the two tracks on the flip, while they’re not quite on the level of “More than a Friend” (which is, frankly, a band-defining song, though Liquids have a few of those under their belt), they’re as strong as any other Liquids track and you won’t have any problems wearing out that side of the record as well.

Hyena: demo cassette (Scavenger of Death) 7-song demo from this new hardcore band from Atlanta, which features most of the lineup of Sorry State’s own Bukkake Boys. While Hyena more or less picks up right where Bukkake Boys left off (though thankfully without a name that makes us wince!), there are some subtle differences in their sound. The basic framework is still heavy, full-bore hardcore that lies somewhere in the fertile ground between mid-period Poison Idea records like War All the Time and Kings of Punk and more Discharge-inspired stuff like Anti-Cimex’s first 12”. Like Bukkake Boys, Hyena is also elevated by absolutely brilliant drumming… Corey is one of my favorite hardcore drummers, and I couldn’t be more stoked to hear his distinctive and crushingly powerful beats behind a new band. Hyena do have a different guitarist than Bukkake Boys, though, and he peppers a couple of these tracks with blistering leads that push Hyena more in the direction of classic-sounding Japanese hardcore, but with the slight looseness and power of the aforementioned bands. If you’re into the kind of hardcore bands that Sorry State has put out in the past, this is pretty much a no-brainer. Highly recommended.

The Scam: Everything Ends in Rot 7” (Antitodo) Reissue of this excellent 1986 7” from New Hampshire’s the Scam on Spain’s Antitodo Records, which has been digging up quite a few interesting USHC obscurities as of late. The Scam were ripe for the picking, because while I imagine that their metal-tinged hardcore might have sounded a little bit de rigeur in 1986, nowadays it’s easy to appreciate the uniquely sinister vibe of this one. Basically, it sounds to me like the Scam’s music is informed in equal parts by early 80s SoCal punk like the Adolescents and TSOL, the more punk end of Death Rock (particularly the first Christian Death LP and maybe Samhain) and a touch of crossover / thrash (a la Animosity-era COC). I can’t think of another band that sits in this spot of the venn diagram, which is particularly impressive because they tend to adopt the best parts of each of those genres, namely the catchiness of SoCal punk, the spooky atmosphere of death rock and the musical sophistication / precision of thrash. Vibe-wise, the closest comparison I can make is some moments of United Mutation. While it’s not exactly like that, I think that it’s a safe bet that if you’re into those kind of “outsider” early 80s bands with a really unique vibe—UM, Mecht Mensch, Spike in Vain, Power of the Spoken Word, Die Kreuzen—you’ll flip out for this one. Highly recommended.

Violence Creeps: Ease the Seed Bag 7” (Drunken Sailor) Brand new 4-songer from this San Francisco-area band who have been a Sorry State favorite for a while now. You get four songs here, three of which you may already know, including an alternate version of their cover of Soft Cell’s “Sex Dwarf,” which originally appeared on their 12” EP on Total Punk (which, IMHO at least, remains THEE Violence Creeps record to get). While Ease the Seed Bag lacks the unity of sound and vision that some of Violence Creeps’ other releases have had, what it lacks in unity it makes up for with the strength of the songs themselves, as this EP collects some of the band’s most memorable moments. Too musical to be no wave but too musically confrontational to really be called straightforward punk, Violence Creeps have the same kind of stance as bands like Flipper, No Trend, and Public Image Ltd., and like those bands at their very best Violence Creeps have a way of wrenching jagged but memorable melodies out of the chaos. Keeping up with this prolific band’s bulging discography can be tough, but the rewards make it well worth it.

