Wednesday, April 29, 2020

The Nation Of Ulysses - The Primal Scream Demos


I haven't seen this posted anywhere in a long time, and this was the recording that truly turned me around on N.O.U., so I'm sharing it. I'm going to let Henry Owings, of Chunklet fame, and who shared these cuts with me, tell the tale:
NOU were in Memphis on tour with Bikini Kill in early 1992 to find that the promoter hadn’t actually promoted their show. So the band immediately took to flyering the streets of Memphis. While walking the streets and going into record stores and whatnot, they ran into Primal Scream who were in town recording an album. At their show that night at the Antenna Club, Primal Scream showed up (being 2 of the 5 paying people at the club) and then after the show, invited NOU to come to the studio to record some songs. So the next day, with a slightly irked Bikini Kill in tow, Nation of Ulysses recorded five songs on Primal Scream’s dime in nine hours.
Only in America! Only in the 90s! What a bat shit story. Setting aside the fact that someone totally flaked on promoting a Nation of Ulysses/Bikini Kill show, how the fuck do you randomly recognize a random Glaswegian alternative band and soon-to-be authors of Screamdelica in the street? Serendipity is a thing, y'all.

Henry says his copy only had four songs on it, and I have yet to see what the fifth song was anywhere, so let's just enjoy four cuts that would later appear on Plays Pretty For Baby. And now I'm sad I never got to see them. :(


Tuesday, April 28, 2020

The Worst - The Worst Of The Worst

So back around 2001, some amazing soul released ten fan club 7"s of early 80s American hardcore under the label Reagan Era HC. When you've only heard old heads talk about how great YDI or Offenders were, and you suddenly can cop a bunch of their master works at $4 a pop, you don't quibble over the morality of buying bootlegs. You just gobble them up. That's how I heard the Worst for the first time.

Their 1983/4 12" Expect the Worst, a proto-crossover classic, was suddenly available in a conveniently inexpensive format. And I was hyped. Expect the Worst was short/fast/loud...just perfect for what I was looking for. It took me down the road of exploring all the Mutha Records catalog...this really fun suburban New Jersey 80s label that stood as this counterpoint to the super-serious NYHC scene of Agnostic Front, Cro-Mags, and Warzone. I mean, any label that put out Chronic Sick records had to have a good sense of humor.

Flash forward almost 20 years, and I'm making the rounds of local thrift stores. I hit this cache of what seems to be someone's hardcore/grind/emo CD collection. Lots of fun stuff...most of which I already owned. The best finds were the White Cross discography on Grand Theft Auto, a CD version of Propaganda - Russian Bombs Finland, and what you have below: The Worst of The Worst.

So what you get is pretty comprehensive. The Worst of the Worst starts off with their self-titled 1982 7", then crashes into the aforementioned Expect the Worst. THEN you get an unreleased 12" worth of material that was recorded for a 1984 release. The CD is capped off with a portion of a Worst live set from Max's Kansas City in 1979, all with unreleased songs. All told, it's a 29 song, 43 minute banger. Sadly, it's out of print, and currently selling for around $20 online...if you can find one. It's worth finding one. Stuart Schrader wrote a fantastic set of liner notes that serve as a loving history for this band that might otherwise be a footnote in some granddad's remembrance of the "good ol' days".

Yeah, here's the discography. If you like trashy, thrashy 80s hardcore that sounds like it was recorded on a boombox (and, yeah, that's a GOOD stylistic choice), then this is right in your wheelhouse. I picked this up for $3.


New Medicom Be@rbricks!

I get really bummed out when I think about the work I used to do, and what I'm not doing now.

Of all the toy companies I worked with, the one I was always stoked to work with, and the one I still miss the most, is Tokyo's Medicom Toy Company. For what it's worth, they remain masters of the blind box platform toy. They're still putting out amazing 1:6 scale and 1:12 scale figures. If you want to know what sofubi are, and where you can cop some, then Medicom has them for you. I'd never buy a Supreme t-shirt, and I couldn't give a fuck about Yeezys, but I'll stan for Medicom.

It dawned on me that the 40th series of Be@rbrick is coming up in a few months, so I decided now was the time to see what I've been missing out on. It's been a lot. Here's what stood out to me:

Be@rbrick Series 40 releases right around the corner in June. While we won't get the full lineup until late May, it looks like a pretty...interesting list of licenses and artists right now:
  • Parisian graphic designer Nathalie Lete
  • James Gunn's Brightburn
  • Japanese artist Hakuro's Ocean Exploration Robot Denshitako No.3
  • Designer Kae Tanaka
  • Wonder Woman '84
  • Peanuts
...plus the standard Basic, Jellybean, Pattern, Flag, and a f-ton of cool Artist pieces. In case you're not familiar with the Be@rbrick concept, each mini-figure stands 70mm (2.75") tall, comes packaged in a blind box, and is shaped like a bear. These retail in Japan for 450¥; these should run around $6.00 from your more reputable American sources. I'm a sucker for these, and in more halcyon days, I'd buy a case of 24, just to ensure I copped some of the variants that inevitably show up.

