Gang Of Four – Solid Gold & Another Day/Another Dollar

OK, it's been a month...let's post up another one of those Infinite Zero Gang Of Four reissues. As with the "Entertainment!/Yellow EP" reissue, this one combines a full-length with a North American 12"; in this case, "Another Day/Another Dollar" combines the crucial "To Hell With Poverty" 7" with a pair of 1981-era live tracks and the B-side from the "What We All Want" 7".

At the risk of sounding like a dick, I very clearly prefer the Dave Allen era lineup to all other Go4 lineups. Maybe it's a result of anti-disco prejudice, maybe I'm just an idiot. Although "I Love A Man In Uniform" is a straight bop...

Discogs

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Blitz - All Out Attack EP

Rabbit, rabbit, as the kids say. And here's what might just be my favorite punk rock 7" ever.

Yes, ever. More so than "Nervous Breakdown" or "In My Eyes" or "Realities Of War" or "3 Songs". More so than "Alachua" or "I Like Fucking" or "Her Jazz" or "The Sun Isn't Getting Any Brighter" or the self-titled NOU disc. More so than "Who Killed Dove?" or the Get Up Kids/Coalesce split or "Drive This Seven Inch Wooden Stake Through My Philadelphia Heart" or "Monoton Tid" or anything.

Prove. Me. Wrong.

(ripped at 320 kbps from my copy of "No Future: Complete Singles Collection", an absolutely crucial reissue that Captain Oi! put out in 2020 and WHY AREN'T YOU SLAMMING THAT "BUY NOW" BUTTON RIGHT NOW?!?!?)

Discogs

Click here to download.

The Cramps - Psychedelic Jungle / Gravest Hits

In the before/before time, I had a pretty reliable rule: if a bar had the Cramps on the jukebox, they were going to be my type of gin joint.

I'm partial to their earliest work, featuring the late Bryan Gregory on guitar alongside Poison Ivy. But this set, released by I.R.S. all the way back in '86, offers the best of both worlds: the second LP from the Cramps, 1981's "Psychedelic Jungle", and their 1979 12" "Gravest Hits". "Jungle" is rad as its one of Kid Congo Power's' earliest appearances on vinyl; he replaced Gregory after the Cramps' first LP, and began doing double duty in the Gun Club in 1982.

This is so trashy. It makes me want to sniff glue and watch some Joe Don Baker movies. I want to stomp on feet and eat a plate of cake and go back to drinking $2 whiskeys in a shitty part of town and put about 20 Cramps on the jukebox and wake up with a painful, delicious headache from too much fun.

Discogs

Click here to download.

Motörhead ‎– No Sleep 'Til Hammersmith

The old joke goes, "Who'd win in a fight: Lemmy, or God?" "Trick question: Lemmy IS God!" I heard it for the first time when I saw "Airheads", where Brendan Fraser, Steve Buscemi, and Adam Sandler cover a Reagan Youth song while Michaels McKean and Richards chew the scenery. A fine film, if you're asking.

One of the greatest (and loudest) shows I ever attended was Iron Maiden, Dio, and Motörhead: the sixth date of the American leg of the "Give Me Ed… 'Til I'm Dead World Tour". LIVE at Merriweather Post Pavilion in scenic Columbia, Maryland. I was finishing up college, working at a bar and trying to figure out what I was going to do with the next year of my life, when it was decided that the bar's ownership would treat us to tickets to this show. Now, I never grew up a metalhead, but everyone loves (or should love) Lemmy, and Philthy Animal Taylor all but invented D-beat, so I rented a van for the lot of us, put the only straight edger in our crew in charge of driving, and off we went. Just about everyone had tied one on before the show started; we staggered in as a wobbly group of a dozen punks, skins, and metal heads. It was still daylight when Motörhead hit the stage and absolutely PUMMELED us while we stood in the eighth row. I've never seen a room fill up so quickly once they started playing. By the end of their set, we were all agape, whether it was the first time or 20th time we'd seen them. We were just brutalized, regardless of our individual level of experience with the band. It was as good as feeling as the highest high, a state of euphoria I've not often reached.

