Monday, December 27, 2010

Holiday down time

Yeah, I'm in Atlanta, land of good BBQ, reasonable climates and unreasonable politics. I've been here almost a week and weather permitting, I'll be back in a couple of days. I'll upload some more stuff soon after that. I got a request for William Martyr 17, so that will likely top the list.

In the meantime, I came across this article that ties in with my earlier near-rant about analog. I'm not a total analog loyalist. Do I prefer it? Yes, but crappy analog and great digital recordings exist. This article was interesting in that it more or less reinforces all the things that Steve Albini used to rail about what with digital's main pitfall being that it is is so fragile. The earliest digital recording have begun degrading, but unlike analog tapes (that can be "baked") when 1's tun to 0's... well, the music is unrecoverable. I touched on some of digital's shortfalls in an earlier post.

The article is here: File Not Found

The irony of posting it on an MP3 blog isn't lost on me. Seeing as these MP3s are of crappy quality, the only way to truly keep the music safe and have it for yourself is to take the files and cut your own vinyl records from them. Despite the $14k price tag, you can't afford not to.

Thursday, December 9, 2010

Tune In Tokyo - Heat Resistant 7"

1. Names Are For Tombstones
2. Jericho Fever
3. Pardon Me, But Your Teeth Are In My Neck
4. Heaven's A Drag
Highwater Records, mid to late 90s
11:30, 21MB 256K MP3

I actually don't know much about this band. Apparently there are a couple of Tune In Tokyos out there, but this is the hardcore-ish one from Austin. I will say this; the layout is nothing special, but I dig the use of overlaying spot colors. I always appreciated it when sleeve designers would play off the medium's strength as opposed to trying to reproduce a blurry photograph or painting which would invariably end up looking washed out with weird coloration.

This 7" spits 4 songs of the Mike Kirsch (Torches to Rome, Navio Forge) school of rock at you in all their tinny glory. It's definitely a fun, energetic listen. Like most of the records that came out of this period, there's no bottom whatsoever to this record. I have no idea what these guys played through, but I can imagine them setting up Marshall JCM 800s and playing late 70's SGs through them (for the non-gear dorks out there: they'd have nice equipment that would otherwise sound awesome) but getting such a crappy recording done with a couple of duct-taped mics and a cassette 4-track. I swear that every band from this era did that. Granted, if you contrast that with the brick walled, pro-tooled within an inch of its life crap recording that most bands do now, I'll take the tinny. At least it's honest.

My favorite track was always Track 3. That's probably because they lifted "Love Will Tear Us Apart" note for note and sped it up.



Rocket From the Crypt / Bloodthirsty Butchers - split 2x7"

Rocket From the Crypt
1. Cut It Loose
2. Living & Dying
3. Pressure's On
Bloodthirsty Butchers
1. Water
2. Alligator
3. Raven
Pusmort, 1994
18 Minutes, 32.8MB 256k MP3

Here's a record I lucked into years ago and haven't seen since. I can't even find them on eBay or Popsike to at least get an idea of its worth; not that I'd ever sell it. This is a gatefold, 2x7" split EP (each band gets a 7") between our heroes, RFTC and Japan's Bloodthirsty Butchers. I have no idea how many exist, but seeing as it's on Pushead's label, and how he didn't really think it was ever necessary to ever press any more than say... 300 of any given record, I'm sure there aren't many of these floating around. Am I gloating? Just a bit. I think I paid $13 for this many moons ago.

Of the 3 RFTC tracks, Pressure's On made another appearance on All Systems Go! Vol. 1. The other 2 songs are typically fun RFTC fare, well-done and all, but they definitely cherry-picked the best track for All Systems Go!

Truth be told, I never listened to the Bloodthirsty Butchers side that much. They play up tempo rock that compliments RFTC. Supposedly they're also still around. Japanese bands are nothing if not disciplined.

