various artists - Mojo Presents: Beloved (A Treasury Of Classic British Indie Rock)

Far be it for me to miss a second straight week of Mojo Mondays. And with St. Valentine's Day right around the corner, what better time is it to celebrate our beloved 80s British indie bands?

From the Monochrome Set and Orange Juice (shout out to The New Vinyl Villain for their ongoing OJ/Edwyn Collins singles series) through the Sound and Half Man Half Biscuit, all the way up to McCarthy and the La's, this is good confirmation that this was a classic era of indie for the UK. Universally, none of this broke in the States at the time of its release, but I sure as hell keep an eye out for these records in secondhand stores and thrift shop bins. This is the kind of physical media that the Gen X'ers seem to still be ditching if they didn't 86 it all when streaming really took hold. It's one of those "beggars can't be choosers" situations, where you're paying a premium to seek out specific records. But if you're down for a bit of aural adventure, you can finally determine why Julian Cope is held in such high regard, why Cherry Red is still reissuing Felt recordings 40 years on, and why you should give a damn about Pete Wylie and his various iterations of Wah! (Heat).

Discogs

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various artists - Mojo Presents: Heavy Mod

What the hell do I know about the Mods? Not much; something about Vespas and amphetamine and soul music. Youth culture, loving the blues and jazz, preceding the skins. They made a few movies about 'em. I know a lot more about the mod revival (White Trash Soul recently posted some Purple Hearts demos that are just out of sight) due to its proximity to punk and 2 Tone. So I take this 17-year-old compilation's title with a grain of salt. Is this indeed "Heavy Mod"?

Well, look; I have no clue if the 13th Floor Elevators and David Axelrod were getting played on the same turntables as the Small Faces, the Who, and the Yardbirds. But as with all the Mojo freebies I've gotten, this one works for me. I really dig the sequencing here; there's a real flow present that stood out to me as I listened for the first time in a long time. I'd say this one hews closer to the sort of mix CD you aspire to make for a friend than the typical "free with magazine purchase" giveaway.

It's clearly a Phil Alexander joint. You get a good mix AND a really nice explanation why these were grouped together in the liner notes. It's something I've been missing on the few Mojo releases from 2023 & 2024 that I've turned up recently.

Discogs

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various artists - Mojo Presents: ok_Computer

Here's the deal, sports fans: I dug through a few boxes in storage last weekend and found a cache of previously unopened Mojo giveaways. So it's going to Mojo Mondays for a while going forward. You're just going to have to...enjoy it?

It's still a free country...sort of.

Anyway, why "ok_Computer"? I was in a local second-hand media store over the weekend, and they had a bunch of copies of the Arthur Russell biography that came out last year. Now that I see what it's retailing for elsewhere, I'm rather compelled to run back and purchase one this week. But Mrs. Mummy clocked me eyeballing the cover and asked me what the deal was. So I told her I was trying to track down more Arthur Russell-related music recently, on account of a couple of his tracks had come up on comps I'd ripped in the past month or so. This is one of those comps. And now I share it with you.

Like all good Mojo comps, this has a solid mix of artists I'm familiar with (Human League, Gary Numan, Tangerine Dream) and folks I've never really encountered in the past (Xela, Severed Heads). But it's all pretty decent, covering subgenres that I typically don't delve into. The common thread is the synthesized sound, which I can dig, because I love artificiality. As for what this all has to do with the third Radiohead LP, I do not know. I lost the issue and kept the CD.

Discogs

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Masshysteri - Vår Del Av Stan

I popped into one of the many record stores that have popped up in the north Seattle suburbs in the past couple years today. I didn't know what I wanted; only that I wanted to hang out for a while, have a beer or two (it's a record bar, duh), and buy something based on someone else's taste.

It didn't quite work out that way. While my bartender and I discussed the finer points of late 90s power violence and I shared my opinions on Coalesce, my record tenders couldn't quite point me in the direction of something I didn't already own. They DID suggest Lip Cream's "Kill Ugly Pop", an Abrasive Wheels compilation, some Sleep records. All good recommendations; all recordings I already own.