Everything after that was just gravy. Dio was amazing (totally changed my opinion on him) and Maiden...well, Maiden was MAIDEN. They were great. But it was Motörhead that left the lasting impression. I went from being familiar to being a true fan, the kind that waxed poetic as each member of the classic trio passed along over the past ten years.

I'm not even sure if "No Sleep 'Til Hammersmith" is a fair representation of what I saw. After all, it was recorded over five nights between the release of "Ace Of Spades" and "Iron Fist", in the midst of their truly heroic run of releases on Bronze. Over 20 years would pass until I'd see them in the summer of 2003. But I'll be damned if it didn't earn its #1 chart position, via one of the greatest live albums of all time. The copy shared here is the Roadracer 1991 US reissue. It includes five live tracks that didn't appear on the initial Bronze release, four of which were released on 1980's "The Golden Years" EP. Two of those would be omitted from future pressings, so it's a nice version to pick up.

If Lemmy is God, and I'm told Lemmy is dead, than the corollary should be that God is dead. I prefer to believe that Mssrs. Kilmister, Clarke, and Taylor have all ascended to a higher plane, where they are now laying waste and teaching the true meaning of white line fever.

Discogs

Click here to download.

Mission Of Burma - Mission Of Burma

My first exposure to Mission Of Burma was via Rhino's "Faster & Louder" series back in 1993, which might as well just serve as my Rosetta Stone for the music I'd obsess over during next three decades. The first volume remains imprinted in my brain; it's the mixtape from the older brother I never had. It's hard to overstate the impact of hearing "Pay To Cum", "Dicks Hate The Police", "Get It Away", and, yes, "That's How I Escaped My Certain Fate" all in the same place. Add in the cover art by Gary Panter, the photos by Ed Colver, Jenny Lens, and Glen Friedman, and suddenly I had a checklist of things to look for when I went to a record store, or when I started exploring modern art.

My second exposure to Mission Of Burma came a couple years later, when I turned up a cherry copy of Ryko's "Mission Of Burma" double LP for some stupidly-low amount of money at one of the numerous record stores that used to dot Fells Point. Maybe I paid $12 for a copy that didn't look like it'd ever been played and still had the obi strip on it. Ryko was still a couple years away from their comprehensive remastering program, and all that Ace of Hearts material from the 80s was out of print, so I snagged this, alongside a copy of "London Calling" and "Q: Are We Not Men?" for less than it'd cost to get a newly-pressed copy today.

There's been a couple rounds of reissues since then; the aforementioned 1997 Rykodisc remastering campaign, and Matador's consolidation of most of the Burma catalog in 2008. Matador has kept those records in print in really nice editions on vinyl, including a really sick copy of "Signals, Calls, And Marches" on orange wax that they released with Newbury a few years back. But this, comprised of their contemporary material released before their 1983 breakup, as well as a pair of live cuts and unreleased cuts, still lives near and dear to my heart. When I saw a seller who I was ordering another record from had it for a few bucks on CD, well, I knew what to do...

Discogs

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Empire - Expensive Sound

I didn't grow up in DC, per se, but what happened there musically in the 80s and 90s had an outsized influence on my taste. And like any good lil record nerd, I chased every band mentioned in an interview with Ian MacKaye or on a Jawbox flier. As a result, I have a metric fuckton of really obscure, but great, CDs in my collection that go for $5-$15 a piece on Discogs, due to lake of knowledge.

The Empire LP, "Expensive Sound", is one of those rarities, a record notable for its members' lineage and the influence it had on a few key players in the DC hardcore scene. Those members were Mark Laff and Bob Derwood Andrews, late of Generation X before that outfit turned outright into the Billy Idol show. Andrews and Laff both found themselves at odds with Idol's and bassist Tony James' goals to embrace a more mainstream sound and look for the band, and started Empire in London with Simon Bernal from experimental collective MLR.

What they turned out was a post-punk record that one could argue is proto-emo in sound. When I listen to this, I hear exactly where the fellas in Embrace were coming from musically when they made their self-titled record in 1986. That continues throughout the Dischord catalog into the 90s, with bands like Ignition, Soul Side, and 3 wearing the influence on their musical sleeves.

