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This week I have a hot tip for you: the first-ever vinyl reissue of the Only Ones’ second album, Even Serpents Shine, is in stock now. I’m a big fan of this album, and since it’s the first time it’s been available on vinyl since its original release, I thought I’d tell you about my connection to it.

The Only Ones are most famous as the band behind the all-time classic track “Another Girl, Another Planet.” As far as I can remember, I first heard “Another Girl, Another Planet” on this Rhino CD box set called No Thanks that was formative in the growth of my love for 70s punk. The box set is packed with hits, but I always particularly loved the latter two discs, which offer a hit-parade overview of the early punk diaspora, with massive pop tunes like the Real Kids’ “Ghosts of Princes in Towers,” the Members’ “Sound of the Suburbs,” and “Another Girl, Another Planet.” Even among such a strong track list, the Only Ones’ contribution stood out, as I’m sure the song does to so many people whenever and however they hear it. It’s just an all-time classic tune.

At some point I picked up Special View, the bowdlerized American version of the Only Ones’ first album, to see if the Only Ones were one-hit wonders. Special View was a US-only release that combined tracks from the first two Only Ones albums with a few non-album cuts for the US market. It’s in that tradition of US versions of 60s UK albums where record companies took the UK version, swapped out a bunch of the album tracks, and replaced them with singles, b-sides, and other bits and bobs. This practice had mostly gone out of favor by the early 80s (it was doomed once people began thinking of albums as coherent artistic statements), but it notoriously happened to the first Clash album. Truthfully, I don’t remember much about my initial impressions of Special View... it certainly didn’t turn me into an Only Ones fanatic, and I’ve barely touched the record to this day, though I still have it.

The next step on my Only Ones journey was the single for “You’ve Got to Pay.” Thankfully my copy still has the price tag, which jogs my memory as to where and when I got it. I was visiting my brother in St. Louis for a few days, and at some point I went out on my own to the local record shops. When I stopped at Euclid Records, they had this massive file cabinet for 7"s... it was kind of awkward and a pain to go through, but once I started flipping, I found all these relatively cheap punk-era UK singles you never see in the US. They were cheap enough that I made a few blind buys, of which I remember the Mutants’ “Boss Man” (a great, amped-up pub rock single) was the best. When I got home and listened to the stack I bought, “You’ve Got to Pay” was an immediate standout. Part of that is the loud-ass mastering job on the single. I’m not sure if they were trying to make the song stand out on radio or what, but the version of “You’ve Got to Pay” on the single sounds monstrous, its simple guitar hook stabbing you in the gut like a rusty shiv. As a song, “You’ve Got to Pay” is built on the same skeleton as “Another Girl, Another Planet,” i.e. big guitar hook at the beginning, massive chorus, and lyrics that are ostensibly about love but work just as well if the object of that love is drugs rather than a person.

Once “You’ve Got to Pay” hit me so hard, I knew I had to get Even Serpents Shine, the album it originally appeared on. It took some patience to find a copy here in the US since it was never pressed here and has never been repressed at all since it’s original release, but once I got my hands on it, it cracked open my brain and dominated my listening for months. Like “You’ve Got to Pay,” Even Serpents Shine has a great sound. It sounds like a major label production from the late 70s, crisp and clear in the manner of so much classic rock, and while the fact that it’s not crowded with overdubs makes it sound elegantly minimal, there are flashes of lushness when production touches like backing vocals and guitar overdubs come in. The songs are great too, like “Out There in the Night,” an upbeat pop tune that coulda been a hit. The b-side opener “Curtains for You” is one of the band’s best moments too, a slow-burner that has all the high drama of London Calling, but with a mature, world-weary sophistication. Honestly, though, I could write about every track. This album just rules.

A quick aside on our Only Ones journey. Ever notice the one guy in the band who looks visibly older than the rest of them? (I feel for him. When Scarecrow is traveling, I often get asked if I’m with the rock stars.) Turns out the Only Ones drummer is an old-timer who previously played in the band Spooky Tooth. This would hardly be worth mentioning, but one day Dominic handed me a Spooky Tooth album and told me to check it out. It’s called Ceremony and ostensibly it’s a collaboration between Spooky Tooth and the French avant-garde composer Pierre Henry. However, what actually happened was that Pierre Henry was handed a master tape of six Spooky Tooth tracks (which were written as a set to be a “rock mass”), and without ever meeting the band or discussing it with them, added his own strange musique concrete sounds and completely remade the album in his own image. Spooky Tooth was none too pleased, but the result is a delightfully weird classic rock / modern classical hybrid that fans of groups like Univers Zero will dig. Dominic assures me that no other Spooky Tooth records are worth my time.