Tarantula: S/T 7” (Lengua Armada) Since, as of this writing, we’re already sold out of this EP and whether we can get a restock is very much TBD I won’t spend too much time raving about it, but I had to go on record as noting that this is definitely one of the best punk records that 2017 has offered us so far. I’m sure you know by now that Tarantula features a number of former Cülo members among their ranks and pretty much pick up right where Cülo left off, but honestly I think that this EP is better than anything Cülo produced, and I’m a pretty big Cülo fan! It’s funny, I mentioned to Jeff that for a band that didn’t even have a bass player in their previous iteration, the basslines on this EP are absolutely killer, and without a doubt one of the bright spots in the songs. The other reason I prefer this somewhat to Cülo is because they’ve slowed the tempos down just a hair. While this is still pretty much full-bore punk rock, playing at just a tad less manic tempo really makes the catchiness of these tracks jump out at you. I feel like I hear a lot of the classic punk sensibility of bands like the Dickies or even prime-era Naked Raygun in these tracks, though without sounding like a rehash or an homage at all. The lyrics are even really strong and well worth a read. Here’s hoping that we get a spate of Tarantula releases much like the deluge of Cülo vinyl that we saw in 2010 and 2011 and that they’re all as killer as this one.

Paranoid: Praise No Deity 7” (Konton Crasher) My favorite d-beat band in the world, Sweden’s Paranoid, grace us with another 3-track opus! Why are Paranoid my favorite d-beat band? Well, that’s a really hard thing to put my finger on. I think that ultimately what I like about them is that they have perfect balance of purism and progressivism. When you’re making the self-conscious choice to play a genre like d-beat with relatively tight formal constraints you need to find a way to honor what makes the genre great without simply rehashing, and Paranoid consistently manage to do that. The a-side (I won’t type out song titles because they’re all written in Japanese on the sleeve) is the centerpiece, and uses some of the same chords as Celtic Frost’s “Into Crypts of Rays,” which Paranoid actually covered on their excellent, highly recommended covers album. As the track listing for that covers album hints, Paranoid have more than a little bit of metal in their DNA, and this track achieves that perfect balance between Celtic Frost’s neanderthal chug and the almost breezy quality of first 12”-era Anti-Cimex. The b-side’s 2 tracks both exhibit slightly different sides of the band, the 1st track being a little rawer and nastier (sounding more like the Anti-Cimex 7”s, but with more modern production) and the second one is slightly (I mean really slightly) more technical with more complex changes than your typical d-beat track. I imagine that a lay person would probably throw this on and think “just another d-beat record,” but if you’ve spent some time listening to the genre closely and you have the background knowledge to appreciate what Paranoid is doing, then there isn’t a current band that does a better job of keeping this rich tradition alive.

All New Arrivals
Pierre Et Bastien: Musique Grecque 12" (SDZ)
Sufjan Stevens, Bryce Dessner, Nico Muhly, James McAlister: Planetarium 12" (4AD)
Terror: The Walls Will Fall 7" (Pure Noise)
Kreator: Pleasure to Kill 12" (Noise)
Kreator: Terrible Certainty 12" (Noise)
Kreator: Endless Pain 12" (Noise)
Kreator: Extreme Aggression 12" (Noise)
Big Thief: Capacity 12" (Saddle Creek)
David Bowie: The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust 12" (gold vinyl; Parlophone)
The Drums: Abysmal Thoughts 12" (Anti)
Mattin: Songbook #6 12" (Munster)
JJ Doom: Bookhead EP 12" (Lex)
Can: The Singles 12" (Spoon)
Fleet Foxes: Crack-up 12" (Sub Pop)
John Coltrane: Ole Coltrane 12" (Org Music)
John Coltrane: Giant Steps 12" (Org Music)
John Coltrane & Don Cherry: The Avant-Garde 12" (Org Music)
Past: Czarno / Biala 12" (???)
