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Stains: S/T 12” (SST, 1983)

The Stains’ 1983 full-length on SST Records has been the subject of a lot of internet chatter over the past couple of weeks. I’ve found this chatter both entertaining and frustrating, so I chose the Stains as my staff pick this week in order to fill you in on as much of the story as I am privy to.

Here’s the background info. The Stains LP was SST’s 10th release, recorded in 1981 but released in 1983, presumably because of SST’s notorious cash flow problems in their early years. While I think most people today think of the Stains as a hardcore-era band, they started in the 70s and were contemporaries of the Masque bands and the original Hollywood punk bands, and you’ll see their name on many flyers from that era. Black Flag were big admirers of the Stains, and while, thanks to the release dates, many people assumed the Stains were influenced by Black Flag, it seems just as likely that the influence ran in the other direction. In particular, guitarist Robert Becerra’s expressive playing, full of long, psychedelically bent notes, sounds a lot like Greg Ginn’s playing on Black Flag’s later material.

I was lucky enough to buy my copy of the Stains LP in the early 2000s, when it was much less expensive than it is now. If I remember correctly, I paid around $50 for it. It’s always been difficult to find, but its stock has risen in the intervening years, and the median price on Discogs now sits at $400 for the first pressing. There are several factors at play here. While there was little to no information out there about the Stains when I first bought this album, the past several years have seen a mini-documentary about the band on YouTube and a lengthy cover feature in Razorcake magazine, both of which helped to fill in some of that context. An important part of that context is that the Stains, while they played a lot in Hollywood, were from East LA and all the members were Latino, something I rarely, if ever, saw remarked upon before a few years ago. With so much interest in voices from marginalized communities, the Stains’ story was even more enticing to younger punks. The internet has also allowed a lot more people to hear the record, and it’s so undeniably great that as soon you hear it, you want a copy. The record hasn’t been repressed since 1987, even as a bootleg, so higher demand plus no more copies available equals the prices of originals rising through the roof.

That all changed last week when news emerged that SST had repressed this record. I heard about the repress earlier than most people, because I was sitting at my desk working when an email arrived from one of our distributors saying a pallet just arrived from SST. I looked at the email immediately because SST releases have been impossible to get for the past few years. SST’s distribution has always been erratic, but lately the supply seems to have evaporated completely. The problem is so bad that pressings of their classic records from just a few years ago are selling for big money on Discogs. People want the Minutemen’s Double Nickels on the Dime so badly that they’re willing to plunk down over a hundred bucks for a copy pressed in the 2010s. Crazy!

As I’m scanning the list of what the distributor got in stock, I saw the Stains LP listed and jumped out of my chair. That was the first inkling I’d gotten that the LP was available again. I put together an order and asked them for 50 copies of both Double Nickels on the Dime and the Stains LP (I would have gone for 100 or more, but SST releases are expensive). A few hours later, they wrote back saying they put those two releases on their website and they sold out, and that I wouldn’t get any copies of either. No real surprise there, but I was disappointed. However, when our order shipped, there were 5 copies of the Stains LP on the invoice, though when the order arrived there were only 3 (and 2 extra copies of Black Flag’s Annihilate This Week single… eyeroll emoji). Two copies were claimed by Sorry State staffers, and the other one sold. I’ve been hitting up every distributor who carries SST releases trying to source more, but no luck yet. Rest assured that, given the opportunity, I’ll get as many copies as I can for Sorry State.

This story wouldn’t be worth writing about in my staff pick, except that SST’s chaotic rollout made the 80s hardcore record collecting internet explode with speculation and misinformation. It’s funny, I think a lot of labels would kill (or at least pay a lot of money) to generate this kind of hype, but SST has done it, apparently unintentionally, just through the bizarre opacity of their decision-making.