Back to the Only Ones. Eventually, and again after much searching since it never came out in the US, I found a copy of the original UK version of the Only Ones’ debut. I was hoping the original UK version would hit me just as hard as Even Serpents Shine, but thus far it hasn’t. I can’t figure out why, as so many of the things I love about the second record are present on the debut. Peter Perrett’s lyrics are great, the lead guitar lines are hooky as hell... but aside from “Another Girl, Another Planet,” much of the record skulks along at these sludgy tempos that keep the energy level low. I could see these songs really connecting if I were in the right mood (maybe if I was on heroin?), but I’ve yet to have that moment when I really and truly fall in love with the first album. MOV has also reissued the debut alongside Even Serpents Shine, though, so pick up your own copy and decide for yourself.

And while I’m mentioning other releases that came in at the same time as Even Serpents Shine, MOV has also reissued the third Saints album, Prehistoric Sounds, which (like the Only Ones records) never got a domestic US pressing and hasn’t been pressed at all since 1987. This is another record I had to search high and low to find a nice original copy of, and like Even Serpents Shine, it was well worth the wait. Maybe it’s more “mature” than Eternally Yours, but I think it’s nearly as good, and many people out there prefer it to the first two Saints albums. So scoop that too if you need it.

By the way, this trip through the Only Ones discography (with a few other stops along the way) reminds me of my patented multi-record picks, as seen on the YouTube series What Are You Listening To?. Jeff and I, along with our buddy Dave Brown from Sewercide Records and host Mike Foster, will share some of our recent listens on WAYLT? this Friday evening, July 12, at 10PM Eastern US time. It’s way more fun to watch live and post in the comments while it’s livestreaming, so join us at this link if you can!

Scream: Still Screaming 12” (Dischord, 1983)

This week I’ve been jamming Scream’s 1983 debut album, Still Screaming. The ninth release on Dischord Records, Still Screaming was the first full-length by a single group on Dischord (the compilation Flex Your Head and the Faith / Void split had both come out a year earlier in 1982). It makes sense that this distinction would go to Scream, as they had a somewhat more diverse sound than most of their label-mates at the time. Even Minor Threat’s Out of Step was only a 12” EP, and I can see how the label might have been trepidatious about how a straightforward hardcore band would execute a full-length. Punctuating their hardcore with segues into reggae, though, along with their knack for crafting big singalong choruses, made Scream a good candidate to test whether a 15+ song hardcore punk album should be a thing or not.

Still Screaming bursts out of the gate with two of its best songs, “Came Without a Warning” and “Bedlam.” “Came Without a Warning” might be Scream’s best-known track, and it’s certainly a punk classic. My old band Logic Problem used to play this song… we liked to learn covers for specific shows, and since we went up to DC for gigs often, we ended up learning a handful of songs by DC bands. “Came Without a Warning,” while undeniably memorable, is a pretty simple song, but I think “Bedlam” really shows off what makes Scream so special. In particular, the chorus melody is more complex than on the first track, and Pete Stahl sells the fuck out of it too, filling his vocal line with so much expression and passion. I’m sure the song would have been strong if it had been stripped down to a barking UK82 style, but Pete just makes it come alive.

Revisiting Still Screaming for the first time in many years this week, I was also struck by how much of it is just straight-up blistering hardcore. I guess moments like the reggae and funk tinges from “American Justice” and “Hygiene” just loom large in my memory, because most of this record blazes. Maybe the melody in tracks like “Killer” and “Cry Wolf” gets obscured by the speed, but I’m glad these tracks are there. I may not be able to remember the song titles as well as the hits, but these songs keep the energy level high, and tracks like “Fight” meld strong melodies to pretty straightforward hardcore songwriting. Like I said, the more diverse tracks tend to loom large in my memory, making me think Still Screaming is more diverse than it is, but it’s a hardcore album through and through.

