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The Undertones: Hypnotised LP (Sire, 1980)

After my foray into the literary for last week’s staff pick, let’s swing way in the other direction and talk about a classic punk record everyone should know. Saturday was Record Store Day, and as I usually do on Record Store Day, once things calmed down in the shop I went out to buy lunch for the staff. I suggested this spot I like called Vegan Community Kitchen, whose food I love but rarely get to eat because they’re way out in the burbs, completely on the other side of Raleigh from where I live. I figured it would be a good treat for Record Store Day, and that their hearty food—their specialty is vegan kebab—would be satisfying after an intense day of work. The weather on Saturday was great in Raleigh. It had been almost 90 degrees on Friday, but Saturday was cooler, and while the sun wasn’t out, it felt like a relief after the premature heat of the past few days. So as I hit the highway to pick up lunch, I rolled the windows down and dialed up an old favorite to listen to.

I’m sure I don’t have you tell you how great the Undertones are. Everyone knows “Teenage Kicks,” but if you know little beyond that, I strongly urge you to check out their first two albums and all the surrounding singles and b-sides. I’ve always had a particular fondness for Hypnotised, their second album. While the Undertones’ first album has a unique youthful charm that makes it many people’s favorite, I love the slightly more mature version of the Undertones you get on Hypnotised. The band members are still very young, but they play with such confidence and power here, the excellent recording accentuating how precise yet alive their playing is. They were just a great fucking band at this point, and while I’m sure they could have pulled off more complex music, they kept things pretty straightforward. Never ones to show off, the songs on Hypnotised are still the unpretentious pop the Undertones had been writing up to that point, but the Undertones weren’t rubes. The opening track, “More Songs About Chocolate and Girls,” is totally self-aware about where the band was in their career. The chorus articulates exactly why so many bands struggle with their second album: the songs need “a lot less time but a lot more care.” The Undertones crammed Hypnotised full of hits… the title track with its all-time classic chorus, the brilliant slice of life of “My Perfect Cousin,” the gentle psychedelic pop of “Wednesday Week.” Aside from the cover of “Under the Boardwalk,” which I always skip, it’s pretty much nothing but bangers.

That the Undertones become such seasoned and capable musicians feels like a validation of punk’s promise that anyone could do it. Aside from their natural talent, the Undertones didn’t appear to have anything going for them. They were really young, not particularly attractive (apologies to them), and about as far from the cultural center of the British isles as you could be, in a city beset by poverty and brutal political violence. But they made great fucking music, and it took them far. And while fame exposes cracks in many bands, success only seemed to hone the Undertones’ songwriting and performance chops. The band would move away from punk on their third and fourth albums, but Hypnotised captures them at this perfect moment when they were still a punk band, but also just a great band full stop. In that respect, Hypnotised reminds me of the Ruts’ The Crack and the Stranglers’ No More Heroes, smart and aggressive punk records made by bands with big-league playing chops captured in good studios with major label recording budgets.

So yeah, if it’s springtime where you live, break out your copy of Hypnotised, take a big breath of fresh air, and blast it as loud as you can.

Note: While this story is based on actual events, it has been lightly fictionalized / exaggerated for your entertainment benefit. Except the parts about records… I would never, ever lie to you about records.

It’s Saturday and I’m having a lazy day, my morning routine of coffee and reading the news stretching into the early afternoon. I open my email and there’s a message from a woman who says she has a closet full of records she’s never going to listen to again. She wants to know if I’d like to have a look at them. She’s attached a file which lists all the artists in the collection, each one preceded by a number, presumably the number of records by that artist. At the top, separated from the rest of the list, are a bunch of well-known classic rock artists. 16 Grateful Dead records… cool, we can always use Dead records, and 16 is quite a run. There are also 8 Beatles, 6 stones, 7 Zeppelin… all stuff that sells. But as I dig into the list, I see things that look more interesting. 4 Clash records. A Buzzcocks LP. 1 Devo. 3 Captain Beefheart. A Fall record. A Saints record. Even a T.S.O.L. record. Maybe I’ll get lucky and it won’t be Hit and Run. After some back and forth, we decide I’ll drive out to her place to have a look at the records this afternoon. She seems very nice, and particularly appreciative that I’m willing to drive out to her home in Louisburg. She even sends a bunch of smiley face emojis when I tell her I don’t mind making the drive. I can see from her email signature that she works near downtown Raleigh, about 2 miles from the store, but I can understand not wanting to lug around a couple hundred records.

As I drive out toward Louisburg, I’m in a good mood. It’s a lovely spring day. I notice the thermometer on my car reads 72 degrees. The weather is literally perfect. I imagine the person with these records is some cool, late-middle-aged woman who was deep into music in the 70s and 80s. Who knows why she lives in Louisburg? Maybe she’s a librarian or a teacher, or maybe there’s a community of cool hippie-ish folks there I don’t know about. It’s not uncommon for me to drive out into the woods around tiny central North Carolina towns like Saxapahaw or Pittsboro and come back with an armload of Talking Heads and Brian Eno LPs. And, of course, it’s a maxim in the record-buying world that cool people are the easiest to deal with. If you’re smart enough to get into cool music, you’re usually smart enough to set reasonable expectations as to their value. Often, people are pleasantly surprised when I offer them any money for something they thought they’d have to just throw out. I imagine I’ll look over the records, give this person a few hundred bucks, and I’ll make her day and get a few cool records for the store.

I stop by the SSR warehouse and grab some boxes, then put the address in my GPS. I thought I’d be heading north out of Raleigh. There’s a road called Louisburg Road that branches off from Capital Boulevard, the main road that runs from downtown Raleigh north to a town called Wake Forest, an exurb of Raleigh with huge country homes and smaller developments full of retirees. I assumed Louisburg was just east of there, but the GPS took me straight east out of Raleigh, into the creepy, sparsely inhabited lowlands that stretch from Raleigh to the coast. Eventually I get off the highway, passing through the town of Bunn. Bunn had a population of 327 as of the 2020 census, and it still has a small historic downtown with some character. I even see what looks like a hip coffee shop. Before I know it, though, Bunn is in my rear-view mirror and I’m heading into the sticks.

When I reach the house and pull in, it isn’t what I expected. It’s one of those 3-bedroom prefab houses—basically an upmarket double-wide trailer—sitting in the middle of a big empty lot. There are no trees and there are fallow fields on all sides, the house like a strange growth protruding from the flat, empty landscape. There’s also an enormous truck in the driveway, the kind typically adorned with Punisher logos and thin blue line flags. When I approach the door, I see a Ring doorbell, which seems strange. Plenty of people have Ring doorbells, but usually it’s tech workers who have a thing for gadgets or rich people who live in McMansions that have all the most up-to-date everything. A Ring doorbell in the country, though, on a house in the middle of a bunch of fields where you can see clearly for a mile in every direction, strikes me as odd.