Spodee Boy: Sterile World 7" (Drop Medium)
Datenight: Sonic Youth 18 Years On Earth cassette (Drop Medium)
Datenight: Datenight Does Dallas cassette (Drop Medium)
Allvaret: Skam Och Skuld 12" (Erste Theke Tontraeger)
Muff Divers: No Muff Too Tuff 7" (Erste Theke Tontraeger)
Skull Cult: Vol 1 + Vol 2 7" (Erste Theke Tontraeger)
Self Abuse: (I Didn't Wanna Be a) Soldier 7" (Antitodo)
The Scam: Everything Ends in Rot 7" (Antitodo)
Tarantula: S/T 7" (Lengua Armada)
Venenum: Trance of Death 12" (Ajna Offensive)
Niku-Dan: S/T 12" (Euro Import)
John Coltrane & Wilbur Harden: Tanganyika Strut 12" (Superior Viaduct)
Relatively Clean Rivers: S/T 12" (Phoenix)
Brian Jonestown Massacre: Bravery, Repetition and Noise 12" (A Recordings)
Albert Ayler: Prophecy 12" (ESP Disk)
Ball: S/T 12" (Horny)
Golem: Orion Awakens 12" (Mental Experience)
Teenage Filmstars: (There's a) Cloud Over Liverpool 12" (Munster)
Generation X: Sweet Revenge 12" (Munster)
Alex Chilton: Take Me Home and Make Me Like It 12" (Munster)
Bruce Haack: The Electric Lucifer 12" (Telephone Explosion)
Reality Group: Demo 2016 cassette (Electric Heat)
Xertz: Demo 2017 cassette (Electric Heat)
The Sexual: Discography 12" (Euro Import)
Disorder: Human Cargo 12" (Rest in Punk)
Negazione: 1983: Pre-Early Days 12" (Disforia)
Ash Ra Tempel: High and Mighty Priestess 12" (Euro Import)
Ash Ra Tempel: Join Inn 12" (Euro Import)
Ash Ra Tempel: Schwingungen 12" (Euro Import)
Ash Ra Tempel: First Album 12" (Euro Import)
My Bloody Valentine: Loveless 12" (Euro Import)
GG Allin & the Jabbers: 80s Rock N Roll: The Singles 12" (Euro Import)
Misfits: 12 Hits from Hell: The MSP Sessions 12" (Euro Import)
Science Project: Basement Blues 7" (Neck Chop)
Process of Elimination: S/T 7" (Neck Chop)
Paranoid: Praise No Deity 7" (Konton Crasher)
Svaveldioxid: Ändlös Mardröm 12" (Konton Crasher)
Utanforskapet: S/T 12" (Konton Crasher)
Necrot: Blood Offerings 12" (Tankcrimes)
Fucked Up: Year of the Snake 12" (Tankcrimes)
Connoisseur: Over the Edge 12" (Tankcrimes)
Fuck You Pay Me: Dumbed Down 12" (Tankcrimes)
Deny the Cross: Alpha Ghoul 12" (Tankcrimes)
Victims: Sirens 12" (Tankcrimes)
Vivisick: Nuked Identity 12" (Tankcrimes)
Connoisseur: Stoner Justice 12" (Tankcrimes)
The Shrine: Waiting for the War 12" (Tankcrimes)
Brainoil: S/T 12" (Tankcrimes)
Exhumed / Iron Reagan: Split 12" (Tankcrimes)
Ghoul / Cannabis Corpse: Splatterhash 12" (Tankcrimes)
Municipal Waste / Toxic Holocaust: Toxic Waste 12" (Tankcrimes)
Ghoul: Wall of Death 7" (Tankcrimesew)
Cliterati: S/T 7" (Tankcrimes)
Annihilation Time: Cosmic Unconsciousness 7" (Tankcrimes)
Hyena: demo cassette (Scavenger of Death)
Danzig: Black Laden Crown 12" (Nuclear Blast)
Iced Earth: Incorruptible 12" (Century Media)
Jason Isbell & the 400 Unit: The Nashville Sound 12" (Southeastern)
Ataxxia: Demo cassette (self-released)
Mutoid Man: War Moans 12" (Sargent House)
