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The lost classic returns!! Available for the first time on LP in over 20 years, TKO is bringing you POISON IDEA's seminal second LP from 1987 - "War All The Time." Long a favorite of diehard PI fans, "War.." was a pivotal moment in POISON IDEA's evolution. With the addition of a second guitarist, and the debut of legendary powerhouse drummer Steve "THEE Slayer Hippie" Hanford, this album established the direction POISON IDEA would follow into the second decade of their career. This one has been a long time coming folks, and with the full deluxe "Kings Of Punk" series reissue treatment, this version will prove to be well worth the wait. Stay tuned, more volumes in the KOP series are due to follow in 2017!!
Our take: For whatever reason, War All the Time always seemed to me like the red-headed stepchild of the Poison Idea oeuvre. I remember when I first dove head-first into full-on Poison Idea obsession in the late 90s it was their most difficult album to get… records like Pick Your King and Darby Crash Rides Again had gone through multiple pressings and turned up pretty readily (if for a premium price) on the secondary market, while 12”s like Record Collectors Are Pretentious Assholes, Kings of Punk, and Feel the Darkness got repressed by labels like Taang! and Farewell. However, aside from those CD reissues with vastly inferior artwork, War All the Time was impossible to get, and it took me a few years to lay my hands on a copy. Well, that gross oversight has now been remedied as War All the Time is the latest of PI’s records to be given the reissue treatment by TKO Records. In addition to the discographical considerations outlined above, War All the Time also stands out in the discography for being the only full-length to feature Eric “Vegetable” Olsen on guitar (who also wrote music for a few of the tracks, including the jaunty piano romp “Ritual Chicken”). It’s funny, I feel like War All the Time would almost make more sense if it had come out before Kings of Punk. While Olsen’s metallic lead guitar is a new wrinkle for the band, the songwriting here actually feels a little more straightforward than it did on Kings of Punk, with fewer tempo changes and more of a steady, Motorhead-esque tempo (incidentally, they also cover the song “Motorhead” on this album), whereas Feel the Darkness would have more of the varied songwriting you hear on Kings of Punk. I mean, at the end of the day, all of this is some navel-gazing, hair-splitting shit… this is a Poison Idea record, and even if you’re not a superfan you pretty much have to acknowledge that everything up to Feel the Darkness is totally essential. This reissue brings it back onto vinyl where it belongs, with a layout that hews close to the original with a few subtle changes (like a reconfigured photo collage on the insert and an alternate shot from the same session for the back cover photo). If you like hardcore this album should be in your collection, and if you’re not lucky, old, rich, and/or a big enough nerd to have the original this will do you just fine.