I ring the bell and it’s not a woman who answers, but a thick-necked bro with a tight t-shirt and product in his hair. I introduce myself. He shakes my hand, and he introduces his wife, the person I’ve been speaking to, who comes in from the kitchen. The woman is thin, looks like she works out a lot, and has bleached blonde hair. My mind drifts to an article I’d read that morning in the New York Times about how the new, Trump-era evangelical Christians aren’t as stuffy and uptight as previous generations of religious conservatives. A key piece of evidence was this “Conservative Dad” pin-up calendar, which has pictures of women from the world of right-wing punditry wearing bikinis and doing things like holding assault rifles and reading the Bible. I think to myself that this dude looks like someone who would buy that calendar. His wife looks like someone who would pose for it.

The records are sitting on the floor in the living room, spread across a few boxes. We chit-chat for a second and I start flipping, beginning with the box on the coffee table. The woman tells me that’s the stuff she thought no one would want, and based on the classical records and Time magazine box sets I can see poking out, she’s probably right. But I flip through them anyway, and a few records in I find an original pressing of Herbie Hancock’s Mwandishi. Then a few records after that, a copy of Let Them Eat Jellybeans. That’s a good start, though both are pretty beat. They look like they’ve been stored outside for at least part of their lives, the jackets dry-rotted, seams split, and the vinyl itself scuffy.

Next I move to the stack of Beatles records lying on the coffee table. As I pick them up, the guy says, “yeah, it’s so hard to figure out what records are worth. You look up one Beatles record and it’s selling for $10, and then another one that looks exactly the same is selling for $2,000.” I ease into my spiel, developed over many years, about how the Beatles records that sell for a lot of money are very rare, and they’re probably not the ones you have. I also point out these copies are trashed. They have the same signs of dry-rot as the previous box, but the vinyl is in considerably worse shape. I explain to him that the titles he has are primarily the less-desirable pre-Rubber Soul albums, and that in the condition they’re in, the most we’d sell them for would be $5, and it’s more likely that Dominic wouldn’t want something that junky clogging up his bargain bin.

If the Ring doorbell was red flag number one, throwing out a figure like $2,000 was red flag number two. When you’re negotiating, the first number thrown out is important because it sets the anchor point for the rest of the discussion. I know records, and I have a pretty good idea how much money I can generate from most collections I look at. When a person throws out a number that’s way more than that, it tells me I’m going to have to do a lot of work to adjust their expectations. Often, these are frustrating transactions, because I feel like I’m stretching to meet their expectations, yet in the end I feel like the person still walks away disappointed. As I mentioned, though, cool people with cool records are very easy to deal with. They respect my expertise and understand that we need to sell records for more than we buy them for in order to stay in business. On the other hand, situations like this, where the person enters the discussion convinced they’re being ripped off, almost always revolve around beat-up classic rock records. These people convince themselves their records are worth significantly more than they are, selectively looking at online listings that confirm their assumptions. When I try to explain my position, they assume I don’t know what I’m talking about or that I’m trying to rip them off. Fortunately, these interactions are usually easy to walk away from, because if I don’t buy some jerk’s Led Zeppelin records, it won’t be long before a much nicer person with a bunch of Led Zeppelin records walks through the door.

I move to the next box, which contains the classic rock titles that were bracketed off on the list the woman had emailed me. There are indeed a lot of Grateful Dead LPs. Most of the studio albums are there, plus a few old 70s, Trademark of Quality-type bootlegs with mimeographed covers pasted onto blank white jackets. The first record I look at is Europe ’72, because it’s probably the most valuable. The seams are split and there’s heavy ring wear, but all 3 LPs are there. They are covered in scuffs, but still playable. We’d charge good money for a nice copy of Europe ’72, but I imagine we could still get $20 for a beater like this. The rest of the Dead LPs are in similar shape. As I flip, we’re still chit-chatting, and the guy tells me he’s already put the entire Grateful Dead collection up on eBay, as a lot, for a Buy It Now price of $2000. I chuckled and told him that was way too much money, and he quickly got defensive, telling me the listing had 14 watchers. I let it drop. If this guy sells online, surely he knows there’s a wide gulf between someone clicking the “watch” button and someone forking over two grand.

As I get past the Dead and Zeppelin, the records get cooler. I knew there was some Beefheart, but I hadn’t expected an original Trout Mask Replica. The cover has so much ring wear the cover art is barely visible, but the vinyl wasn’t nearly as trashed as the Dead records. There’s also an OG Safe as Milk, again not in great condition, but with a thorough cleaning someone would certainly want it. A few records after that was a cool-looking psychedelic cover I didn’t recognize. I look more closely and it’s Tyrannosaurus Rex’s first LP, My People Were Fair And Had Sky In Their Hair... But Now They’re Content To Wear Stars On Their Brows. I can’t recall the last time I saw one of those. The vinyl on this record is a lot nicer, and after that is a solid copy of their 3rd album, Unicorn, and then a blank black jacket that turns out to be a copy of A Beard of Stars with the front panel of the unipak gatefold ripped off.

Somewhere around this point, the guy tells me where he got the records. I had figured out by now that they didn’t belong to the woman I’d been speaking to… she was absent-mindedly shuffling them around at one point and said, “Jerry Garcia… where do I know that name?” This clearly wasn’t a person who owned 16 Dead albums. There was a weird moment when the guy asks, “did I tell you where I got these records?” and the woman and I both say “no” at the same time. He explains that he’s a contractor who works for one of those companies that buys “ugly houses,” and that sometimes—his example was someone who dies and has no relatives—the houses are still full of stuff when his company takes possession of them. He found these records in a house his company had bought in downtown Durham, and his boss said it was fine if he took them. Then he started telling me about other things he’s found in houses and sold. He was particularly proud of some silverware from colonial America. He said a complete set of this silverware would have been worth $20k, but he was missing 4 pieces, so he sold what he had for $2k. By this point I’m realizing this person is both full of shit and an asshole, bragging (and, I’m sure, wildly exaggerating) about how he’s profited off other people’s suffering and bad fortune.

As he tells these tall tales, I continue going through the boxes. If it wasn’t already apparent from the Beefheart records, whoever amassed this collection had seriously cool, forward-thinking taste in music. When I looked at the list in the original email, I assumed the Saints record would be one of the crummy, post-Ed Kuepper albums you see all the time, but it was an EMI pressing of I’m Stranded. The Devo LP was Q: Are We Not Men?. There were cool 60s and 70s albums like Soft Machine’s 3rd and the Small Faces’ Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake with the die-cut cover. A copy of the Cramps’ Gravest Hits. And there were a bunch of hardcore records to go with Let Them Eat Jellybeans… T.S.O.L.’s first 12” EP, This Is Boston Not LA, and, best of all, a nice copy of (GI) on Slash.

