various artists - No Sleep For Hardcore

Mike from Kill the Man Who Questions, circa 2001
(photo from @suburban_voice)

I had shared "Dangerously Unstable", the second of four Suburban Voice comps, a couple weeks ago. So it made since to whip this one out to share. This came with issue #45. If memory serves, Tear It Up was on the cover, Al did a really long interview with Brian from Grand Theft Audio, and the whole endeavor was reflective of the thrash revival of 2000-01. It was the penultimate issue, the final musical release, and both were pretty good ones.

So, if you're feeling froggy, what will your $1.99 (plus shipping) on Discogs get you? The lead song is from Limp Wrist, whose demo I hadn't heard at the time and whose first 7" hadn't come out yet. "Does Your Daddy Know?" still fucking slaps. It was a perfect teaser for the 7" and 12" that'd come out later in 2001. The covers on "No Sleep" are super solid: D4 covers DYS, F-Minus does a Middle Class song that appeared on "Tooth and Nail", and Word Salad does a perfectly cromulent version of "Angel of Death" by Slayer. Cover boys Tear It Up, a dramatically underrated band if there ever was one, contribute an unreleased cut, and XFilesX share a track from their demo, which hadn't really appeared outside of Massachusetts at that point. I'm pretty certain this was my first exposure to Vitamin X and Hates and Straight to Hell and Four Letter Word. I find it very easy to miss releases like this, just like I miss that you could browse a magazine rack's worth of new music zines every month.

No sense in bemoaning what's been lost; let's only look forward to what can be. Re-listening to this makes me want to put out my own comps, to document what's happening here and now. And I guess that's the highest praise one can offer; that a piece of work inspires someone else to create their own version.

Discogs

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