Harley Quinn from Birds Of Prey was the Villain Be@rbrick from Series 39. That design is getting expanded into a 400% Be@rbrick this September. That means it's four times bigger than the standard Be@rbrick. I love this format; they always come in a really sharp-looking full-color box, and they display really well. This one's listing at 10,800¥, so expect to spend around $120 for this.

I had no clue that Medicom and the NBA were releasing Be@rbricks based on retired players until I hopped on the website recently. The first one I saw? The Hick from French Lick himself, Hall of Famer Larry Bird. You get a twofer here, with a 100% AND 400% #33 in Be@rbrick form. Hell, he even sports his late 80s dirt-stache. This is fantastic, even at 13,000¥/$150. It comes out in Japan in August.
Last, but definitely the one I'll be working to pick up, is the fifth Jean-Michel Basquiat/Medicom collaboration. This, like the Larry Bird release, is a dual 100%/400% Be@rbrick release. What I love about this (and the other artist collabos Medicom makes) is that it makes art attainable. I got turned onto Basquiat via the 1996 Julian Schnabel film (killer cast, great soundtrack...that'll be a topic for another post), and have been a fan ever since. This is probably the only way I'll ever get to pick up one of his pieces, albeit adapted for a modern medium. But at 12,000¥/$150, I think this totally worth it. This'll come out in Japan.

If you want to check out more Be@rbrick new releases, or check out the monster list of releases from the past 20 years, go to www.bearbrick.com. To pre-order...check in with your local comic shop, who should be able to get each of these via their distributor.

Monday, April 27, 2020

Samiam / Texas Is The Reason - Your Choice Live 037

Photo by Mark Beemer
I've been listening to and thinking about the new Fiona Apple a lot lately, seeing as how it came out a week ago. And I won't say it's the only reason I haven't written anything for the past week, but it's A reason. And an excuse. Which I'll overcome now.

The Your Choice Live series was a very cool concept that ran for seven years from 1989 to 1996. It was designed as three series of live releases, with each series benefiting a different independent charity in the U.K. It was a very appealing idea to this young Ape, even though I came in at the tail end of their release life. There's a whole mess of rad releases in the 30+ record catalog. There are killer Ripcord and Verbal Assault records that came out in the project's first year. In 1990, YCR released a live Neurosis 7" that has this amazing Lawrence Finn woodcut for a cover. And then there's this release: the penultimate one for this great label.

I'm not sure why I thought/think Texas Is The Reason only played a handful of domestic shows. Is it because I never saw a flier for one of their shows outside the Tri-State area? I know they didn't play Baltimore, and I'm quite certain they didn't play D.C. But, apparently, they not only played out of New York City; they went on tour with Samiam the summer of '96, and they toured Europe.

From YouTube
So that's what this is. It's live from Wiesbaden, Germany, circa 1996. The sound mix is pretty sharp (a quality common to the YCR releases I've heard), and both bands are in fine form. Samiam had been playing out behind Clumsy for nearly two years when this was recorded, so you get a nice mix of tracks from their major label debut as well as their New Red Archives catalog across their seven songs. Texas Is The Reason plays two songs off their self-titled 7", and four cuts from Do You Know Who You Are?. I'm a fan, and this is my favorite recording of them. I only learned as I was writing this that this was TitR's final show until their 2006 reunion. I got my copy in the late 90s from Reptilian; I'm sure Chris bagged on me for not buying whatever AmRep record he was playing. But I later sold my copy for $40 on Discogs, so who's laughing now?

This idea of a label subsidizing non-profits would get repeated with Sub City Records a few years later, as well as Shirts For A Cure, just to name two. I've seen a number of bands carry on the practice via Bandcamp releases, which I think is a perfectly cromulent use of the platform. I'd love to see this resurrected, tho, if only to regain access to an awesome catalog.


Sunday, April 19, 2020

Nendoroid Alex DeLarge

I haven't really ever written about toys here, not because I'm not interested, but because I always had other outlets to talk about them. See, where most reasonably bright people used their college educations to become accountants, salespeople, C-levels, doctors, and whatnot, I used mine to join the collectibles business. It's what I did for money up until 3 years ago.