After I flipped through everything, I gave the guy my honest assessment. He had some very cool records, and fortunately those cool records were, on average, in better condition than the trashed classic rock records he’d assumed were his most valuable items. I told him that, while he’d thrown out a bunch of very high numbers earlier in our conversation, my offer for the whole collection would probably be a few hundred dollars, not several thousand dollars. I hoped he’d see this as found money—after all, he’d gotten these records for free—and would be happy with $500. He replied he had planned to put the entire collection on Facebook Marketplace with an asking price of $1500. I asked him if I could pay him $500 to cherry-pick the titles I wanted from the collection, leaving him all the Beatles, Stones, Zeppelin, and Grateful Dead. He hemmed and hawed, so I told him I’d go back through, inspect the more valuable items more thoroughly, and try to give him a better offer.

I made a second pass and tallied everything up. I felt like I could make about a thousand dollars on the rarer titles in the collection, which was about 40 LPs. I was really hoping that, when I added in all the classic rock records, they’d add up to enough that I could offer him the $1500 he mentioned as his asking price. However, when I spent more time looking at the classic rock titles, they really were trashed. Adding those in, I thought the collection was probably worth around $1500 retail. It would cost us a few hundred dollars in labor to clean everything up and prepare it for sale, plus I’d likely get an earful from Dominic for bringing him more dirty, scratched up records. I’d already gotten one of those earfuls the day before about a collection in much better shape than this one, and I wasn’t eager for round two. I gave the guy another offer, which wasn’t that much different from my first offer: $500 for the 40 or so records I really wanted, or $800 for the lot. He was visibly disappointed. He told me he needed a few days to think about it. I told him that was fine, and I left.

As I drove back to Raleigh, a few things about this interaction got to me. I remembered how I thought I’d be dealing with a cool older woman who wanted to clear up some space in her house, but when I got to the door, instead I meet this douchebag and his aggressive negotiating tactics. I felt like I’d been catfished, like this guy has his wife correspond with potential buyers, acting all nice and sending emojis and shit, but then you show up and you’re dealing with some Pawn Stars knockoff. I also thought about how this guy basically found $800 in the trash, but he’s so paranoid of getting ripped off that he can’t just take the win… he has to maximize his return (on $0!), and he’s haunted by the idea someone else will make a few hundred dollars that won’t go to him. Maybe it’s ridiculous for me to think about it that way. There’s no reason I deserve those records just because I know what they are. But at the same time, it kills me that these records are being held hostage by someone who can’t and won’t appreciate them, just because he has some dim idea they are worth money.

Then I think about whoever originally owned these records. I know nothing about them other than that they lived in Durham. But the person who owned these records was one of my people. They wouldn’t have these records if they weren’t. And based on the state of these records and how this guy found them, I don’t think things ended well for these records’ original owner(s). I doubt they abandoned their house in downtown Durham and all their possessions to live out their days on a private Caribbean island. Maybe the records belonged to an old hipster whose health declined. Maybe it was someone whose addictions got the better of them. At the very least, they never got the chance to cash in on their good taste. This dickhead in Louisburg, though… he’s gonna squeeze every cent he can out of them.

Iggy & the Stooges: Raw Power 12” (Columbia, 1973)

This weekend the Stooges’ classic Raw Power provided an excellent soundtrack to doing my Sunday chores around the house. Not that one needs an excuse to pull Raw Power off the shelf, but on this occasion I listened to it because of a podcast I just started listening to. It’s called The Cobain 50, and the podcast plans to explore the list of his top 50 albums that appeared in Kurt Cobain’s journal, with one episode devoted to each album. I’ve always found that list interesting. It’s clearly not the type of meticulously thought through list a music critic might publish in a magazine... it’s more like something you’d dash off on a long, stoned Wednesday afternoon when you can’t think of anything better to do. And while Kurt had exquisite taste in music, he was also very young and living at a time when underground music was difficult to access. I can’t help but wonder what Cobain’s list might have looked like if he had been born in 2000 and composed it in 2020 after spending his teens rifling through obscurities on YouTube.

The podcast’s first episode is on Iggy and the Stooges’ Raw Power, a fitting opener since Cobain cited it as his favorite album of all time, not just on this list but in other interviews, too. The podcast is pretty short (about 25 minutes), and after a short introduction to the podcast and a capsule history of the Stooges, there isn’t much time left to talk about the album at any length, and the hosts don’t really offer any deep analysis. I think one host even notes that preparing for the episode was the first time he’d really sat down with Raw Power and given it an attentive listen. I guess it’s not fair of me to be annoyed with this because the hosts are a lot younger than me and I’m not their target audience, who I’m guessing are younger people who might like Nirvana’s music, but don’t know as much about them and aren’t steeped in 70s and 80s music. But while the episode didn’t give me any new insight about the album, it sparked the urge to revisit it, so kudos to them for that.

The second episode in the series is about the Pixies’ Surfer Rosa, and that episode aggravated me. I was telling Jeff that I should have made Surfer Rosa my staff pick since I have a lot more to say about that episode, but I didn’t actually listen to Surfer Rosa, so it doesn’t seem appropriate for my staff pick. I’m not even sure I have a copy of Surfer Rosa. I can’t remember the last time I listened to an entire Pixies record. I loved them when I was younger, but at some point I went cold on them. I still enjoy them whenever I hear them, but their music doesn’t spark any kind of reaction in me beyond a faint whiff of nostalgia. Part of my souring on the Pixies might have been seeing them play an utterly joyless set in a basketball arena on their first reunion tour. They sounded exactly like the records, but they literally didn’t say a word between songs and I got the impression they really didn’t want to be there. It was depressing.

This is nit-picky, but there was one aspect of the Pixies episode that especially irked me. The hosts spend much of the episode talking about Steve Albini, who recorded both Surfer Rosa and, of course, Nirvana’s In Utero. The hosts really try to drive home this claim that, after Nevermind’s gloss, having Albini record In Utero was some kind of giant middle finger to the system. Granted, I don’t think Albini was the person Geffen wanted to record In Utero, but Albini had worked on plenty of high-profile projects at that point, including records for major labels. And the proof is in the pudding... does In Utero really sound all that different from Nevermind? It still sounds huge, clear, and powerful... it’s not like they had their buddy record the album on his broken 4-track. Another thing that really irked me is that the hosts kept calling Albini the “producer” of In Utero, Surfer Rosa, and all the records he recorded. Rather famously, Albini hates the title producer and prefers his album credit to read, “recorded by Steve Albini.” Not only did they keep calling Albini a producer, but one host even says that Albini is his favorite producer of all time. It’s like, dude, your favorite producer of all time is not even a producer!

