Considering I've been listening to hardcore for 31 years is warping my brain a little bit. Which may be why I'm willing to consider a release on Victory Records, a label that Mark McCoy once sang "sucks" in an all-timer from Charles Bronson. But this comp, the tenth release on the now-notrious Chicago label, decidedly does not suck. It's led off by Warzone, one of the few bands still live and kicking from the seccond wave of HC.Then it's a pretty great lineup of bands that felt super huge to me when I was 16: Resurrection from New Jersey, Snapcase and Zero Tolerance from Buffalo, L.A.'s Strife, Louisville's Endpoint, and Black Train Jack from NYC.
In a time long before the internet, Warped Tour, or reunion package tours, or even when you could find many punk/HC records at your local record store, this was an audio flier for bands you could actually see play live. You could be that kid on the cover. You could drive to Blacksburg or Charlottesville or even all the way to DC to see someone like Bloodline play. It was the damndest game of telephone: reading zine reviews and fliers and thank you lists and distro pamphlets to discover what was available and currently happening. Resurrection was how I got into Lifetime; Endpoint led me to Slamdek Records; Warzone had me ordering records every three months from Revelation Records, newly relocated from Connecticut to Southern California.
The best part of this? I probably hadn't listened to this since the late 90s when I pulled this out of a box a bit ago. But the music still sounds vital, the lyrics no less strident than they did three decades ago. This still fucking rips.
1 comment:
Thanks. You described my life back in the nineties - only in a little, useless country in the middle of Europe....
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