Ride: Weather Diaries 12" (Wichita)
Piece War: Apathy 12" (Square One Again)
Various: Bingo!: French Punk Exploitation 1978-1981 12" (Born Bad)
Wicked Lady: The Axeman Cometh 12" (Guersson)
Wicked Lady: Psychotic Overkill 12" (Guersson)
MF Doom: Operation: Doomsday 12" (Metal Face)
Disfear: Misanthropic Generation 12" (La Familia)
Conflict: The Ungovernable Force 12" (Hätääpu)
Conflict: It's Time to See Who's Who 12" (Hätääpu)
Inferno: Anti Hagenbach Tape 12" (Power It Up)
The American Epic Sessions OST 12" (Third Man)
The Monks: Hamburg Recordings 1967 12" (Third Man)
Songs: Ohia: S/T 12" (Secretly Canadian)
Songs: Ohia: Axxess & Ace 12" (Secretly Canadian)
Jason Molina: Let Me Go, Let Me Go, Let Me Go 12" (Secretly Canadian)
Broken Hope: Mutilated 12" (Century Media)
Dying Fetus: Wrong One to Fuck With 12" (Relapse)
Ex Eye: S/T 12" (Relapse)
Tyrannosorceress: Shattering Light's Creation 12" (Tofu Carnage)
Helmet: Meantime 12" (Interscope)
King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard: Murder of the Universe 12" (Castle Face)
Raincoats: S/T 12" (We Three)
Iron Maiden: Brave New World 12" (Sanctuary)
Iron Maiden: A Matter of Life and Death 12" (Sanctuary)
Iron Maiden: Dance of Death 12" (Sanctuary)
Iron Maiden: Rock in Rio 12" (Sanctuary)
Jeff Tweedy: Together at Last 12" (Anti-)
David Bowie: Hunky Dory 12" (gold vinyl; Parlophone)
Piss: II 7" (Static Age)
Prince and the Revolution: Purple Rain 12" (picture disc; Warner Bros)
Prince and the Revolution: Purple Rain 12" (remastered; Warner Bros)
Tigers Jaw: Spin 12" (Atlantic)
Carach Angren: Dance and Laugh Among the Rotten 12" (Season of Mist)
Immortal: Diabolical Fullmoon 12" (Osmose)
Municipal Waste: Slime and Punishment 12" (Nuclear Blast)


Restocks
Baroness: Blue 12" (Relapse)
Baroness: Yellow and Green 12" (Relapse)
Brand New: I Am a Nightmare 12" (Pmtraitors)
Death: Human 12" (Relapse)
Death: Scream Bloody Gore 12" (Relapse)
Death: Spiritual Healing 12" (Relapse)
Geto Boys: S/T 12" (Rap-a-lot)
Geto Boys: We Can't Be Stopped 12" (Rap-a-lot)
Joey Bada$$: All Amerikkkan Bada$$ 12" (Cinematic)
King Diamond: Conspiracy 12" (Metal Blade)
Modest Mouse: This Is a Long Drive 12" (Glacial Pace)
NOFX: The Decline 12" (Fat Wreck)
Jay Reatard: Blood Visions 12" (Fat Possum)
Royal Headache: S/T 12" (What's Your Rupture)
Run the Jewels: S/T 12" (Mass Appeal)
Run the Jewels: 2 12" (Mass Appeal)
Run the Jewels: 3 12" (Mass Appeal)
Slayer: Show No Mercy 12" (Metal Blade)
Swans: Filth 12" (Young God)
Urchin: How to Make Napalm 7" (Roach Leg)
The Coneheads: 14 Year Old High School PC-Fascist Hype Lords 12" (Erste Theke Tontraeger)
Dystopia: Human=Garbage 12" (Tankcrimes)
Ghoul: Dungeon Bastards 12" (Tankcrimes)
Ghoul: Transmission Zero 12" (Tankcrimes)
Ghoul: Maniaxe 12" (Tankcrimes)
Ghoul: We Came for the Dead 12" (Tankcrimes)
Ghoul: Hang Ten 10" (Tankcrimes)