Still Screaming does, though, hint at how the hardcore sound was already expanding and evolving by 1983. “Solidarity” sounds to me like the blueprint for early Avail and Trial-era Verbal Assault, whereas the jangly, REM-ish guitars in “Laissez-Faire” presage the Revolution Summer that would happen two years later in DC in 1985. Scream was particularly ahead of the game when it came to vocal performance and arrangement, with Pete Stahl’s big melodies carrying so much of the record and lots of background and gang vocals (most of them featuring a clearly audible Ian Mackaye, who also produced the record) giving these songs more push and pull than your typical sparsely produced hardcore punk fare.

So yeah, that’s what I’ve been listening to… I don’t have anything earth-shattering to say about Still Screaming, but maybe my ramblings will prompt you to pull this classic off the shelf. Oh, and I should also note that I was lucky to see the original lineup play many of these songs when the band did some reunion shows back in 2011. The show they played here in North Carolina was pretty notorious. This was when the Animosity lineup of Corrosion of Conformity got back together and played some shows. They had already played several times by the time they played with Scream at the Cat’s Cradle, but at this gig Eric Eycke (CoC’s singer on Eye for an Eye) jumped on stage unannounced, and Mike Dean from CoC started fighting him in the middle of their set. My old band Devour opened that gig and it ended up being the last time we ever played. Weird energy in the air that night, but I’m glad I got to see Scream crush it.

Various: Hell Comes to Your House LP (originally Bemisbrain Records, 1981; this edition Riot State Records, 1982)

Since I’ve been reading Welly Artcore’s new book Nefarious Artists, I’ve been spending a lot of time with compilations. As I noted in my write-up on the book, I’ve added a ton of compilations to my want list, and I’ve also been revisiting my favorite compilations in my collection. And, as happens when I spend time in one part of my collection, I’ve noticed gaps and started filling them. Luckily comps don’t tend to be very expensive, and when I dropped by Radiation Records in Anaheim while I was in LA last weekend, there were plenty of comps I needed in their bins. I’m sure I’ll write about some others in the future, but today I’m focusing on Hell Comes to Your House, the 1981 compilation on Bemisbrain Records (though my copy is a 1982 UK repress on Riot State Records).

When I read Welly’s write-up on Hell Comes to Your House it made me want to listen to it, but when I went through my comp section, I couldn’t find it. It’s funny how that happens... there are so many records I could swear I have, but when I go to play them, they aren’t there. But after spending some time with it this week, it seems entirely possible that I never actually owned it, as I’m not that familiar with any of the material. I knew what was on it—exclusive tracks from the early SoCal punk scene, with several bands leaning toward the emerging death rock sound—but this album isn’t baked into my bones how American Youth Report or Party or Go Home or Welcome to 1984 are.

A couple of things really distinguish Hell Comes to Your House as far as early American punk/hardcore comps go. The first is that it’s quite early. Originally released in 1981, the comp featured very early material from Social Distortion, Red Cross (though my 2nd pressing copy sadly omits their track), Legal Weapon, 45 Grave, Christian Death, and Super Heroines. The first four bands released their earliest stand-alone records in 1981, and while I’m not sure if Hell Comes to Your House came earlier than those records, if it was later, it was only by months. Rhino 39 and Modern Warfare were the veteran bands on the compilation, having released their first singles in 1979 and 1980 respectively, though 100 Flowers also qualify as scene elders, having only recently changed their name from the Urinals. While there are some sprightly tempos on the record, Hell Comes to Your House captures a moment just as hardcore was coalescing as a style, with all the bands having one foot still firmly in punk. Social Distortion and Legal Weapon tilt toward the more melodic, song-oriented side of that equation while Modern Warfare, Outer Circle, and 100 Flowers lean more experimental / post-punk.

The other important thing to know about Hell Comes to Your House is that nearly all the material here is exclusive. Social Distortion’s “Lude Boy” wasn’t even comped on their collection of early material Mainliner: Wreckage from the Past, though “Telling Them” got re-recorded for Mommy’s Little Monster. I think Legal Weapon’s song is a different take than the version on Death of Innocence, and the 45 Grave tracks are also exclusive, earlier (and superior, I think) versions of “Evil” and “45 Grave” from their first LP, with “Concerned Citizen” exclusive to this record. Christian Death re-recorded “Dogs” way down the road on their 1984 LP Deathwish, but this is the version you want. And Super Heroines sound like a completely different band to their first LP, much more aggressive and basically hardcore on their two tracks. If you’re a big fan of those bands, you’ll want Hell Comes to Your House for the exclusive tracks, but the sound here is similar enough from band to band that if you like one band, you’ll probably like almost all of them.