In the end, I picked up a copy of World Burns To Death's "The Sucking Of The Missile Cock", a Portland crust classic, the Hardcore Holocaust release of which I probably sold in the mid-aughts to make a mortgage payment. This led me down the path of talking about records that Sonarize had reissued in recent years, which took me to Scandanavian hardcore, which brought me to Masshysteri, one of the most perfect punk bands of the past 20 years. This is their first of two full lengths, released by Feral Ward here in the States and by Ny Våg in their native Sweden. Masshysteri was the continuation of a line that includes the Vicious, Regulations, the (International) Noise Conspiracy, Insurgent Kid, and INVSN. Hell, one of their members used to be in Doughnuts, a Victory Records band that I actively ignored in the 90s but keep thinking I'll finally check out one of these days if I can just find a copy of their full length in the dollar bin.

ANYWAY...

Masshysteri: good-ass band. It's hardcore kids playing power pop, which is my favorite performance style of power pop.

Discogs

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various artists - This Comp Kills Fascists, Vol. 1

I had intended this to be posted on Monday, January 20th, but having a move thrust upon me kind of threw things out of whack, Instead, you get a a few days late.

It's taken forty-seven years, but I can wrap my brain around why someone might embrace fascism. And by "someone", I mean a normal human. A person who 30 years ago might have resided firmly in the middle class. That stability no longer exists. The world has gotten faster, the sensory input amped up, and still no answers present themselves. In the ensuing madness, I can understand why anyone might turn to a strongman, someone providing easy solutions to difficult challenges. Fuck the immorality or cognitive dissonance that comes along with accepting giving in; the trains might run on time, and you might get a deserved bite of the apple, a taste of the good life that you've been told is your birthright.

But it's all bullshit. It always has been, and, especially now, it will continue to be. After all, I lived through 2017 to 2021. I remember what has already happened; I can anticipate what will come.

A lesson I took from a life in punk rock is that you can do it yourself. You can start your own band. You can release your own record. You can publish your thoughts. You can create and distribute and connect and evolve. The scale is irrelevant. Whether you make 25 copies of a fanzine, or you start a mutual aid society in your town, you reject the dominant message that you cannot and embrace the message that you can.

i guess what I'm getting at here is that this is not a time for whining, or despair, or surrender. It's a time for regroup and realign. Figure out what sort of world you want to live it, and set about creating it. I promise there are others who feel the same way, and want to help. What your President, your MP, your Premier, your Prime Minister, and the men who back them, doesn't change what you can do at home.

Anyway, here's a comp from 2008, embracing Conflict's message to see who's who. Let's not be afraid to fight for a better world with this as part of the soundtrack.

Discogs

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various artists - Rap-A-Lot Greatest Hits

This comp doesn't fuck around.

When it says "Greatest Hits" on the cover, it's not telling any lies. It's Houston hip-hop history, writ large, leading off with their first sons, Geto Boys. All the heavy hitters are here: UGK, Scarface, Juvenile, 5th Ward Boyz, Z-Ro. Every single cut present shows how crucial RAL was in showcasing hip-hop outside the industry strongholds of NYC & LA in the 80s and 90s. It's weird to me to see that Rap-A-Lot hasn't put out new music in nearly a decade; they were omnipresent throughout the establishment and growth of my musical taste. When you encounter that sort of tastemaker, you just kind of assume they're always going to be there, tipping you off to something new and incredible.

It's also hard to believe that I picked this up for a buck after it'd been sitting on the shelf in one of my regular haunts for a few weeks. I was glad to give it a new home.

Discogs

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various artists - Mojo Presents: The Dawning Of A New Era (15 Classic Punk & Ska Tracks!)