Seeing as it's years after the fact, I can safely come clean and say that I ripped off the image of the owl (granted, I altered it considerably) on the inside of this gatefold 7" for a design on one of my old band's shirts. We sold upwards of a dozen of them and I never paid Pushead a dime. I REGRET NOTHING.


Rocket From the Crypt - I Flame You 7"

1. I Flame You
(B-side is the etching shown above)
Perfect Sound Records 1995
2:46, 5MB, 256k MP3

I am an unabashed John Reis/Speedo fanboy. I'll get that out of the way right now. If the man is in any way involved with a record, I will buy it. Nearly 20 years ago, I wore out a dubbed cassette of RFTC's Circa: Now! while delivering pizzas. I would pull up to houses and wait until the best parts of the songs would play through before exiting my car and dropping off the pies, such was the man's hold on me. I mean, look at this list: Rocket From the Crypt, Drive Like Jehu, Pitchfork, Sultans, Hot Snakes, Night Marchers, Back Off Cupids, Staccato Reeds... Okay, Staccato Reeds was pretty weak, but seriously? The dude's discography is a monster. His ruling to stinker ratio is off the scale, and half of his projects are seminal cornerstones in their respective genres.

I got to meet him once. The Get Up Kids recorded 4 Minute Mile in Chicago and stayed at my place while doing so. I got to hang out at CRC and accidentally drink all of Bob Weston's orange juice (sorry, Bob) and while I loved that band, I had no idea how huge they'd blow up after that. Fast forward a few months and The Get Up Kids were playing a sold out show with RFTC at the Metro. My fool ass had failed to get a ticket, and went to talk to the GUK crew at the merch table. While a menacing security guard looked on, I told them what happened and they said that they'd already filled all of their guest spots and that I was unfortunately out of luck. As soon as the security guard turned away, 2 of them stopped talking mid-sentence, yelled, "NOW", grabbed my shirt and forcibly pulled me over the merch table into the backstage area, told me to hurry back there and hide. T'was bad ass. I thanked them and wandered around backstage with a shit-eating-grin on my face, stoked that I was able to see the show. I ducked into one of the rooms and there was Speedo more or less holding court with other guys from the Get Up Kids telling him that he enjoyed their music and giving little pointers about being in a band. He offered me a beer, I took it, said hello and drank it all while my inner dialogue kept screaming, "HOLY SHIT" over and over. I was too terrified to speak because I probably would have come off as the starstruck dipshit kid that I was. Despite the fact that RFTC was touring on their weakest record, "RFTC" they tore ass later that night.

Anyhow, as for the record I posted, a shortage of material was never a problem for RFTC. Despite having more records than I could ever conceivably collect (not that I haven't tried) to this day, they still have a slew of songs that were never collected or re-released on any of their 3 collections. As far as I know, this was the only place to get this song.

I Flame You was a 1-sided, etched 7" that was a fan club release only. I walked into Reckless in Wicker Park (when they were still on North Ave), saw this on the wall and plunked down the $15 for it, which for a 7" was a lot of money for me.

Enjoy

Wednesday, November 24, 2010

Generation of Vipers 12"

1. Ventricle
2. One Year too Early
3. The Way, The Truth and The Life
4. Side of
5. Tried & True
6. Voice of the Generation
Landmark Records 1997ish (1994)
24 minutes, 42MB, 256k MP3

When trying to figure out what to put up here, I'll do a quick search and make sure no one has already put forth the effort and beat me to it. I found another "Generation of Vipers" (who in all fairness have probably never heard of this one seeing as the AR outfit predates them by a decade and didn't do much) At first I was excited that I wouldn't have to spend an hour encoding and slicing this one up, but it wasn't meant to be. I pressed play on their myspace page and Neurisis downtuned sludge happened. Not awful by any means, but not what I was looking for.

Generation of Vipers is a band that has caused more arguments, made more friends and enemies and upset more people than any band of our time. It has done so because it is an utterly frank, no-holds barred dissection of America. In other words of you, your parents, your neighbors and your children.