Anyway, back to Raw Power. I fucking love the Stooges. I remember last fall, when I was flipping through my records to see if there was anything I wanted to purge to make the used bins at the shop look nice for the Sorry State 10th Anniversary Weekend, I discovered I had several copies of all three Stooges albums. For each album, I had the first copy that I had bought, which I felt a sentimental attachment to. For the first album and Fun House, I also have copies of the very cool-looking Russian pressings. And then for all three I also have a nice original pressing. I think I ended up getting rid of my starter copies because there’s no need for me to keep a bunch of late 90s / early 2000s represses in my house when I’m never going to listen to them. But it’s a sign of how important those albums are to me and how formative they were that I felt some pangs at the idea of parting with these totems.

I wouldn’t mind having one more copy of Raw Power, though, because I have some attachment to the remix that Iggy did in 1997. This was the first version of the album I heard. I remember buying it while I was working a deathly boring summer job between my first and second years of college. I had very little to do at that job, but thankfully there was a record (well, mostly CD) store down the street that I would stop by on my lunch breaks. I made pretty good money at that job and I had very little work to do, so my purchases that summer were adventurous (for me, at least). It was only later that I learned how much people hated Iggy’s remix. People hated the original mix of Raw Power, but it seems like people hate Iggy’s mix even more. Having been weaned on Iggy’s mix, Bowie’s original mix sounds shrill to my ears, the higher frequencies on the guitars so piercing they’re almost painful when you really blast it. It would be nice to have a vinyl copy of the Iggy mix, since whenever I listen to one version of the album I invariably want to hear the other.

Maybe I’ll keep you updated as I make my way through The Cobain 50. I’m interested to hear what they do with the hardcore records on the list. If I’m so irritated with the way these guys talk about Raw Power and Surfer Rosa, my head might explode when they get to the Faith / Void split.

Naked Raygun: All Rise LP (Homestead, 198?)

A few weeks ago, Jeff wrote about Government Issue’s self-titled album for his staff pick, and this week I have a similar record for you: Naked Raygun’s All Rise. Maybe there’s something seasonally appropriate about this style of music in (a little) springtime (in the back of my mind). I noticed in the archive that Jeff actually wrote about GI’s self-titled record once before, and right around the same time of year. So maybe it’s not surprising that today, when I was taking a walk in the sunny springtime weather, I was seized with the urge to listen to All Rise. It just felt right.

I’ve been a big Naked Raygun fan for a long time. One of my favorite things about Naked Raygun is the guitar-playing. I was never much of a guitarist, but when I used to play, my ideal guitar sound would have been some amalgamation of Stubbs/Hammond, Shelley/Diggle, and John Haggerty from Naked Raygun. While Haggerty rarely plays anything complicated, his tone just roars, whether he’s laying down a thick bed of chords or cranking out a hot lick like on “Backlash Jack” or “Those Who Move.” I swear, when a guitarist like Haggerty hits a big chord just right, I get a synaesthetic feeling of pleasure in the back of my throat. I just love it.

Another thing that attracts me to Naked Raygun—and this is true of a lot of my favorite bands—is that they have a big catalog and things to appreciate on every record. There’s no clear consensus pick for the best Naked Raygun album, but I think All Rise might be my favorite. It’s their second album (third if you count Basement Screams, which I do), and at this point they’ve largely left behind the artier sound of their early era and embraced the Buzzcocks-esque punk-pop that dominates their later albums. There are still traces, though, like “Peacemaker,” a Big Black-esque song with a menacing, industrial sound. Actually, Naked Raygun vocalist Jeff Pezzati played bass in Big Black, and former Naked Raygun guitarist Santiago Durango was also in Big Black. Durango’s song “New Dreams” serves as All Rise’s memorable closer even though he doesn’t actually play on the album, his composition bolstered by John Haggerty’s distinctive guitar style.

While All Rise is probably my favorite Naked Raygun album, it doesn’t have my favorite Naked Raygun song, which has to be the non-album single “Vanilla Blue.” I remember reading an anecdote on the old Dag Nasty message board around 20 years ago—I eavesdropped on many conversations among old DC scenesters there—about Government Issue playing with Naked Raygun in Chicago, and Naked Raygun giving GI a tape of the then-unreleased track “Vanilla Blue,” which GI said they played constantly as they drove around the country. I can’t remember who relayed the anecdote—it might have been John Stabb, Tom Lyle, or someone else—but I remember them saying that GI and Raygun felt a close kinship around that time, the bands having arrived at a similar sound despite evolving from very different earlier material.

Springtime… big guitars, big melodies, a hint of nostalgic longing (remembering things perhaps as they should have been)… let’s roll down the windows and sing along at the top of our lungs.

The Jesus and Mary Chain: “Never Understand” b/w “Suck” 7” (Blanco Y Negro, 1985)

The Jesus and Mary Chain has a new album out this week. I hate to say it, but I haven’t listened to it yet. There are a lot of Jesus and Mary Chain records I haven’t listened to. They’re a band I’ve always liked, but aside from the odd listen to Psychocandy or Honey’s Dead during a shift at the store, I haven’t listened to them much. But a while back I came across a stack of their singles and they seemed really cheap, so I bought them all. The earliest in the stack was “Never Understand,” their 3rd single from 1985, and I’ve been having a bit of a moment with it.

The night I first listened to it, I was playing a bunch of new to me singles, and that was probably the 8 or 10th single I’d listened to that night. As tends to happen, the volume knob crept higher and higher with each record to where I was really blasting them. And then I threw on “Never Understand” and it just peeled my fucking face off. The guitar tone on this record is downright audacious, as wild, brutal, and insane as anything Confuse, Negazione, or Disclose put to tape. I love blasting a record like this and just bathing in noise, and “Never Understand” gives me that sensation. I’d always associated JAMC with the softer, gauzier sound of “Just Like Honey,” but the production on this single is knives out, going straight for the throat. But then behind it is this very sunny pop song…

I’ve really been feeling 80s UK indie pop lately. I’ve always liked that kind of stuff well enough, but lately I’ve been discovering or re-discovering bands that have a punky take on that sound that’s really been doing it for me. Sealed Records’ reissues from Dolly Mixture and Chin-Chin (I know the latter was Swiss, but they’re very of a piece with this sound) remain in constant rotation, and I’m still listening to the Gymslips pretty often, too. I even thought about doing my staff pick about Girls At Our Best’s Pleasure this week, which I’ve also been playing regularly. Maybe we’ll do that some other time. At any rate, I’ve really been primed for this sound, and “Never Understand” is right on the money, with a bouncy, Ramones-y rhythm and vulnerable vocal melody.