A lot of this confusion stems from a post on the Stains Facebook page, which speculates that the release is a bootleg or dead stock copies. The post’s main evidence for that claim seems to be that it doesn’t appear on SST’s website, but given SST’s chaotic approach to pretty much everything, it’s not surprising they haven’t updated their website. The evidence that this is a new pressing from SST is much stronger. First, the distributor who carried them said they arrived on a pallet direct from SST full of other SST releases, which they put up for sale at the same time. It would take a complex conspiracy for that to be incorrect… either they bootlegged an entire range of SST releases, or they sat with this bootleg waiting in the wings until a shipment arrived from SST (that coincidentally also contained a bunch of other SST releases that hadn’t been available for years). The matrix etchings also indicate that they pressed this new version from the same plates as the original release, and it’s unlikely anyone but SST would have access to those.

The post also implies this release is a bootleg because the band wasn’t involved, but anyone who listens to the SST-focused podcast You Don’t Know Mojack knows that Greg Ginn always insisted on the rights to releases in perpetuity. The Stains’ singer even acknowledges in the mini-documentary that SST owns the rights to the record, and by all accounts, SST is not in the habit of keeping in touch with the musicians whose work they own. The Stains may not like the fact that SST has repressed the record without their knowledge or input, but that doesn’t make it a bootleg.

The Facebook post also speculates that these might be dead stock copies, and I’ve seen other people repeat this claim as fact. However, it’s dead wrong. If you hold one of those things in your hands, it’s clear it’s not a dead stock copy from 1987 (the last time SST pressed the record). We deal in dead stock records all the time at Sorry State, and we know a 35-year-old sealed record when we see one. This isn’t one… the weight, color, and texture of the paper are dead giveaways. Plus, it just doesn’t make sense that someone would sell a ton of sealed dead stock copies for a tiny, tiny fraction of what they sell for on the secondary market.

TL;DR version: SST repressed the Stains album, but they’re rolling out it out in a fashion that’s chaotically opaque, which is typical of SST. While the randomness of it all has people freaking out, I’m pretty sure that, with some time, copies will continue to drip through SST’s Willy Wonka supply chain and you’ll have the opportunity to buy one. Patience is the record collector’s best friend.

Oh yeah, funny side note about my copy. Ten years or so ago a bunch of people were partying at my house and I put on this record. It started skipping, and I was so bummed. I thought it had gotten warped sitting on my shelf. I started looking for a replacement copy, but never found one at a price I wanted to pay. Then, a year or so ago, I decided to check how bad the warp was. The record played fine! Either it flattened itself out sitting on my shelf (which seems impossible), or I was tipsy and didn’t lay the record down flat on the turntable at that party. I deprived myself of a decade of listening to this on vinyl for no reason at all!

The Blood: False Gestures for a Devious Public LP (1983, Noise Records)

1983’s False Gestures for a Devious Public is the first full-length record by London’s the Blood. I’ve owned this record for years, but it’s been getting a lot of play time lately, for reasons I will explain below. I should also note that we have in stock a collection called Total Megalomania on Radiation Records the features all the tracks I write about here, so if you dig ‘em, that’s a worthy pickup.

I can’t recall when I first heard the Blood, but their two singles, 1983’s Megalomania (No Future Records) and Stark Raving Normal (Noise Records) have been favorites for many, many years. If I recall correctly, I first heard “Stark Raving Normal” on some punk compilation or another, but when I heard “Megalomania,” that’s when things clicked. “Megalomania” is a monster track, from its resplendent piano intro to its blistering, Machine Gun Etiquette-esque pace, to the sublime octave chords in the song’s main instrumental hook. It’s an all-time favorite song, and if you haven’t heard it, check it out… if you don’t like it, then you can stop right here because the Blood’s output doesn’t get any better.

Once “Megalomania” got its hooks in, I starting pulling whatever threads I could latch onto, which is what I do when I find a song or a record I like. The first order of business, of course, is to get the band’s releases from the same period, and I grabbed this 1990 red vinyl reissue of False Gestures for a Devious Publicon Link Records. I remember getting it in the mail, listening to it, and thinking, “well, that’s not as good as ‘Megalomania,’” and putting it on my shelf, where it has stayed since then. That opinion got canonized in my mind, and if you asked me what I thought of False Gestures for a Devious Public, I would have told you the Blood had lost the plot by then and it wasn’t worth the trouble.

What was I thinking?