What I'm sharing here comes from the 2003 reissue of "Expensive Sound", expanded with seven unreleased tracks and a quartet of live cuts from 1981. Released by Northern Virginia's Poorly Packaged Products, it was followed up in 2006 with another CD of previously unissued Empire recordings; I've never seen a copy of that one in the wild. The folks at Drastic Plastic in Omaha also put out a really nice vinyl reissue a few years back that is 100% worth snagging at $15.

Discogs

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various artists - Keats Rides A Harley

Nothing big going on today, right?

I went out to pick up food, prescriptions, and #0 mailers yesterday, and made a quick lil stop at a thrift store along the way. It's rare that I don't find something cool there, and this visit was no exception. There was a copy of this live U2 fan club release, a copy of the "Stand Alone Complex" soundtrack, and a couple of other things I'll end up putting up for sale online. Not a bad haul for $2 a CD.

But the find...THE FIND...was a reissue of one of those early 80s comps I've heard about for years and years, but never seen in real life until yesterday. "Keats Rides A Harley" originally came out in 1981 on the Urinals' Happy Squid Records. Hell of a lineup for 1981: the Gun Club, the Meat Puppets, Leaving Trains, 100 Flowers, and Toxic Shock (who became Slovenly) all appeared on this comp of SoCal (and one AZ) outsiders. It's not a particularly rare record; in the liner notes for the reissue, it's said that 2,000 12"s were pressed. But I'd never come across the LP or the CD reissue until now.

The reissue came a quarter century later, courtesy of Warning Label in Massachusetts. It was a wide expansion of the original record, with a second cut from each band on the original comp, as well as the first ever reissue of 1980's "The Happy Squid Sampler". This addition is cool for its additional Urinals song, an early iteration of Trotsky Icepick, and this really weird synth cut by Phil Bedel. It is, as one of my British friends would say, "a mad curious sitch". I appreciate its strong weirdo punk vibe; so different from what I'd anticipate hearing if I was handed another punk record from 1981.

This is the part of the blog where I'd tie everything I've just written with what's happening in the world today. All I have to say is, if you're an American and registered to do so, go vote today. Stand in line for a few hours. Tilt at the windmill that is our political system. Do it because it's one of the few choices you still have left. Like Ms. Apple once said, "This world is bullshit." Go with yourself. Be a goddamned oddball and make something happen, even if the results aren't immediate. Who knows? Maybe forty years later, someone will write about the little thing you did that had a real impact. Like a record, like a vote.

Discogs

Click here to download.

Minutemen - The Punch Line

Boon & Watt, L.A., 1984

I remember how excited I was when I found a slightly watered damaged copy of The Punch Line on CD in the now-defunct CMart in Forest Hill back in 1995. There's an excitement that I've been missing a lot over the past five years in discovering something brand new. My roommate and I were talking last night about going out on Tuesdays and getting knocked out by a band you've never heard before. I'd say it's a function of getting older, but it doesn't ring quite as true as I'd hope. I want desperately to have that nervous, right-before-the-first-kiss feeling again, the way I did the first time I heard Out of Step or A Love Supreme or The Punch Line.

I don't know what else to say about this, other than the Minutemen have always been one of those bands I'd want to emulate if I were in a band. There is no bullshit here; just the sound of D Boon, Mike Watt & George Hurley getting to the point. It fucks me up knowing that a lot of younger folks have missed out on this (and other SST back catalog) due to Ginn's mismanagement of the catalog. I have loved this band for a long time, but still choose this as my sentimental favorite.

"...I'm already on someone's list as a casualty..."

Minutemen - The Punch Line

(click the record to DL)

RIYL: one liners, fucking corndogs

Negative Approach - The First Year

If you're like me, you enjoy drinking someone else's beer, turning up Negative Approach and running repeatedly into a brick wall. You don't like that, you say? Well, you are missing out. There are very few things better in life than N.A. and a pilfered six-pack of Shiner Bock.

Cheers to Henry at Chunklet and Benn & Rachel at Atomic Books for a rousing Rock Band party last Friday, and for the inspiration for this post. What you have here, in a mere 28 megs of file space, is the first year's output from Grosse Point, MI's finest. What you get is the first demo, the track from the Process of Elimination 7" and the self-titled 7". 21 songs, 18 minutes. You must break something. All of this should be on Guitar Hero, or Rock Band, or some video game.

Negative Approach - The First Year

RIYL: random acts of violence, 1981, shaved heads