Those are pretty heady words for a band that wasn't around more than a year and didn't play but a handful of shows in and around their hometown of Little Rock, AR. Like a lot of the bands that came out of AR in the early 90s (ie, Econochrist, Chino Horde, 12ft6, William Martyr 17, Benchmark, etc.) Generation of Vipers had riffs and personality to spare. Musically, they (and again, pretty much everyone from Little Rock) were pretty heavily influenced by Current and did the mid to up tempo hardcore with impassioned vocals with more of a meat (vegan of course; can't forget this was the PC-90's) and potatoes composition.

They were one of those "Should have, could have" bands that broke up before their time that all the Little Rock bands would talk up while on tour. A friend played me a battered cassette of these songs before the LP came out and "One Year Too Early" floored me.

Sadly, the drummer Chris was killed in a car accident. There's mention of him here, and File 13 records (then a mainstay of the Little Rock hardcore scene) did the "We've Lost Beauty" compilation LP in his honor.

Chris also played drums in William Martyr 17. Other members of Generation of Vipers played in bands such as Chino Horde and Thumbnail among others.

One thing that I'm realizing now that I'm going back and scrutinizing these records is that people did not know how to sequence DATs for shit. I can't imagine that many of these bands wanted between 4-7 seconds of dead space between songs. When DIY record labels started getting really prevelant in the late 80's/early 90's, digital was just starting to come into its own and the technology was not nearly as user intuitive as it is today. Digital's main advantage at that point was professed to be audio quality as opposed to ease of editing. Someone (like myself) being able to encode music and trim dead bits off of rendered waveforms was unheard of 15 years ago and so we had DAT tapes, which had digital audio with the ease of use of a cassette. CD-burners were large, expensive pieces of gear that only higher end studios had. CDRs were $5 each and every other one that you tried to burn would throw a glitch or an error. Most masters were sent in on DAT tapes, and they SUCKED. I could go into detail about how this is one of the factors that initially caused the whole return to analog, but long story short: not all DATs would play on all machines. There were also new formats coming down the pipe so quickly and for a while it was a free for all. (All of this was part of the initial impetus for Albini's Electrical Audio studios and his outspoken stance on analog.) Sometimes you'd record something on one machine, and it couldn't be played back on another. As you can guess, the difficulty also extends to sequencing the records. I definitely trimmed some dead air from this 12" and that My Lai 7". I also was able to get better levels, so this and all subsequent posts shouldn't sound all crappy and quiet.

Anyhow, aren't you glad that you just read all of that? Here's the music. I'll shut up now.

Tuesday, November 9, 2010

Split Lip - Union Town (demo) 7"

01. Union town
3 minutes; 5.7MB
Anti-Matter Zine/Doghouse Records 1994

Living in the midwest, I was lucky enough to see Split Lip (usually on tour with Endpoint) numerous times before they went alt-country. Split Lip was one of the better hardcore bands kicking around during the time when hardcore bands sort of ground the youth crew template into the ground (the first time) and weren't really sure what to do without sounding stale. For every Split Lip, Quicksand, Hoover or really awesome, innovative bands that came out of this period, you unfortunately ended up with 10 more that were truly horrid. Split Lip started out promising, albiet a tad cookie-cutter and grew into something moodier, more brooding, and more "Americana" sounding as time went on.

I remember listening to this with a friend as soon as we got it. We dug it, but weren't exactly won over. The two of us had played For the Love of the Wounded incessantly, and this track was a lot more open and subdued. For a couple of kids weaned on a steady diet of Minor Threat, less aggressive wasn't necessarily a good thing. You probably know the story from there: once Fate's Got a Driver was released, Split Lip rechristened themselves Chamberlain and more or less acted like their earlier material never happened. This bummed me the fuck out since I thought those earlier records were brilliant. I understood what they were trying to do and while I loved Fate's Got a Driver, I got the split with Old Pike and it lost me. It took me years to appreciate it and the records that followed. To this day, Fate's Got a Driver is still my favorite record that they did.

