Swiz --> Bluetip --> Sweetbelly Freakdown --> Jesuseater --> Retisonic --> Red Hare
...plus various roots like 108, Battery, Garden Variety, Severin, Shudder to Think. That's a hell of a nice family tree. You could stretch this out even further, if you care to include all the outstanding design work Jason Farrell has done since the late 80s. For the purposes of this piece, I won't. But I WOULD visit a retrospective of his.
I digress.
Back in the halcyon days of 2004, in between Pedro the Lion and From Ashes Rise releases, Jade Tree Records very quietly posted Swiz's first demo, titled here as "With Ramsey". As the story goes, the band initially played out as a quintet, with Ramsey Metcalf joining Jason Farrell on guitar. However, before Swiz cut their first 7", "Down", Metcalf had left the band, leaving us with the familiar late 80s four-piece hardcore band we all know and love.
I'm rather surprised this isn't available on someone's Bandcamp or blog, or that it hasn't been released as a physical artifact. "Lie" sounds a lot fuller on this demo, compared to the versions that would later appear on both "Down" and "Hell Yes I Cheated". I don't hear any difference between this version of "Taste" and the one on Swiz's self-titled 12". You also get four songs that never appeared anywhere else. All in all, this sounds like a natural progression from "Can I Say"-era Dag Nasty; perhaps a little more hardcore than Dag. Check for yourself. And maybe we'll get a nice lil' 10" of this one day.
Click here to download.
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