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Active Ingredients: Discography 2x12” (Street Rats Records) Kentucky punk label Street Rats Records brings us a double-LP discography from 80s Lexington, Kentucky hardcore punk band Active Ingredients. Active Ingredients first came on my radar sometime in the early 2000s. This was in the dark days before every punk record ever had been ripped and posted on youtube, and one of my most listened-to records was a bootleg 12” featuring four killer under-the-radar 80s US hardcore EPs in their entirety: Mecht Mensch’s Acceptance, Clitboys’ We Don’t Play the Game, the Catatonics’ Hunted Down, and Active Ingredients’ Bringing Down the Big Boys. That record (alongside a similar bootleg with EPs by the Abused, Antidote, Urban Waste, and the Mob) was huge for me, and was a big part of cementing my love for / obsession with 80s US hardcore. Active Ingredients had a sneering and sarcastic take on 80s hardcore, reminding me of bands like Dead Kennedys, Adrenalin OD, and the Angry Samoans both in the snotty vocal and lyrical approach and the hooky, punky music (as opposed to the harder, more Discharge-informed end of the spectrum). Eventually I found an original copy of Bringing Down the Big Boys, but for some reason I never investigated Active Ingredients further, and it turns out they released a lot more music during their original run. I didn’t even realize Bringing Down the Big Boys is their second EP—they also released a self-titled 7” in 1984—and there was also a cassette-only full-length called Fly Again in 1987. All this is collected on this double-LP discography alongside an entire LP side of totally unreleased demo tracks. Hearing all this new-to-me Active Ingredients music is pretty exciting. After a handful of listens to the discography, I think Bringing Down the Big Boys is the moment where everything really came together for the band, but all the other material is well worth hearing. The packaging doesn’t make it clear when the demos were recorded (maybe that information is lost to the sands of time), but it sounds like some of them pre-date the first EP given their more 70s-punk-informed sound. These songs have a similar air of sarcastic menace to the well-known material, and I imagine there are some 70s punk heads who will think this is Active Ingredients’ best stuff. The 1984 self-titled EP is also new to me, and that basically sounds like a prototype version of the second EP (the two records even start with the same song, “Service with a Smile”). The recording isn’t quite as good as the second EP and the band isn’t as tight, but the songs are just as strong. If you already have the EPs, the real gem of this discography is the 1987 cassette-only full-length Fly Again, presented here on vinyl for the first time. While Fly Again isn’t (for the most part) as fast as the EPs, it still sounds like Active Ingredients, but with a slightly riffier, maybe even sludgier sound. Fly Again sounds a lot like Fang to me, particularly given the tone of sardonic menace that runs through all of Active Ingredients’ recordings. Of course you get the requisite ephemera and flyers (Active Ingredients must have played with every national punk/hardcore band that came through Lexington) on the insert and inner gatefold, plus a second insert written by Dan from Street Rats detailing his personal history with the band and how the discography project came together (fun fact: this was originally supposed to come out on General Speech). Active Ingredients fans will be stoked to own great-sounding versions of all this material, but even if you don’t know the band, any 80s US hardcore deep head will get plenty of play out of this collection.