Indeed, Hell Comes to Your House is a solid listen all the way through. A lot of times with comps—particularly ones like this with exclusive material—the quality and style can vary from track to track. Often established bands bring their b-material, and sometimes the lesser-known bands blow their wad on their one shot at the big leagues. The playing field for Hell Comes to Your House, though, is pretty level. A year or two later, getting exclusive tracks from Social Distortion, Christian Death, and 45 Grave would have been a coup, but this comp catches them so early in their careers that their fame hasn’t leaped ahead of the lesser known groups. The consistent recording quality (cheap but competent, like so many of my favorite early SoCal records) also helps tie things together and ensure a consistent listening experience.

After doing some research, I might need to get a Bemisbrain copy in my collection besides this UK pressing because, while most of the track listing is the same, there are some differences. As I mentioned, Red Cross doesn’t appear on my pressing, and Modern Warfare’s two songs on the Bemisbrain pressing are swapped out here for a completely different third track. A totally new band, Outer Circle, is added to the UK track listing, and I like their song “Blind Venetians” a lot, an artier synth-punk track that reminds me of Nervous Gender. A quick look tells me this track comes from their 1982 12" EP on Bemisbrain, so I’ll have to check that out and see if the whole EP is as good as this song.

So there you go. I think anyone deeply into early SoCal punk and hardcore should enjoy this LP. Like a lot of compilations, the original pressing isn’t nearly as expensive as these bands’ contemporaneous stand-alone releases, but it might be tough to find as, barring a hard to find 1997 repress on Time Bomb Records, it hasn’t been in print since 1985. If you come across Hell Comes to Your House, though, it’s well worth a grip.

E.T.A.: We Are the Attack 7” (2002, Deranged Records)

This 2002 7” from Sweden’s E.T.A. (aka Epileptic Terror Attack) holds a special place in my heart. I picked it up when the band played Richmond in the summer of 2002. I’m not sure I recognized it at the time, but it was a significant moment. I had been gobbling up everything referred to at the time as “Y2K thrash” (Tear It Up’s Nothing to Nothing was probably my favorite record of that year), but there was something even cooler just over the horizon. I had seen Total Fury play the summer before. Brandon Ferrell had joined Municipal Waste on drums and they were covering early Poison Idea. Amdi Petersen’s Armé played Richmond, but I missed the gig (one of my biggest show-related regrets ever), but thankfully I made it out when E.T.A. played at the Hardcore Holocaust warehouse. Within two or three years, it felt like there was a whole scene of retro 80s US-style hardcore bands wearing combat boots, tight jeans, and denim vests, but as these early moments were happening, they felt like glimpses into another world, one I desperately wanted to immerse myself in.

Nowadays, I don’t hear too many people mention E.T.A., but when they do, it’s usually in the context of Regulations, which featured 3 of E.T.A.’s 4 members. It’s easy to read E.T.A.’s discography as the members groping toward the sound they eventually locked in with Regulations. I haven’t spent too much time with E.T.A.’s first few releases on the Swedish label Putrid Filth Conspiracy, but they’re more aggro than the later material, and while Otto’s vocals are pretty much there, the band hasn’t adopted that punky west coast style they’d perfect later. I’ve seen people describe E.T.A.’s early stuff as having a more traditional Swedish hardcore sound, but it’s not d-beat… more like fast scissor-beat hardcore… closer to Filthy Christians than Anti-Cimex or Mob 47.

By the time E.T.A. released their split 12” with Tear It Up and their No Faith LP in 2001, their music was showing more influence from early 80s US hardcore, particularly the more melodic west coast variety. Many songs referenced skateboarding in the lyrics. The guitar riffs were brighter, swingier, and more prominent in the mix rather than taking a back seat to the cacophonous drumming. And while the drummer still relied on scissor beats on the fast parts, they’re a notch slower, giving the songs a steadier, more confident groove, and there are more mid-paced parts that rely on classic surf-punk rhythms. Like the guitars, the vocals occupy more space in the mix, shouted in a youthful hardcore style and with memorable melodies, even serving up some hooky “whoas” on tracks like “Fucked for Life.” And in case you couldn’t tell which way the wind was blowing, No Faith closed with a cover of the Circle Jerks’ “Beverly Hills,” just to drive the point home.