Summer slips away. The days here grow short. The sun stood tall in the sky past 9pm just a few weeks ago; now, things are evening out, dusk coming at a more normal hour of 8-ish. The pool will soon close; the hoodies will come out of the closet.

I will wear shorts for another four months.

I didn't pick this up in January/February 2008, when this hit the newsstands. So I couldn't say what the context of this was. I'm left to guess how one justifies mixing JA rocksteady & reggae, the Untouchables, the Ruts, Judge Dread, and the goddamn Belle Stars to represent the eIxplosion of 2 Tone in 1979 & 1980. It's as tenuous a compilation as I've encountered from Mojo.

But I'm not really complaining. I think I got this for a buck, and one could play the first five tracks, all Trojan classics, on repeat without it ever getting old. I'll do this at least a few times over the coming weeks, if only to extend summer just a bit longer.

Discogs

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various artists - I Like It Like That

I forgot to plug in my laptop, which means I forgot until 20 after midnight to start writing, which is probably residual from the ol' rectal clean-out I undertook last weekend. Regardless, you're not getting the usual top notch trenchant insights you come here for bi-weekly.

I found this, as I do so many other awesome weirdness, on a shelf at one of my local haunts, for the usual buck or two. It comes from Fania Records, the home of boogaloo, salsa, and a shitton of incredible Latin beats. One disc is a grip of remixed Fania classics; the second disc features the originals. If this is a world you're unfamiliar with (and if you're a cracker-ass white boi like yrs truly, you probably aren't familiar), then this serves as a pretty cool sampler of the 3,000+ releases on this landmark label.

The remixes, you could take or leave. But it's getting cooler out, so some hot jams are quite welcome.

Discogs

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various artists - Mojo Presents: The Changing Man

There was, up until about 20 minutes ago, a 6 foot tower of boxes, filled with CDs and DVDs, sitting in my living room. I looked up from rolling cigarettes just in time to watch it tip over and crash upon the floor.

I'm avoiding getting up to examine the damage.

Here's a Mojo CD from 2008 that I bought for a dollar a few months ago. It has William Bell, Washington Phillips, Gil Scott-Heron, and Dinah Washington on it. Plus, Paul Weller's the theme..."Rarities & Inspirations" the common bond of these 15 tracks.

I feel like a paraphrase of a "Spinal Tap" line when asked, "don't you already own records with all these songs on it?" "Yeah, but this one was a dollar."

Sigh...I'm going to go clean up now.

Discogs

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Lee "Scratch" Perry - Chicken Scratch [Deluxe Edition]

'Twas a fun day at the ol' thrift store today. I came home with a Sergio Leone boxset, a copy of Abel Ferrera's "The Driller Killer", "The Queen Is Dead" and "Nigeria Afrobeat Special" and Grant Green's "Standards" and THIS slice of JA nostalgia. It's super early Lee Perry...the Upsetter, Pipecock Jackson, King Scratch, y'all. And I'm a fuggin' sucker for anything involving the Master of the Black Ark.

This here represents a sampling of singles released on C And N Records, Coxsone Records, Rolando & Powie, Mu-Zik City Records, Worldisc, and Supreme Records in the mid 60s. The credits list reads like a Hall of Fame of Jamaican music. Coxsone Dodd and Graeme Goodall engineered the tracks. The Soulettes and the Wailers provided backing harmonies. The likes of Jackie Mittoo, Roland Alphonso, Lloyd Knibbs, and Tommy McCook, whether under the Skatalites band name or ungrouped, make up portions of the backing band. The liner notes by David Katz are incredibly thorough; he literally wrote the book on Lee Perry, so it should be expected, but is still welcome.

This originally got released in 1989, collecting 12 cuts that'd never before appeared on CD. Twenty years later, Heartbeat reissued that compilation, adding seven tracks that'd previously only been available in their original 45 release. It's a dynamite collection, capturing Perry in his first years as an impresario, and the Skatalites as the top backing band on the island. It blows my mind that someone would donate this, but I was happy to plunk down my $2.99 for this one.