And then there’s “Suck,” the b-side. It’s funny, I was listening to “Never Understand” with my friend Mike the other night, and I blurted out that it’s really just the Velvet Underground’s sound… straightforward pop songs drenched in feedback and noise. But “Suck” is really where JAMC goes full Velvets, reminding me of the most out-there moments on The Velvet Underground and Nico. I also love that “Never Understand” follows that UK single trope of having the pop hit on the a-side and the more daring, artistically adventurous song on the b-side. The Buzzcocks’ “Everybody’s Happy Nowadays” b/w “Why Can’t I Touch It?” is one of my favorite singles that follows that format. Siouxsie & the Banshees take this tack too, though honestly most of their b-sides are pretty bad. Listen to the singles collection Once Upon a Time and then listen to the b-side compilation Downside Up… that’s a pretty gnarly disparity in quality. “Suck,” though, strikes the perfect note, adventurous but not oblique; a diversion, but a consequential one.

A quick listen through JAMC’s early singles (they’re all on streaming, individually and not as a compilation, which is so fucking classy and cool I can’t even handle it) reveals that “Never Understand” is, perhaps not an outlier, but a moment where everything came together just perfectly. Or maybe that’s just my taste… I’m sure there are many opinions on which is the best JAMC single. I also listened to “Never Understand” on digital, where they add the song “Ambition,” which appears on the 12” version of the single. “Ambition” is a fine song, but I think it throws off the perfect balance of the 7” version.

That’s what I have for you this week. Listen to and appreciate singles. They rule!

Annie Anxiety: Soul Possession LP (Corpus Christi, 1984)

Despite spending several decades immersed in punk’s history, I’ll never stop being humbled by how much I don’t know. Case in point: Annie Anxiety. I was familiar with Annie Anxiety’s 1981 single on Crass Records, “Barbed Wire Halo.” I have a habit of picking up any reasonably priced Crass Records single I come across, knowing full well that a lot of them don’t fit the anarcho punk mold (insofar as there is an anarcho punk mold). “Barbed Wire Halo” is one of those outliers, not quite as out there as the poet Andy T’s single, but not really a toe-tapper either, its music composed mostly of manipulated radio recordings and the vocals, while interesting and expressive, are not really something you hum to yourself in the shower.

I know I’ve seen the cover of Annie Anxiety’s Soul Possession album before—probably when Dais Records reissued the album in 2017—but I’d never listened to it until I came across this original pressing. Looking over the jacket before I put the record on, I noticed Soul Possession’s producer is Adrian Sherwood. While Sherwood’s resume is a mile long, I know him mostly as the proprietor of the On-U Sound label and a key figure in propagating dub reggae’s influence in the post-punk underground. I have a ton of Sherwood-produced records in my collection, including groups like Creation Rebel, African Head Charge, and New Age Steppers for which he seemed to be a driving creative force, but he also has credits on Depeche Mode, Primal Scream, and Sinéad O’Connor records, and had a hand in producing Slates, perhaps my favorite record by my favorite band, the Fall.

As for Soul Possession, it’s exactly the mash-up of Crass Records and On-U Sound I never knew I wanted. Penny Rimbaud from Crass provides drums, Derek Birkett from Flux of Pink Indians plays bass, Gee Vaucher contributes backing vocals, and Eve Libertine provides the striking cover design. Sherwood produces and brings along his multi-instrumentalist On-U Sound partner Kishiko Yamamoto, and the first track, “Closet Love,” sounds like the perfect combination of all those elements. Like Annie Anxiety’s earlier single, it sounds fragmented and choppy, but as in dub reggae, the rhythm section is the glue that holds the composition together and makes it feel like a song. That, and Annie’s vocals are clearer and more present in the mix, revealing warm, dreamy vocal lines that you absolutely could sing in the shower.

One criticism I have of some of the other Sherwood-helmed records in my collection is that they can feel unsatisfyingly circular. Sometimes songs don’t have the sense of development that makes them build toward a satisfying conclusion; instead, the music seems to cycle through iterations of a particular idea, stopping unceremoniously when they’ve wrung the idea dry. I don’t get that feeling from Soul Possession, though. Maybe it’s because each song sounds so different from the last. While “Closet Love” isn’t miles away from something you’d hear on a Siouxsie and the Banshees album, several others have a bluesy, swampy vibe that makes me think of the Gun Club and the Birthday Party. But the album never feels rootsy; the production is determinedly futuristic.

Researching Annie Anxiety, I learned, much to my surprise, that she is American, having performed at Max’s Kansas City with a group called Annie and the Asexuals when she was only sixteen. On a visit to the UK, she ended up at Dial House where she connected with Penny Rimbaud from Crass and then Sherwood. Annie’s involvement with the UK avant garde underground didn’t end with Crass and Adrian Sherwood, either, as her later credits include touchstones like Nurse with Wound, Current 93, Coil, and many others. I need to know more about her contributions to these recordings. Certainly she has a keen ear for identifying forward-thinking collaborators.

In 1987, three years after Soul Possession, Annie released another solo album called Jackamo, originally slated to come out on On-U sound, but ultimately appearing on One Little Indian instead. After that, she changed her stage name to Little Annie, releasing a string of singles and an album (the latter in 1992) and amassing a longer list of credits. I’ll be interested to hear where those records go, as Soul Possession’s combination of avant-garde textures and primal performance has really tickled my fancy lately.

Paul Drummond: 13th Floor Elevators: A Visual History book (Anthology Editions, 2020)

It’s been a while since I shared what I was reading, and this seemed like a good time as I spent the weekend plowing through this 2020 book on 60s Texas psych rockers the 13th Floor Elevators. Shout out to my mom who, when I failed to give her any gift ideas this year, plucked this from a years-old Christmas list I don’t even remember making.

The author of this book, Paul Drummond, also wrote the definitive biography of the 13th Floor Elevators, Eye Mind. I haven’t seen or read that book, but I’ve seen more than one person use the word “exhaustive” to describe it, so I assume it’s long and richly detailed. This book functions well as a biography on its own and there’s a good deal of text besides the pictures, telling the band’s and its members’ stories in a satisfying level of detail, but its main purpose is to document and share the group’s visual record in photographs, vintage show posters, ticket stubs, media coverage, advertisements for gigs and records, and any and every other place where the Elevators left their mark. As a piece of scholarship, it is a phenomenal achievement. There’s so much to see in this book, and it’s executed with the seriousness and attention to detail of an exhibition catalog from a world-class museum. Even familiar images from the Elevators’ records and their most famous gig posters come alive here, as they’re photographed like fine art rather than the flattened, amateurishly retouched versions you typically encounter on the internet. They certainly could have gotten away with less painstaking work, but I’m so glad they put in the extra effort, because this book really transports you into the Elevators’ world.