I’ve been revisiting records I haven’t played in a while, and I got curious about False Gestures and threw it on. On that listen, my opinion began to change. I noticed some of the wild Captain Sensible-esque lead guitar lines that are such a big part of the singles’ appeal, and while the vocal melodies on tracks like “Done Some Brain Cells Last Nite” and “Degenerate” felt broad, others like “Well Sick” and “Waste of Flesh and Bone” could stand next to the classic singles. Internally, I revised my opinion to “False Gestures is OK, but the production is crummy and the songwriting is uneven.”

Then, earlier this week, the album came up on shuffle while I was driving, and I listened to it again. Apparently a third listen was what I needed, because somewhere in there my opinion got revised to “this fucking rules.” I still think the production is lacking, but that’s mostly because the album suffers compared to “Megalomania.” That is such a perfectly produced single, and it’s easy to imagine how some of the clever guitar overdubs and other touches like the saxophone in “Sewer Brain” would have hit way harder on False Gestures if its recording had the same level of care and attention to detail. But, even if its not rendered in crisp hi-def, it’s all there, and the Blood is still raging on this record, which sounds good enough if you crank it real loud. If you love Machine Gun Etiquette as much as I do, “Well Sick” and the epic “Waste of Flesh and Bone” scratch that same epic / melodic / psychedelic punk itch.

Biographical details about the Blood are scant. They were from London and there’s a story, which way or may not be true, of Stinky Turner from the Cockney Rejects “discovering” them on the top level of a double-decker bus. I pulled down my copy of Burning Britain hoping to find a chapter on the band, but they only get a brief mention in the chapter on No Future Records, which confirms their reputation as hard partiers. Label boss Chris Berry relates the story of the band getting shithoused at the contract singing for the Megalomania single, after which No Future decided the band was more trouble than they were worth. After being unenthused with False Gestures on my first listen, I never bothered checking out the follow-up 12”, 1985’s Se Parare Nex, but those tracks are on the aforementioned Total Megalomania collection. The Blood carried on into the 90s and 00s, but judging by some of their song and album titles, they may have leaned further into the “shock rock” element of their sound, and unless someone confirms for me that these releases are worth investigating, I’ll carry on assuming they’re not.

Chicken Bowels: S/T 7” (1987, Kagai Mousu Records)

This week I slayed a white while.

Before I get to that, though, a short rant. The word “grail” in relation to record collecting always grates against my ear. I doubt our sophisticated and cultured Sorry State readers would use so uncouth a term, but I see it a lot in the wider world of vinyl, used among the same people who use the word “vinyls” (a word that also grates against my ear, but so does the weirdly conservative grammarian backlash against it, so I just stay out of that debate altogether). I guess the problem is that the word gets overused, as in “I went to the record store today and found three grails!” To me, a grail is not just an album you like. If you think about the metaphor, the Holy Grail is something you spend a lifetime searching for, never knowing whether it exists, much less whether you’ll find it. If any punk records have that status, it would only be ones you’d be lucky to see, let alone own, in your lifetime… I’m thinking of things like the Necros skatepark sleeve or the Minor Threat Out of Step test pressing with the silk-screened sleeve. This is a class of records even beyond things like the first pressings of the Minor Threat EP or Nervous Breakdown. There are a thousand copies out there of both records, and even though demand outstrips that supply to where their values have gone through the roof, they change hands with some regularity. A grail, on the other hand, is an item of almost mythic status.

The white whale, though, that’s an appropriate metaphor for this week. The white whale, Moby Dick, literally took a piece of Captain Ahab, setting him on a lifelong journey for recompense. Beyond simple revenge, Ahab’s quest for the whale is existential… he will never be whole again until he conquers it. Unlike the Holy Grail, the white whale doesn’t exist in that strange space between myth and reality… it’s real, and Ahab encounters it several times, but never gets the best of it. This is my story with this Chicken Bowels 7” though, unlike Ahab, my tale ends in triumph, not tragedy.