Discogs

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Portishead - Live on Later...With Jools Holland, 15 April 2008

Beth Gibbons, Portishead, "Later...With Jools Holland"

Jesus. 10 years since the last Portishead release. 13 years since their last full-length. Geoff Barrow and Adrian Utley are making soundtracks and guesting on other folks' records. I can only imagine what Beth Gibbons is up to; I hope it's something involving her, some folk songs, and an English cliffside. The magic, the mystery of how and when they make music. There's very little like it in this world.

Listening to a Portishead record for me is a bit like reading a Bible is to others. Seeing them live is church. It's a worship of sound, a spiritual experience unlike few others I've had. I'd see them anywhere, but I feel like the best would be to see them in a deconsecrated space, to keep with the metaphor. Give a holy sound a proper venue.

"Third" came out April 2008. I remember it being a really odd time, an odd sense of doom and hope permeating the air. The first single from Portishead in 10 years, "Machine Gun", had debuted a couple months ahead of the full-length; I think it was one of the last times I went to Pitchfork for any music news. It sounded like the end of world to me. I couldn't wait for the whole deal.

I wouldn't get "Third" right away, but I was more than satisfied by the group performing live on "Later...With Jools Holland" the week the new record came out. They played two cuts: "The Rip" and "We Carry On". Some soul during the heyday of music blogs kindly ripped both performances to MP3 for me; I share them here. These are, by far, my favorite versions of each song. "The Rip" sounds even more ethereal, Barrow's drums so thin and ghostly. "We Carry On"...it's a song that makes me want to run through walls, its motorik beat, slapped against metal, and Silver Apples-style keyboards offset by guitar that plinks and then EXPLODES! I can't hear it without imagining a music video, directed preferably by Ben Wheatly, of medieval soldiers, muddy from head to toe, fighting and dying.

There should be a new Portishead record in 2021, is what I'm saying.

Click here to download.

LaGrecia - On Parallels

I'm pretty certain I never saw LaGrecia live. If memory serves, the record was cut during the first None More Black break-up, with Jay on guitar/vocals, his ex-bandmate from Bound, Dana, on drums, and Sal from A Days Refrain on bass. It originated as a full-band version of Jay's OnGuard release in 2006, reprising one song from that little-heard session. They only lasted around a year; Jay left the band and restarted NMB.

The music is so much more anthemic than Jay's other projects; I think it's fair to draw a comparison to the songwriting in the Loved Ones or Gaslight Anthem. This is grown-ass, New Jersey punk rock, for when you finally settle down a bit and remember that Foreigner wrote some fucking jams, but you still like to sing along with the Ergs. You just want to holler along, pump your fist, drink a domestic pilsner to "On Parallels".

If you dig this, it's worth noting that Jay put out another record of this ilk under the wonderful moniker of "Former Member" in 2018. It's a little huskier, a little slower, but the songs are super strong, and the recording from Will Yip is on point, as should be expected.

Discogs

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Sex Vid - Voyeur

I was thinking about mysterious guy hardcore recently, and what a feverish, overblown internet thing it was, conjured out of message board hype and limited run vinyl. Now, it's not that there weren't, simultaneously, a bunch of bands making grimy hardcore influenced as much by industrial music as they were UK82 or the early Touch & Go releases. But to assign sub-genre to highly anti-commerical bands is kinda beside the point, no?

Sex Vid are one of those bands I remember best from that time. They hailed from Kill Rock Stars country, but sounded like they'd been raised on a diet of third-gen Die Kreuzen bootleg cassettes they found while skateboarding down at a truck stop. I'd heard them for the first time on the second Fucked Up mixtape. And, unlike kindred spirits the Repos or Vile Gash, there was no redeeming art option to the presentation. Sex Vid was all degraded photocopies, UHF static, whispers through a ham radio. They might as well have been from a goddamn separate universe from the branding machinery that had been infiltrating punk music for most of the past decade. This was ugly music for the uncool.

