Now here's a record that I was completely smitten with when it came out, and somehow managed to set aside for nearly 20 years afterwards.
Like most collectors in 2021, I have a list of wants on Discogs. Nothing too fancy (excepting some Septic Death releases that'll cost me my stimulus check), but a lot of $5 to $50 records, CDs, and tapes that I want to own a copy of. Every few weeks, when the ol' Paypal account grows thick, or I've paid all the home bills and have a few shekels left over, I'll go through the list looking for deals. So it was that I ended up a seller's list that had a couple of items from said wantlist for sale. They were asking a price too dear for the specific Devo reissue I wanted, but they also had a couple of Lookout! releases for cheap that caught my eye. I also saw this here 5" aluminum slab, cried foul that it didn't even live on my hard drive, much less that I still owned a hard copy, and plunked down a mere $4 for a pre-owned copy. A week later, it was in my hands again.
Much of my music listening takes place digitally these days. I don't stream, per se; I load up my phone with a few hundred interesting records from my collection, or play directly off my hard drive. But when "Rogue's March" came in, I made an excuse to go for a drive, to pick up coffee and lunch for the missus and I, and slid it into the CD player in the car. It remains a really powerful, maybe under-heard, punk rock record from the end of the century.
American Steel's second LP, like Hot Water Music's "No Division" and Small Brown Bike's "Our Own Wars" from the same year, plays like heartfelt punk rock from the Stiff Little Fingers/Leatherface tradition, adding in the intensity of growing up in a scene where grindcore bands played on the same bill as pop punk and anarcho punx. At first blush, it might seem weird that Lookout put this one out; their run as the home to American pop punk royalty was ending, and their embrace of punk-rooted indie rock would lead to their last hurrah over the following 5 years. This was a vanguard for the likes of Ted Leo and Pretty Girls Make Graves within the next couple of years.
Is this still good? All I can say is, I still remembered every word from "Every New Morning" and the title track the minute they came on, and I hollered them like I was 21 all over again. Felt good, dude.