Which brings us to 2002’s We Are the Attack. You might expect E.T.A.’s final record to sound the most like Regulations, and in some ways it does. Certainly they’ve honed those west coast punk parts, as you hear on the mid-paced parts of “Looking for a Spot” and on their cover of “Dicks Hate the Police” (re-titled “Otto Hates the Police”), which makes that song sound like something from the Beach Boulevard compilation. E.T.A. is also confident in their delivery of big hooks, like on the singalong “I’m a Bore.” But on the other hand, We Are the Attack is more aggro than No Faith. Maybe that’s because it’s an 8-song 7” in the early Dischord / Touch and Go format, but the recording is rougher and the band sounds meaner too, with lots of fast scissor beat parts like on their earlier material. At their best, E.T.A. infuses this more hardcore material with their growing propensity for memorable hooks, like on the standout track “Lose My Mind,” a chaotic hardcore song in the Victim in Pain mold. As with early AF, though, E.T.A. weaves a memorable call-and-response vocal and dynamic rhythmic change-ups into the melee.

By the time Regulations released their first 7” one year later in 2003, they’d excised the gnarlier elements from their sound, fully embracing their early SoCal influences with a thinner, more vintage-y guitar sound and bigger punk hooks. I don’t think many people would argue that E.T.A. was a better band than Regulations, but in order to become Regulations, they had to leave behind parts of E.T.A.’s sound. In the context of these musicians’ development, We Are the Attack captures a unique moment where much of what made Regulations so great was coming together, but the musical possibilities remained more open and less dictated by their influences. And it also articulates this brief but exciting moment when the scene was right on the bubble between the Y2K thrash era and “the No Way years.”

Tomorrow’s Uproar AI Compilation (MA Glory, 2024)

I’ve spent plenty of time listening to music over the past week, but the sounds that have dominated my brain space are the ones on this AI-generated hardcore compilation my friend Adam sent me. Adam sent me the link to Tomorrow’s Uproar after reading my discussion with Woodstock 99 in a previous Sorry State newsletter, in which the band explained how they used AI on their new album, 99 Ta Life. While Brandon from WS99 warned us that AI was coming for our beloved punk subgenres, I didn’t think I’d hear something like this mere weeks later.

There isn’t much info on the Bandcamp page that hosts Tomorrow’s Uproar, just that “The music, vocals, lyrics, song titles, and album art for this record were all generated using AI” and the credit, “Generated using AI by Trevor Vaughan.” A quick Google search didn’t turn up any coverage of or chatter about the album, and I’m left curious about the tools and methods Vaughan used to put together the release. Based on the limited time I’ve spent playing with AI interfaces, we’re not anywhere near the point where you can type “make a hardcore compilation LP” into an AI interface and have it spit out something as on the money as Tomorrow’s Uproar. I find that AI tends to work best when you get a back-and-forth dialogue going with it, refining its responses through multiple iterations, so while the AI gets top billing, I imagine a lot of human thought still went into Tomorrow’s Uproar.

My first impression when I scanned the track listing for Tomorrow’s Uproar was that it reminded me of hardcore parody projects like Grudge and Crucial Youth. Both those projects parodied hardcore’s tendency toward vapidity and embrace of cliche, and how AI cobbles together punk-sounding words into conflagrations like Edge of Resistance, Concrete Annihilation, and Steel Core Rebellion echoes how pastiche divorces form from content, using words as interchangeable puzzle pieces rather than as symbols standing in for more profound thoughts. You hear the same thing in the lyrics, like how “Concrete Annihilation” starts with the line, “I’m haaaaaard / like these concrete streets.” But while that line and titles like “Fists of Defiance” are ham-handed, others like “Stand As One” are more on the money. In fact, “Stand As One” is the title of a Cause for Alarm song, and has served many times as a band name or album title for hardcore bands whose members are all human. Maybe AI isn’t yet smart enough to figure out that “Stand As One” is acceptably cliche while “Fists of Defiance” is dumb, but it’s only a matter of time. I bet your first band was pretty generic, too.