A few things strike me about that world. The first is the contrast between the world the Elevators presented in their music and artwork and what is documented in the book’s many photographs. As one of the first rock groups (if not the first) to fully embrace psychedelia, they helped to define the imagery associated with that sound, with its bright, saturated colors and its swirling and organic, art nouveau-influenced illustration and lettering styles. But when you see the photographs of the band in their environs, it all looks so dusty, dingy, and earthy. They didn’t live in a psychedelic wonderland; they lived in Texas in the 1960s. In many photographs of the band (particularly in their later years as their hair and beards grew), it looks like they could be a country rock group, as their world looks more like the faux-pioneer aesthetic adopted by bands like the Eagles and the Band. The Elevators weren’t reflecting their world; they were building a utopian alternate reality, one they sought to access through their music and the drugs they used. The other thing that strikes me—and this is an insight I owe to Drummond—is is how crudely executed much of the Elevators’ imagery was, which is part of what gives it its charm, particularly for someone like me raised on DIY punk. One fanzine review reproduced in the book complains about the artwork for Psychedelic Sounds, noting its chintzy feel and that the colors look more Christmas-y than psychedelic. Later in the book, Drummond notes that Easter Everywhere looks like a self-produced album from a hippie cult. The Elevators’ amateurish, exploitative record label International Artists gets most of the blame for the shoddy execution, but it also seems like a function of how early the Elevators were to all this. There wasn’t a rulebook or a template; they were making their own.

If you don’t know the Elevators’ story, it’s conveyed with fascinating detail here. Based in Texas, the group didn’t have the benefit of San Francisco’s liberal multiculturalism. The police viewed the Elevators as leaders of an insurgent group trying to corrupt Texas’s youth, and they made it their mission to stamp out the Elevators before the movement could take hold. They were aided by draconian drug laws that could put you away for decades for possession of marijuana and a culture where police brutality and corruption were the norm. Thanks to a drug bust early in their career, the band couldn’t leave Texas without written permission from their parole officers. Members were incarcerated repeatedly, with guitarist Stacy Sutherland serving multiple stints in prison and vocalist Roky Erickson notoriously shuffled into Texas’s brutal asylum system, where electroshock therapy and primitive pharmacological treatments certainly helped to shatter a mind already fragile from years of daily LSD use. It’s a sad story, and it makes you wonder what the Elevators could have done if they didn’t face such an uphill climb.

But the struggles, the missed opportunities, and the shoddy execution are much of what made the 13th Floor Elevators the 13th Floor Elevators. Despite his devotion to studying and documenting the band, Drummond is clear-eyed about their shortcomings, particularly in terms of their recorded output. This only makes this book more valuable, as there is no succinct document of the Elevators at their peak (despite how obviously brilliant and influential their recordings were). Instead, we have to triangulate from the available data, imagining what it would have been like to experience one of those magical nights when the sound, the vibe, the high, the environment, the company, and everything else came together perfectly.

Fy Fan: S/T 7” (Feral Ward Records, 2007)
Fy Fan: Åh Nej 7” (Adult Crash Records, 2009)
Fy Fan: Ingen Framtid... ...För Alltid 7” (No Way Records, 2011)

For no particular reason I can remember, Sweden’s Fy Fan has been on my playlist a lot lately. Fy Fan was from Malmö, Sweden, just across the bridge from Copenhagen, Denmark, and they put out these three 7”s between 2007 and 2011. The list of labels on these—Feral Ward, Adult Crash, and No Way—is pretty phenomenal. Those were easily three of my favorite labels at the time (Adult Crash still is LOL), and all of them cosigning Fy Fan indicates how good the band is. Their “members of” list is also gnarly, touching Herätys and Stress SS, among many others.

This almost certainly flew over my head when these records came out, but listening to them in 2024, I feel pretty certain the Headcleaners were a huge influence on Fy Fan. (They also cover Nisses Notter on their first EP.) I hear Headcleaners in Fy Fan’s scratchy guitar sounds, their willingness to switch between uglier, full-bore hardcore and (slightly) more tuneful parts, and their singer’s raspy yet (again, slightly) tuneful snarl. My favorite bands on Kick N Punch Records in the early 2000s shared some of those characteristics too, and even though Fy Fan was a few years later, it feels like that scene left its imprint on the band. It wouldn’t surprise me if they got some production tips from those bands, as all of Fy Fan’s records have great, vintage-sounding recordings. Åh Nej almost sounds like a recording from Inner Ear’s golden era.

Since I’ve been listening to Fy Fan again, I looked up what the band’s name means in English. It’s a Swedish phrase that doesn’t have a direct English translation. The approximation I liked best was “fucking hell,” since how phrase nonsensically throws together two profane words approximates (from what I understand) the grammatical collision that happens with the Swedish term “fy fan.” I don’t understand it fully (maybe I’ll ask my friends in Vidro next time I see them), but it’s worth a deep dive if you’re interested in language or Swedish culture beyond just punk.

So yeah, three EPs, all of them rippers. If you’re over the age of 35, you probably remember Fy Fan from the first time around. Dig out your copies if you still have ‘em… I think you’ll find they’ve aged nicely. And if you’re younger than that, my quick survey of the Discogs marketplace informs me these records, accounting for inflation, still qualify as dollar bin ragers.

Screeching Weasel: Snappy Answers for Stupid Questions 7” (Selfless Records, 1992)

This week I completed a 25-year journey. It was kind of a stupid journey, and I can’t say I’m proud to have completed it, but it’s done. And hence I shall memorialize it here. I have obtained the last Screeching Weasel record on my want list.

Likely the oldest item on my want list, Snappy Answers for Stupid Questions has been on the list as long as I can remember it existing. I loved Screeching Weasel when I was a teenager, and when I got online in the late 90s, I learned they had a bulging discography of 7”s. I knew most of the songs on these 7”s from the Kill the Musicians compilation, but the original artifacts intrigued me. I guess not much has changed.