Oddly enough, "Voyeur", their final 7", is the one Sex Vid record I don't own a physical copy of. It's a live document from 2008, from their home territory of Olympia. It was also the second of three records they'd release in 2008, culiminating in the "Communal Living" 12". They were cooked by the time 2010 rolled around. Guitarist Dave Harvey has left the most evidence of his post-Sex Vid life; as the good Captain Tripps Ballsington, he's recorded a ton of your favorite records of the past ten years, including the new All Hits and Gag slabs, of which I'm a fan.

Discogs

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various artists - Boot Power Vol. 2 - 1970-1979

Photo by Daniel Meadows

It took seeing Giuda to be open to listening to glam and pub rock; it took "Boot Power" to fall in love.

"Boot Power", ostensibly, is a series of comps curated by the blog Crazee Kids Sound from 2008 to 2010. I'm not sure if Volume 1 was ever posted, despite the appearance of a cover in the "Boot Power" video. Volumes 2 through 5, however, represent one of the best collections of 70s terrace rock that I've ever heard. It's remarkable to me how listenable these tracks are. For every Bowie or Cock Sparrer track, there is a Slade deep cut, or a track like "Always Plenty of Women" by Heavy Metal Kids that I've never encountered. Is it a key difference between the music industries in the UK and US that these songs were big hits in England, but rarely tracked here? I dunno; I wasn't alive for most of it.

So I'm going to post each of the four volumes I have over the next four weeks. The original links on Crazee Kids Sound are dead (old Megaupload links), and I think these are definitely worth keeping alive and available. I'm leaving the Skrewdriver songs in each comp intact (for now); I feel like it's dishonest to remove the Chiswick-era recordings, especially since "All Skrewed Up" stands as a great proto-Oi! record that is a key part of this story. Yet I'll can't ignore that within five years, they had transformed into the leading neo-Nazi/RAC band in the land.

Yeah, come back each Friday, and I'll throw up a new volume. Enjoy.

Click here to download.

Fucked Up - Daytrotter Session

So, yeah, if you like boogie rock, or hipster hardcore, or whatever the hell Vice Magazine is calling it today, you'll like this.

I, of course, like it in secret, behind closed doors with headphones on.

...beats the shit out of the Twilight soundtrack...










Fucked Up - Daytrotter Session

RIYL: Gentle Giant, Wall of Voodoo, Amon Duul II (but NOT Amon Duul I)

OnGuard - This Has It's Price And That Price Has Been Paid

So when I initially heard about Red Star Records, and their mission to highlight tough-to-find demos, I thought, "Awesome! I love demos!" Then I promptly forgot about them for six months.

Imagine my surprise as I'm dicking around on punknews.org today and see that Red Star, now called Red Sound Records, has released their second record. And it's from Jay Shevchuk. At some point post-None More Black, but pre-LaGrecia/NMB reunion, Jason sat down and recorded some demo material under the name OnGuard. The verdict? It's pretty damned good, especially for a free record. I hear a lot of 90's singer-songwriter here: a dash of Fiona Apple, some Mike Ness, a little Billy Bragg. OnGuard also recorded "Give My Love to Rose" for the newly-released Johnny Cash tribute, All Aboard. I'll tell you...this is a damn sight better than the last None More Black record I spent money on. And that's a fact.

So, please visit the Red Sound Records website to pick this up...FOR FREE! It's worth your while, and the two minutes it'll take to download everything.










OnGuard - This Has It's Price And That Price Has Been Paid (demos)

RIYL: LaGrecia, free stuff, sad songs and waltzes

Envy/Thursday split LP

I finished the Charm City Suicides post and noticed the pre-order for the Envy/Thursday split had been announced.
http://www.temporaryresidence.com/descriptions/special.php

Someone be a pal and order me one...










I'll be your best friend...













I'll trade you cool comic book statues...












I got these cheeseburgers, man...









...c'mon, baby, don't make me beg.