The relationship to its source material seems in flux throughout Tomorrow’s Uproar. Sometimes you can hear exactly what’s it’s trying to do, like how the vocal on “Tomorrow’s Uproar” is clearly modeled on Rollins, or how “Curb of Broken Dreams” starts with a title lifted from Green Day, gets going with a total Blink 182 riff, then the vocals slide into Fat Mike. The lyrics are spot-on Fat Mike too, perfectly imitating his somewhat clumsy rhymes and metaphors. At other points, I can’t tell what the exact inspiration is, and those parts are more interesting, but perhaps it’s just because I’m not familiar with what the AI is cribbing from. It’s like how sometimes I’ll watch a sketch on Saturday Night Live and think it’s a hilarious piece of absurdity, only to find it’s some pop culture tidbit I hadn’t heard about, barely amplified or altered from its original source. Again, so much on Tomorrow’s Uproar reminds me of the work of a young artist who is too in love with their inspirations and whose radar for cliche isn’t yet sophisticated enough.

There’s also the odd moment on Tomorrow’s Uproar when I think to myself, “that actually wasn’t bad.” “Viper’s Betrayal” works perfectly well as a parody of tough-guy hardcore, but when the singer shouts “just another Judas…” and then the gang vocals respond “BETRAYAL IS YOUR ACT,” I have to admit it’s not the worst take on the time-worn hardcore lyrical trope of backstabbing I’ve ever heard. If that line had appeared in a Ten Yard Fight song when I was a teenager, you can bet I would have been singing along. Even 44-year-old me struggles with the last track, “Streets of Discontent,” though. This song’s tuneful skate rock reminds me of Code of Honor, and the line “chains and spikes we stand, we tower tall” sparks a twinge of feeling that I wouldn’t expect to get from computer-generated gobbledygook. This track is the clearest sign that, quite soon, AI might generate something I’d listen to unironically.

I think the biggest thing keeping Tomorrow’s Uproar in the uncanny valley is the songs’ lack of adherence to conventional structures. From what I understand, Large Language Models like ChatGPT work by generating texts word-by-word, calculating the word that is most likely to follow the previous words in the sequence… I think that’s the reason that, when you chat with an LLM, you see its responses appear on your screen gradually in words or chunks of words rather than all at once. The songs on Tomorrow’s Uproar seem to work the same way. Where you’d expect them to return to a previous riff and iterate an idea through another, similarly structured verse, they just keep plowing forward. The way songs seem to build toward a resolution that never arrives gives me a seasick feeling, like I’ve fallen into a bottomless pit. Again, though, that seems like a problem that shouldn’t be too hard to fix… I bet the technology that created these tracks could produce more conventionally structured songs with more or better prompts.

I’m not really sure what I think about Tomorrow’s Uproar overall. I thoroughly enjoyed that first listen when I was howling with laughter, and if you’re reading this, you’ll probably enjoy your first listen just as much. I’m curious to see what comes next, though. This time next year, will we be jamming AI-generated outtakes from Detestation? Could AI give us a version of Black Flag’s 1982 demo that sounds just as good as Damaged? Could it take a band like America’s Hardcore that only released a few scattered comp tracks and use that material to generate a full-length record that’s just as good as the real one would have been? Could it venture into an alternate universe where Discharge fired Cal in 1984 and replaced him with Jonsson from Anti-Cimex and bring us back an entire album from that dream project? I can’t answer any of these questions right now, but it seems safe to assume we’re going to see some wild shit soon.

Lora Logic: Pedigree Charm 12” (2024 Record Store Day version, Hiss and Shake Records)

The Record Store Day release I was most excited about this year didn’t arrive at Sorry State until the week after RSD. Wrapped up in the business of RSD, I had forgotten about the deluxe reissue of Lora Logic’s 1982 album Pedigree Charm, which was a UK RSD release with only a limited number of copies available in the US. We ordered copies for Sorry State, but I didn’t realize until a few days after RSD that we didn’t receive any. I quickly checked Discogs and found several UK sellers still had the release in stock, but while I was weighing my options and coming to terms with the spendy proposition of having one of these things shipped over from the UK, I got a shipping notification from our distributor showing we’d have a few copies arriving later in the week. I’m glad I wasn’t too quick to pull the trigger on ordering a copy from the UK. (It’s still in stock as of this writing, BTW.)