Fucked Up: Year of the Dragon 12" (Tankcrimes)
Death Cab for Cutie: Transatlanticism 12" (Barsuk)
Downtown Boys: Full Communism 12" (Don Giovanni)
Elliott Smith: S/T 12" (Kill Rock Stars)
Elliott Smith: Either/Or 12" (Kill Rock Stars)
Danny Brown: Atrocity Exhibition 12" (Warp)
Alice Coltrane: World Spirituality Classics Vol 1 12" (Luaka Bop)
Led Zeppelin: I 12" (Atlantic)
Metallica: Kill 'em All 12" (Blackened)
Radiohead: Kid A 12" (XL)
David Bowie: The Man Who Sold the World 12" (Parlophone)
The Cure: Three Imaginary Boys 12" (Rhino)
The Replacements: Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash 12" (Rhino)
David Bowie: The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust 12" (Parlophone)
Green Day: Kerplunk! 12" (Reprise)
Operation Ivy: Energy 12" (Epitaph)
David Bowie: Hunky Dory 12" (Parlophone)
Motorhead: Ace of Spades 12" (Sanctuary)
Jay Reatard: Watch Me Fall 12" (Matador)
The Cure: Disintegration 12" (Rhino)
Metallica: Master of Puppets 12" (Blackened)
The Replacements: Let It Be 12" (Rhino)
Radiohead: A Moon Shaped Pool 12" (XL)
Nirvana: Bleach 12" (Sub Pop)
Metallica: Ride the Lightning 12" (Blackened)
Joy Division: Unknown Pleasures 12" (Rhino)
In School: Cement Fucker 7" (Thrilling Living)
Blitz: Voice of a Generation 12" (Radiation)
Broken Bones: A Single Decade 12" (Havoc)
Chaos UK: The Singles 12" (Radiation)
Dezerter: Underground Out of Poland 12" (Nikt Nic Nie Wie)
Discharge: Hear Nothing See Nothing Say Nothing 12" (Havoc)
Discharge; Why 12" (Havoc)
Discharge: Realities of War 7" (Havoc)
Discharge: Decontrol 7" (Havoc)
Discharge: Fight Back 7" (Havoc)
Discharge: Never Again 7" (Havoc)
Discharge: State Violence, State Control 7" (Havoc)
Extreme Noise Terror: Phonophobia 12" (Agipunk)
Sacrilege: Time to Face the Reaper 12" (Havoc)
Jack White: Blunderbuss 12" (Third Man)
The Melvins: Houdini 12" (Third Man)
The White Stripes: S/T 12" (Third Man)
The White Stripes: White Blood Cells 12" (Third Man)
The White Stripes: Get Behind Me Satan 12" (Third Man)
The White Stripes: Elephant 12" (Third Man)
Zero Boys: Vicious Circle 12" (Secretly Canadian)
Zero Boys: History of 12" (Secretly Canadian)
Die Kreuzen: S/T 12" (Touch & Go)
Big Black: Bulldozer 12" (Touch & Go)
Big Black: Atomizer 12" (Touch & Go)
The Fix: At the Speed of Twisted Thought 12" (Touch & Go)
Negative Approach: S/T 7" (Touch & Go)
Husker Du: Zen Arcade 12" (SST)
Beastie Boys: Hello Nasty 12" (Capitol)
Death: Leprosy 12" (Relapse)
Funkadelic: Free Your Mind 12" (Three Men with Beards)
Funkadelic: S/T 12" (Three Men with Beards)
Funkadelic: Maggot Brain 12" (Three Men with Beards)
Misfits: Collection 12" (Caroline)
Misfits: Legacy of Brutality 12" (Caroline)
Misfits: Static Age 12" (Caroline)
New York Dolls: Too Much Too Soon 12" (Mecury)
Pearl Jam: Vitalogy 12" (Sony)
Velvet Underground & Nico: S/T 12" (Vinyl Lovers)
Weezer: Pinkerton 12" (Geffen)