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Matte finish jackets, risographed inserts done by Oddities Prints, DL code
You familiar with this, uh... this four-eyed yankee kid... calls himself Erik Neutron, or something of the like. Legend has it that at a very young age, Erik was forcibly uprooted from his suburban home by an intense gust of wind, propelling his infantile body in a near-perfect spiral towards America’s Rust Belt. There, he found himself lodged in a strange, mystical land, to which some leather-donning yokels have taken to calling... “NWI-cago”. Using a small, hexavalent chromium-stained seashell, Erik spent his youth studying music through the sounds of the ocean, recording rock songs of his own creation onto multi-colored floppy disks. He called it... “Devo-core”. All was peaceful in the land of NWI-cago, up until a small, green goblin-man, Limpy, and his friend, the ex-host of Nickelodeon’s Double Dare, scurried away with Erik’s floppies in hand, redistributing the music on their own respective record labels for the general populace to dissect. The rest, my friend, is history.
...Well, others may instead tell you that, in reality, Erik “Nervous” was nothing more than a lone music geek who recorded rip-off rock ‘n’ roll songs in the comfort of his Midwestern home, having nothing to do with any NWI’s, or ‘Cagos, or Lumpy’s, or anything of the sort: these claims are still currently under review. Regardless, following his original debut demo released in late 2015, Erik Nervous has since blossomed into a proper D.I.Y. darling -- a benchmark of what an independent, single-minded musician should be able to accomplish with eclectic tastes, a healthy sense of ambition, and even the simplest of recording materials. For once upon a time, Erik Nervous was but a four-eyed kid recording music alone in his bedroom; now, Erik is a four-eyed kid recording music alone in his bedroom, except this time with a real, true-to-life lineup for live shows, and an expansive, consistently-remarkable catalog of punk, rock, and not-so-punk-rock melodies more than deserving of an anthology collection such as this. Compiling nearly two years’ worth of material -- including the “Shipshewana Swimming” demo, the 2016 Winter Cassingle, the “Teen Distortion Art Junk Music” EP, the “Ice Cream” single, the “Conical Cranium Emulation” cassette, his track from the “Killed By Meth Vol. 2” compilation, and even two previously unreleased songs --, “Assorted Anxieties” is a brilliant collection of angular, tightly-wound rock ‘n’ roll, a soundtrack fitting of a jittery kid fueled by nothing but soda pop and handfuls of ritalin, a mélange of rock ‘n’ roll vibrancy whose simplicity favors the brilliance exhibited in the bounties of grooves woven throughout this record. If Erik Nervous is nothing more than a giant rip-off, then half of these other bands need to step their game the fuck up.