My staff picks over the past few years have touched many times on my love for Pedigree Charm. I first wrote about it in March 2021, shortly after discovering the record, and as I grew more obsessed, I explored adjacent records by Essential Logic (Lora Logic’s previous project, formed shortly after she left X-Ray Spex) and Red Krayola (whose members contributed to Pedigree Charm). The main draw for this deluxe RSD edition was a six-song bonus 12” featuring, among other tracks, a 3-song John Peel session I didn’t know about, recorded shortly before Pedigree Charm as they were working out the album’s final arrangements. Already well familiar with the main album on disc one, when I got this record home I jumped straight to disc 2.

Side 3 of this deluxe reissue is essentially the 12” single of the standout track “Wonderful Offer,” beginning with the two b-sides “Stereo” and “Rather than Repeat” before the extended 12” mix of “Wonderful Offer.” None of these tracks are new to me as I have the original 12” single of “Wonderful Offer,” and they’ve also appeared on previous reissues. (“Stereo” was on the double disc CD compilation Fanfare in the Garden, and both tracks appeared on Aerosol Burns & Other Misdemeanours (1978-1983), a collection of Lora Logic / Essential Logic non-album tracks that was only available as part of 2022’s Logically Yours box set.) Still, I’m happy for the opportunity to revisit these songs. “Stereo” features some beautiful examples of Lora’s baroque sense of melody on both saxophone and vocals, its wistful vibe evoking the deserts of North Africa and the Middle East. “Rather than Repeat” is more upbeat, starting with a free-sounding saxophone part before a funky bass line fades in. It’s dense and funky art-punk that sounds like something that could have been on the first Magazine album, but curiously there is very little percussion on the track even though the instruments lock into the rhythm as if it had a strong, danceable drumbeat. It’s almost like they did a Can-esque funky art jam and then deleted the drum track from the mix, leaving the other instruments floating unsupported in this ghostly way. It’s really interesting. As for the 12” mix of “Wonderful Offer,” it basically just adds a handful of extra bars to the track, making room for some extra slapping and popping on the bass. I prefer the album mix, but I’m happy for the opportunity to soak up more of this album’s fabulous bass playing.

Now onto side B and the three-song Peel session, which finds a pared-down three-piece lineup running through “Martian Man,” “Pedigree Charm,” and “Rat Allé” from the album. While my favorites on Pedigree Charm are the more danceable tracks like “Brute Fury,” “Wonderful Offer,” and “Hiss and Shake,” the three tracks they played at this session represent the album’s artier side, which is just as well since Pedigree Charm’s cracking rhythm section wasn’t present for the session. On first listen, I was taken aback by how different these versions sound from the album. I haven’t A/B’d them closely enough to tell, but it seems like some parts of the songs are still in flux, and the mixes are radically different from the album, putting the spotlight on instruments and melodic lines that took a back seat on the album mixes. The ukulele-esque guitar on “Martian Man,” for instance, is more present in the mix here, which along with the dense percussion emphasizes the song’s tropical feel, though filtered through the rickety sound of UKDIY squatter post-punk. The title track, “Pedigree Charm,” here reminds me of the Specials’ lounge-influenced second album More Specials, something I’d never considered before. Super-fans of the album like me will find these session tracks vital and fascinating, but it’s hard to say what you’d get from this if you haven’t yet fully digested Pedigree Charm.

If you’re new to Pedigree Charm, though, thankfully the album appears in its entirety as disc 1. As I noted, I’m a super-fan, and this is the third vinyl copy of Pedigree Charm in my collection, joining my original 1982 pressing and the copy included in the Logically Yours box set. If you don’t own the album, this deluxe reissue is a great opportunity to pick it up, though unfortunately being a double-disc UK RSD import, it’s not as cheap as I would like. However, it’s the only time they’ve reissued Pedigree Charm apart from the Essential Logic discography, and it’s nice to have the LP in the spotlight rather than buried within an intimidatingly long track listing. If you’re not familiar with the record at all, I’d start with the dance-y songs I mentioned above: “Brute Fury,” “Wonderful Offer,” and “Hiss and Shake.” To me, these songs sound like they’re drawing influence from the black American music of the time, particularly electro with its high-energy rhythms and funky, catchy bass lines full of slapping and popping. If you’re a fan of ESG and the Tom Tom Club, you’ll really like these tracks, as the sound is similar and the playing and the songwriting are just as strong.

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.