During that time, I got to work with a lot of really cool companies. Among them was Tokyo's Good Smile Company, makers of a lot of really rad pieces. One of their lead lines is Nendoroid; it's their articulated, chibi-style figure in a window box. They've been releasing these since 2005, have released/announced over 1,300 styles, and have covered the gamut of Asian pop culture. Long before I ever did any work with them, I became got hipped to them because they did some really fun Hatsune Miku Nendoroids back in the day. What can I say: I'm a sucker for a virtual idol.

Flash forward to a couple days ago. A buddy of mine sends me a link with the caption "!!!" as the header. I click, and I find this handsome fella:
Look, I have plenty of Kenner/Hasbro Star Wars 3 3/4" figures and Legos spread throughout my collection (also, I have a toy collection [sorry, gang, I'm taken]). But, to me, the more perverse or "inappropriate" the license or style, the better. And I think that's why this release puts a big ol' smile on my face. After all, Mattel's not going to look a 50-year-old Stanley Kubrick film about antisocial youth and say, "THIS is our next big release!" It IS, however, very normal for a Japanese toy company to release this alongside a pair of Frozen Nendoroids and a Kingdom Hearts character.
If you're looking for something screen-accurate, built to scale, or super serious, this is NOT your cuppa. While there's a casual resemblance to a POP!, these are articulated, more detailed, while still remaining stylized. These are awesome to play with, pose out, and can get a conversation started like little else. Little Alex comes with a couple of different faces, a glass of milk, a walking cane and a mask. Sadly, no phallus sculpture comes in the package, but maybe that's what Good Smile is planning for the DX release.
Nendoroid 1270 - Alex DeLarge (A Clockwork Orange) is currently scheduled for an Asian release July 2020, at a retail price of ¥4,364. Expect to pay around $50 USD when this hits American shores. The Good Smile US webstore has already closed pre-orders, but holler at your local comic shop; they should be able to hook you up.

Saturday, April 18, 2020

Tiger Trap - Tiger Trap

Note: reposted from my sideblog. Originally written October 2018.

This may have been the best-selling K Records release at one time, but I'll be damned if I could find a  physical copy until I moved to the PNW and started hitting every Value Village between Bellingham and the U District. And why did I want a copy so bad? Mainly because I'd only ever owned a third-generation cassette version, then a download off some long-defunct blog.

And who gives a shit if one owns a physical copy in 2018? I'm a bet hedger, and I love dead media. I get sweaty palmed when I see some out-of-print indie CD that came out when I was 16. It still sounds just as vital as it did when my girlfriend in 1993 passed me a C-60 with this and some Bikini Kill singles on it. The big difference is I'm not some dumbo in southwestern Virginia; I'm in the stomping ground of this amazing four-piece. Kids making music will never not be awesome to me.

Anyway, here's Tiger Trap's self-titled LP. Ripped from the K Records CD at 320kbps. Enjoy. I found this for $2.


Friday, April 17, 2020

Meet Me In The Dollar Bin

Note: here's something I wrote in 2018 when I did two posts of a dollar bin blog, then promptly forgot I'd ever started it. I'm moving it here because here's where I write now.

I've been thinking a lot about writing again.

It was nearly nine years ago that I stopped writing for my last Blogspot blog. I was newly divorced and back on the scene and I just figured, "Fuck it...I'd rather go live it than chronicle it." So I dove into singing for a band in Baltimore. I bought a house. I found a new gig down South, then it moved me out to the PNW. And then I lost my job. And I was out of work for over a year.

Now, being out of work for a year+ teaches you a few things. They include:
  1. Maybe you weren't as well regarded in your industry as you thought you were.
  2. You can get fairly decent health care if your partner is a bulldog on the phone/internet on your behalf.
  3. You better get clever if you want to have some fun.
So, in spite of abject poverty, I've actually probably acquired more music in the past 12 months than at any point in my life. And, with the rare exception of a Bandcamp purchase (the best thing since sliced bread for the DIY musician, IMHO), I haven't spent more than $3 on a single recording. A lot of it is out-of-print. A lot of it is really good. These all came from Goodwills, Value Villages, libraries, and $1 shelves in record stores.

The inspirations for this blog are folks like Spavid at Wilfully Obscure, Matthew Perpetua at Fluxblog, and Grey at Shiny Grey Monotone, all of whom have provided me with 1,001 new things to listen to over the years AND have kept the faith long after Mediafire killed all our links. The soundtrack and namesake is this song by Les Savy Fav, who once put on a hell of a show for a cynical 23-year-old, then became a late night talk show band. I found a copy of "Inches" in a Oregon Salvation Army for a dollar. It made me sad to think this might live there for another six months. So I brought it home, and an idea took shape, and now here you are.