One of the first purchases I can remember making via the internet is when Ben Weasel auctioned off a bunch of out of print vinyl on the Screeching Weasel website. If I remember correctly, the site was called Weasel Manor, and a fan actually made it, but Ben Weasel—newly online himself, I’m sure—quickly sniffed it out and took an active role. (Eventually and predictably, there was drama.) This is before I’d ever heard of eBay, and I’d never took part in an auction of any sort. I emailed my bids to Ben Weasel himself from my new Virginia Commonwealth University email address, which I accessed via the lab in my dorm because I didn’t own a computer. I was stoked to win dead stock copies of both Punkhouse and Radio Blast, both of which had been out of print for several years. I went to the post office to buy a money order, mailed it out, and some weeks later I got my 7”s, new and crisp and not looking anything like five-plus years old. It was magical.

I can’t remember when I composed my first want list, but there were a bunch of Screeching Weasel records on it. This is many, many years before Discogs, so I’m not even sure how I knew what was out there. Maybe Weasel Manor had a discography section, or maybe I was just trying to get all the original records whose tracks were compiled on Kill the Musicians. Over the years, I learned about other Screeching Weasel records and chose not to add them to my want list. There was the 1987 split 7” with the Ozzfish Experience, which was to be Screeching Weasel’s debut record, but the pressing plant went out of business after making only two test pressings, though sleeves were printed and circulate among fans. There was also a sleeveless, promo-only split 7” with Moving Targets that held little appeal for me. In 2000, the band released the double-disc compilation Thank You Very Little, which rounded up all the compilation tracks, outtakes, and other detritus that didn’t make it onto Kill the Musicians. I remember being really disappointed when I listened to Thank You Very Little, and if Kill the Musicians was an argument that I needed to pay attention to 7”s because they contained many of the band’s best songs, Thank You Very Little indicated that, at a certain depth, it’s best to just stop digging because what you find won’t be that exciting.

I’m not sure why Snappy Answers stuck around on my want list so long. Certainly if I had come across a copy in a store, I would have bought it, but I saw many copies pop up on Discogs over the years and didn’t pull the trigger. While Snappy Answers wasn’t compiled on Kill the Musicians, I knew the songs well because a friend had taped them for me in high school. Said friend told me the songs were recorded at the King’s Head Inn, the long-running punk club in Norfolk that my bus route passed every day on the way to school (which sadly closed before I got to see a show there). In reality, the songs are from a set performed live in the studio at WFMU in New Jersey.

Anyway, the other day a reasonably priced copy of Snappy Answers popped up from a US seller, and they even had another record from my want list in stock for a similarly reasonable price. So I bought it. Honestly, I haven’t even listened to the record yet. It’s just sitting on my coffee table, vexing me. I’m sure I’ll listen to it, but what I really want to do is slide it in next to the other Screeching Weasel 7”s in my collection.

As you can probably tell, my feelings about all this are conflicted. I guess I should feel some sense of satisfaction or accomplishment from crossing a 25-year-old item off my to-do list, but I’m having trouble mustering any feelings that resemble that. Maybe it’s that my feelings on Screeching Weasel are so conflicted. I still listen to their peak-era records from time to time and enjoy them, but it’s difficult to really ride for them given everything that has transpired since the days when I first started listening to them.

Actually, after taking the photo for this staff pick, I realized I might have to do a little more work on my Screeching Weasel collection. I was surprised I have 1999’s Emo, which I think is a pretty crappy album. I guess I have it because I pre-ordered it (I also still have the autographed poster that came with the pre-order), but I remember being so disappointed with that record after how killer Major Label Debut was. And I don’t have a copy of 1998’s Television City Dream. I like that album OK, but it’s not nearly as good as Bark Like a Dog. I should probably own it, though, right? And while I like the fact that my Screeching Weasel collection doesn’t touch the 21st century, I know there are some people who ride for Teen Punks in Heat. After that, though, I'm out.

WAX: Punk Och Kärlek cassette / 7” (1983, self-released / 2016, Smutstvättrekårds)

Usman could probably tell you more about my staff pick this week than I can, since he’s the one who showed this band to me, but I’ve been spinning this record a bunch since I got it, so I’ll give it a go. WAX was from the small city of Gävle in Sweden and existed from 1982 until 1983, when they released this cassette, Punk Och Kärlek, themselves. Aside from contributions to a couple of obscure cassette comps (to which I assume they simply contributed tracks from this session), Punk Och Kärlek was WAX’s only release, though Discogs notes some members went on to the group Los Bohemos. I gave Los Bohemos a listen and their hard rock-adjacent melodic punk didn’t do much for me, but it’s not terrible.

I think it was 3 or 4 years ago when Usman played WAX for me. Maniac collector that he is, he had just gotten an original copy of the cassette, so my first impression of WAX was probably as strong as it could have been in terms of sound quality. WAX’s music struck me right away. Rather than the Discharge-influenced hardcore so many of their Swedish peers were honing at the time, WAX’s songs are quite punky, with particularly strong vocal melodies. While they weren’t after the same heaviness as the early Swedish d-beat bands, they were clearly pushing themselves to play at super fast tempos, and Punk Och Kärlek is blazing, just as fast and agile as anything on seminal early hardcore comps like P.E.A.C.E. or Party or Go Home. That combination of a US hardcore-style rhythm section with a woman who could carry a tune on vocals makes me think of Denmark’s Electric Deads, and if you like that band’s first couple of EPs, you’re probably going to dig Punk Och Kärlek too.

When Usman played the tape for me, he also told me about this 2016 7” reissue, which I quickly added to my want list. There were only 300 copies of the reissue, and Usman warned me they rarely pop up. That’s OK… I’m patient. In the meantime, a decent rip of the original cassette someone posted to YouTube could tide me over. Finally, a few weeks ago a copy of the 7” popped up on Discogs and I bought it immediately. It turned out the seller was my buddy Nicky Rat, who handed it off to Paco at La Vida Es Un Mus to include in one of the many shipments he sends to Sorry State. Oddly enough, while I was waiting for the 7” to arrive, I finally started perusing the recent Råpunk book, where the WAX cassette was featured as a key early Swedish hardcore release.

Now that the 7” is in my hands and I’ve been playing it a bunch. Honestly, I think the rip of the tape on YouTube sounds a little better than the 7” version… there are 12 tracks crammed onto this 45rpm 7”, so it’s cut rather quiet, and there’s a noticeable amount of surface noise when you crank it. However, I love that the 7” package reproduces the entire cassette j-card layout, and it also adds an insert with an interview and some other info. It’s all in Swedish, and maybe one day I’ll run it through a translator, but I haven’t done that yet.

So yeah, that’s my pick. I wish I had more info to share with you, but if you’re intrigued, dial up that YouTube rip.

