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.

DL

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.

DL

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

DL

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

DL

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.