various artists - Farm Sanctuary Benefit Compilation

Clearly, it bothers me that this record is old enough to drink legally. Although, it won't, what with the sXe representation present herein.

Anyhow, it's a nice slice of East Coast DIY, circa 2001, courtesy of the Mountain Collective, home to the bleeding edge of hardcore, screamo, crust, and other far-out version of punk as diametrically opposite from the contemporary Warped Tour paradigm as the Guardian is from the New York Post. How's that for an evocative sentence.

Here's to taking bands like Frail seriously, to coming up with ways to help an urban garden thrive, to scratching a handgrip into that hundred-foot wall you've been screaming at for years, hoping it'd fall. If demolition doesn't work, erosion will.

Discogs

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Thorns of Life - live at 924 Gilman St., 31 January 2009

Thorns of Life, live at 924 Gilman, 2009 (photo by Chris Shary)

I'm happy that Jawbreaker is a band again, although I really doubt I'll ever go see them. They were the Bucky Barnes of punk rock; they had died, and were never coming back...until they did. Which, you know, mazel tov. But I cannot separate my expectations with ready availability. Call it a moral failing. Who knows?

Instead, I revel in the static nature of old Jawbreaker records, and following the bands that each member went on to play in. Whether it was Chris in Horace Pinker, or Adam playing with the Baluyut brothers in Whysall Lane, it was fun seeing what happened as people moved on, but still made art. The first Jets to Brazil record, made with Chris from Texas is the Reason a few years after the breakup of Jawbreaker, remains one of my favorites from that era. But then Blake quit making music publicly. Was he still teaching English at Hunter College? Was he writing video game reviews? Did he publish poetry under a pen name? Was he on a lobster boat out in the Grand Banks? This fella, who'd soundtracked so many years of my life and carried so many expectations, was now a cipher, a riddle.

And then I read on the .org that Blake, Aaron Cometbus, and Daniela from the Gr'ups are playing music together. The hope is that they'll make it south (at least to Philly); instead, they play a couple times in Brooklyn, then head out west to California for a short tour. They play a week's worth of shows, reviews are suitably hyped, they return home, they break up by summertime. They left behind a song on a Silver Sprocket comp and this, the only live recording I've ever heard of them. Pretty good looking show, too; I'd pay $8 just for Thorns of Life. Off With Their Heads and Comadre are a great bonus.

Look: if you're a Jawbreaker or Crimpshrine fan, you're probably going to be 100% down with this. It's not a hard sell, as we say in the biz. It bums me out that most of these songs never got their day in the studio; "O Deadly Death" and "Ribbonhead" ended up on the Forgetters' full-length in 2012, and sound outstanding with J. Robbins' in the engineer's seat.

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