"Meet me in the dollar bin
It's a band I once was in
Haven't done much better since
This is no coincidence
Been rubbing off our finger prints
Covered up with phony skins
This giving in has worn so thin
That you can see the beat within"
 Les Savy Fav, "Meet Me In The Dollar Bin", 2004

Re-up: Career Suicide - SARS

Why repost a Career Suicide 7" that I wrote about 11 years ago? I'd be a damned dirty liar if I said I hadn't had "Quarantined" stuck in my head for the past few weeks. Here's what I said in 2009:

I wish I could tell you why I haven't spent more money on Career Suicide's records. I love just about everything I've heard from them. I'm always stoked when a song pops up on my iPod. Yet I find my racks sadly skimp on product from them. What can I tell you? They rule.

What do you need to know here? Career Suicide are a snotty Dangerhouse-style HC band from Toronto. Two of the members are in Fucked Up, which I guess is why C.S. hasn't toured lately. They've released a metric fuckton of records over the past seven years. SARS was their second 7", and first release for Deranged Records. If you're so inclined, you can pick this up, along with the proverbial metric fuckton of other product, on their swell CD compilation,
Anthology of Releases 2001-2003. $9 plus shipping gets you 44 tracks! Viva la punk rock!


Thursday, April 16, 2020

various artists - Our Band Could Be Your Life

I think a lot lately about musical mini trends that have been lost to time.

Can you do a tribute comp in 2020? I mean, sure, you COULD theoretically put one out. But who'd care, much less buy enough copies to break even? I feel like the tribute comp went out around the time that Fearless put out their tenth Punk Goes! release. Although, as I writing this, I'm remembering that Guilt By Association comp that had Petra Haden doing Journey, Superchunk doing Destiny's Child, etc. That was good stuff that a year or two later probably would have been an MP3-only website release for someone like Merge or some publicist firm. But I digress.

I remember being SUPER stoked on this when I snagged a copy in 1996. "Oooh, Jawbox! Oooh, Tsunami and Unwound and Kaia and Treepeople! Doing Minutemen songs! Oooh!" And app. 25 years later, it still holds up. I hate to describe this as a novelty, because releases (the indie rock tribute to [Band X]) like this were numerous throughout the 90s and early aughts. But seeing it in the flesh (aluminum?) feels weird, even if it sounds so good. The most pleasant surprise for me was re-hearing Seam's version of "This Ain't No Picnic". I have a real yen to revisit their Touch & Go catalog now.









"Our Band Could Be Your Life: A Tribute to D Boon and the Minutemen"
ripped at 192kbps from the 1994 CD release on Little Brother Records
(DL)

Wednesday, April 15, 2020

New jams from Manuela Iwansson

Stupid COVID-19, stupid unemployment. About the only good that comes from any of this is there's plenty of time to read, watch movies, and listen to records. Lots and lots of records.

I was a big fan of the late, great Terrible Feelings. They put out a bunch of fantastic post-punk/power pop records over the last decade, including a pair of LPs that came out in these parts via the folks at Deranged Records. Sadly, I missed their show in Baltimore at the Golden West several years ago due to...I was poor? I had to travel for work? I hear it was a ripper. But then this Swedish quintet, as most things do, called it a day, apparently in 2016.

Imagine the pleasure I felt when I saw that lead singer Manuela Iwansson had started making music again under her own name. She released a 4-song EP June of 2018, but what drew me to her was the digital release last fall of two new tracks by PNKSLM Recordings in Sweden. They're hitting a real sweet spot for me. They're a pair of icy new wave rippers that scratch a real itch for me.


The first place my ears went when hearing "Strangers on a Train" was to Haircut 100; I hear some musical references to "I Ran (So Far Away)". There's a lyrical reference to A Flock of Seagulls in the first verse which is a little on the nose. Still, this is the kind of track I like sinking my teeth into.


"Blank Surface" is even better. The newest cut released by Iwansson, this has a real "Heartbreaker" vibe to it. Mrs. Mummy, who never ceases to draw the links between Pat Benatar and Bikini Kill, asked me to play this three times in a row when I played it for her for the first time.

The ad copy on the Bandcamp page references "added noise and 80s Berlin noir", and far be it for me to argue against that. There's a lot less punk and more polish to both of these cuts than with Terrible Feelings, but, fuck it, I'm 42 now; that's not a bad thing.

It appears that these will be released as one of them there "double A-side, limited edition 7"s" in May by the folks at Night School in the U.K. Who knows what the pandemic will do to that release date, and it's not like this fella, who's currently "on the dole" (as a 1970s British punk might say), can afford paying $15 for a new release 7". But if you're flush with cash, or feeling like a wild person, I'd say fuck it, and order one, because I'm into these tracks.

Read This One

Post #400: Double Dagger - Ragged Rubble

It took from May to August 2000 to go from 100 to 200 posts. Then I hit 300 posts two days before Christmas 2000. And now I'm here, anot...

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