Feederz: Jesus 7” (Placebo Records, 1983)

I don’t know how many times I’ve listened to this Feederz 7” since I picked it up a month or two ago. I’ve been a fan of the Feederz for many years, yet I watched several copies of this 7” (as well as one copy of the very rare first pressing with the original sleeve) come through Sorry State without ever taking one home for myself. This is one of the records I added to my want list last year when I started putting new polybags on my entire collection (I still haven’t finished) and noticed how many gaps there were, records I felt like I “should” have but didn’t. Realizing these 1983 Placebo pressings of Jesus weren’t getting any cheaper, I decided to get one while I could. It took a few months for an attractively priced copy to come my way, and I’ve been totally obsessed with it since I got it in my hands.

Originally released in 1980, the Feederz’ first 7” is pretty early on hardcore’s timeline, and it sounds like it. Big, distorted guitar sounds and monochromatic rhythms hadn’t yet become de rigueur; a few years later, the Feederz would have had a template to follow, but on Jesus they sound like a new wave band possessed by the spirit of hardcore. The surfy main riff on the title track makes me think of the B-52’s, while “Stop You’re Killing Me” sounds like its riff and tom-heavy drumbeat were more or less swiped from “The Attack of the Giant Ants” off Blondie’s first album. Even that crushing riff in “Terrorist” has something about it that reminds me of early Talking Heads. But the attitude of the Feederz’ music is so different. There is none of the flirtation with accessibility that defined new wave; the Feederz sound like a band whose entire existence is about channeling negative feelings and refining them to knife’s-edge sharpness.

The most infamously negative (and infamous in general, really) song is the first one on this record, which also appeared on Alternative Tentacles’ Let Them Eat Jellybeans compilation and on the Feederz’ first album, Ever Feel Like Killing Your Boss? (the latter of which is, thankfully, still sporadically in print). Weirdly, the track is called “Jesus” here, while it’s “Jesus Entering from the Rear” on Let Them Eat Jellybeans and “Entering from the Rear” on Ever Feel Like Killing Your Boss?. Whatever you call it, listening to it in the year 2024 is a weird experience. I’m pretty sure they meant this song as a good old-fashioned piece of blasphemy, and it’s a good one at that. I love the way the chorus focuses on the moment of penetration; the temporal and physical precision of it feels so sacrilegious when referring to a being that is supposed to transcend time and space. In 2024, though, most people probably couldn’t give a shit about the blasphemy, but many people might be offended by the prominent use of a homophobic slur in the chorus. The word hangs heavy over the song, and to be honest it’s hard to listen past it. I don’t want to get into the weeds assessing whether or to what degree the Feederz are guilty of homophobia, but I find it interesting that a song whose entire purpose is to offend ended up being offensive for completely different reasons than what the band intended.

Back to the music, though. For me, this single has absolutely perfect punk production, with the kind of dry, unadorned recording that is always the best move for a band that can really play. As I mentioned above, the guitars have essentially no distortion, achieving their aggressive, slashing sound just by hitting the strings really fucking hard. The guitar sound is so nasty and percussive that it makes the songs sound even more intense, though the locked-in rhythm section (which works with a variety of different, often off-kilter rhythms) does a pretty good job of maximizing intensity on their own. The sound is perhaps a little fuzzy (I wonder if they recorded on used tape?), but every instrument lives in its own distinct frequency range. Aside from just getting great, dry tones, the only “production” touches are a little double-tracking of the guitars and the occasional backing vocals, with the ahhhhhs on “Jesus” sounding so much like the Adolescents that it makes you wonder if there’s a direct connection.

So yeah, what a great EP. I could talk more about how much I love that all four songs are so different from one another or how Frank Discussion is my favorite punk nom de plume of all time, but I’ll leave it there. If the slur I mentioned above sounds like it might offend you, then abide by the trigger warning. But if you’re willing and able to put that very of-its-time transgression to the side, I think Jesus is a truly great American punk record.

No Security / Crocodile Skink: Split 7” (1995, D.I.Y. Records)

Last week work was kind of getting me down… too much to do, too little time, which meant that every night when I got home I was exhausted and grumpy. Sometimes when I feel like that, I try to pull my mood in the other direction with music that’s on the gentler side (for me, at least), but often I just want to blast hardcore, having it overwhelm me to the point where I can’t think about anything else. I was on one of those kicks the other night, and pulling 7”s to listen to, I ended up spinning a whole bunch of Swedish stuff. I thought about writing about several of the records I played, but this is the one I landed on, both because it rips and because I think it’s a little more under-the-radar than some of the other slabs I jammed.

Even though it’s side B according to the labels, I’ll start with No Security, since their side is the reason I bought this record. None of No Security’s records have been in print for many years (as far as I know), so I’m not sure how well-known they are nowadays. They started in 1985, and I’m not clear on when they split up. Discogs says this EP came out in 1995, but No Security’s tracks were recorded in 1990. I wonder if perhaps the record just took a long time to come out, because on the insert No Security refer to themselves in the present and even tease an upcoming LP on which these three tracks were slated to appear. Unfortunately, that LP never happened. I haven’t heard it, but it looks like No Security recorded six songs for this session and the other three are available on the Lost and Found Records compilation CD When The Gist Is Sucked From The Fruit Of Welfare (The Ugly Faces Of Truth Show). I may have to track that down.

As for the music, No Security contributes three rippers that any fan of early Totalitär is bound to love. No Security featured Jallo on drums, who went on to play for Totalitär on Sin Egen Motståndare and all the records after that. It’s interesting that these tracks, while they have a similar grooviness to that Totalitär stuff (which makes sense as it’s the same drummer), they’re also rougher-sounding, with a loose, chaotic edge to them that makes them even more exciting.

It would be cool if there were an easily-available No Security collection (aside from the Lost and Found CD, there was also a 2019 collection CD on a Peruvian label), but I think there’s something cool about the way their discography is spread across all these split records. I could be wrong, but I think an EP’s dose of No Security is the right amount. Plus, if you track down all these splits, you get to hear a bunch of other interesting bands. Case in point, Japan’s Crocodile Skink.

While they slightly interrupted the flow of my Swedish hardcore night, Crocodile Skink is a great match for No Security, as their two contributions here are similarly blazing and riff-oriented, but with a crustier, more bottom-heavy sound. The vocalist is great too, with a mean-ass bark that sounds a little like Tokurow from Bastard, but with a freer (or maybe just worse) sense of rhythm. The lyrics are in English and they’re inscrutable in a really interesting way, though the animal rights message behind the line “you wear the steak” certainly comes through. Oh, and like No Security (and a lot of 90s bands, I suppose), Crocodile Skink has a very split-forward discography.

So yeah, pretty cool record if you can find it. If anyone has a spare complete collection of No Security and Crocodile Skink splits, get at me.