Union Town ended up on Fate's for the most part unchanged. The vocals are definitely higher and delivered differently than happened on the album (and the subsequent re-recording/mixing of the album as Chamberlain) There are essentially 3 recorded versions of this song out there.

Seems that Split Lip/Chamberlain is back together in some form or another as of last year. If anyone hears some old asshole at a show in the back yelling For the Love of the Wounded songs, that's probably me.

v/a - Happiness is Dry Pants 7"

v/a Happiness is Dry Pants 7"
01. Yo La Tengo - Dreams (Fleetwood Mac)
02. Big Black - Burning Indian Wife
03. Kilslug - Warlocks, Witches & Demons
04. Moving Targets - Squares & Circles
Chemical Imbalance, 1987
14 minutes, 26MB

This comp from 1987 came with issue #2 of Chemical Imbalance zine (which I sadly do not have). Besides having Kilslug, Moving Targets and Yo La Tengo doing a Fleetwood Mac cover, the highlight is the Big Black track which was recorded at the same time as the "Happy Otter" side of their Songs About Fucking LP. I ate up everything that that band did (my fanboydom including a snarky Steve Albini quote in my senior high picture page. Yeah, I fancied myself an antagonistic little fellow. Sad thing was that I even managed to misquote him.) Anyhow, the track ended up not being included on Songs About Fucking, but it's definitely worth a listen.

My version doesn't have a cover, but through the magic of Google I was able to find one (along with more details about this release) here

Friday, November 5, 2010

My Lai - 03.16.68 7"

1. 03.16.68
2. Ruthless
3. 15 Minutes
4. Short Horn Champion
10 minutes, 18.45MB
Divot Records, 1998


My Lai was a Chicago outfit that kicked around for a few years in the late '90s. They were always fun live, and here's a 7" that I finally got sick of looking for an encoded version of online, so I just did it up myself.

As my mentioned in my previous post, the 90's were totally different than today. Underground "heavy" music hadn't blown up, so part of me wants to think that peoples' motives to create this sort of thing were a bit more pure than you'd find with a lot of the haircut bands that more or less took this sort of style and ran with it. My Lai certainly wasn't trendy; listening to them now they have something of a Enewetak or Unruh feel to them. They also happened to feature Brian Peterson on bass who booked many a show at the Fireside. In addition to this record, they also released an LP (Learn. Forget. Re-Learn) a different 7" (Pony Soldier) and appeared on a couple of comps who's names escape me at the moment.

Anyhow, this is more or less a test run. I gave the MP3s a quick listen and they seem to hold up. If anyone notices anything amiss on a technical level (ID tags, encoding, volume levels, etc.) amiss, please let me know.

Enjoy

Up and running

I set this thing up years ago and look to finally be getting around to doing something worthwhile(?) with it.

Anyhow, a bit of backstory: I've been playing and listening to music for the better part of 2 decades and have amassed a fairly sizeable collection of music at this point. Sizeable to the point where I have too many LPs and 7"s lying around, some of which are tricky if not impossible to find anymore. I'll probably start getting rid of some of them at some point, but in the meantime I'm looking to digitize them before I get rid of the vinyl itself. The bulk of it is from the 90's and comes from the harsher end of things; think hardcore before it polarized into "___"-core or youth crew throwback and (scr)emo before such a term conjured up images of myspace.

Some of it aged well. Some of it (fuck... a lot of it) didn't. Some people might be interested in some of this stuff for historical purposes, some might find it good for a laugh, some might have wondered what was going on in heavier, non-metal music at that time.

As someone who played music and put out records: I'm trying to put up stuff that's for the most part unavailable. If you're a copyright holder or an artist that doesn't want your stuff here, let me know.