My story with Chicken Bowels goes back to the early 2000s. I’m sure I’ve mentioned this several times in the newsletter because it was such a formative event in my relationship with punk music and record collecting, but one summer my friend Joel ceremoniously (Joel loves ceremony) dropped off his entire record collection at my house and left it there for several months. Joel was a manic collector of Japanese hardcore, and had all the classic records like Gauze and G.I.S.M. and the Comes and Lip Cream and Death Side when I was obsessed with those records, but only knew them from mp3 files. Holding those artifacts in my hands only increased their mystique and allure. Joel also had a ton of under the radar rippers I had never heard before, and I listened to every single record in his collection that summer, soaking up every scrap of knowledge I could. I visited Japan twice in the next couple of years, and with a couple of exceptions (I still don’t have an original copy of Fuck Heads… at the time Joel had two!) I more or less replicated Joel’s collection. Japan’s record stores are something else.

Chicken Bowels, though, proved elusive. I asked about this record at every shop I visited, but came up empty on both trips. Which got under my skin, because this record got its hooks into me. Even among the Japanese hardcore hall of fame that was Joel’s record collection, Chicken Bowels’ EP was unique. It didn’t sound like anything else. And since it came in 1987, way later than many of the hardest to find classics, and didn’t have the hype associated with the scene’s big names, I should have been able to find it.

Like Ahab, I had a few encounters with this white whale over the next two decades. I’ve had a saved eBay search for “Chicken Bowels” for that entire time, but I can’t recall ever seeing one up for sale. (Popsike tells a different story… there are nine eBay auctions for the EP archived there, but there hasn’t been one since 2013. Amazingly, though, two copies sold barely a week apart in the fall of 2006.) Whenever I heard a friend was visiting Japan, I always asked them to look for a copy for me (a strategy that proved effective for nabbing other elusive wants like Bastard’s Wind of Pain and the Aburadako flexi). At some point, I remember hearing that Joel had given his copy of the Chicken Bowels 7” to our friend Brandon as a wedding present. I got several great records from Brandon when he downsized his collection a few years after that, but I think I remember hearing that his copy of Chicken Bowels went to Mark from Beach Impediment, with whom it presumably still resides. I remember once someone on the Viva La Vinyl message board listed a copy for sale (I think it might have been Burkhard, who put together the Flex discography books). He didn’t name a price, so (if I remember correctly) I offered him $150, which at the time was consistent with what the EP had sold for on eBay and Discogs. He said the offer was way too low, and I guess he was right, because someone made him a better offer and he took it before I could counter. The white whale had escaped my grasp once again.

A few weeks ago I dropped in on the “items for sale in your want list” page on Discogs, as I am wont to do, and that garish red and yellow cover felt like it smacked me in the face. There was a problem, though: the record was in Australia, and it wasn’t available for purchase in the United States. I sprang to attention and sent the seller a message, explaining that I was happy to pay their asking price and whatever it cost to ship the record to the US. I expected nothing would come of it. If you spend a lot of time on Discogs, you know that the best records at the best prices disappear from the site in minutes. I thought for sure someone would buy the record before the seller responded to my message or before we worked out a deal. Luckily, though, the seller not only wrote back right away, but took down the listing to ensure no one else would buy it while we worked out the details. I tried to suppress my excitement, because there was still the lengthy waiting game of international shipping. While that process wasn’t without incident (the seller sent me the wrong tracking number, leading to a semi-freakout when I saw the record was delivered to a parcel locker in San Diego), the record showed up earlier this week.

You’d think that, with so much buildup, getting this EP in my hands would be unsatisfying, but that is not the case. Getting to pore over this artifact and blast it from my turntable reminded me how much I fucking love this weird ass little record.

I’ve never been able to dig up much information about Chicken Bowels, but here’s what I know. I believe they were from Hiroshima, and their drummer was Muka-Chin, whose name you might recognize since he played drums on most of Death Side’s records. Aside from their guitarist, Motsu, handling vocals in Half Years, I know little about the other members’ resumes. However, the Chicken Bowels EP was produced by Zigiyaku, a towering figure in the history of Japanese hardcore. Zigiyaku first came to prominence playing guitar in the legendary band Gudon, then formed Half Years, then Bastard, then Judgement. From what I understand, Zigiyaku was the main creative force behind those bands, and hence was one of the major figures who shaped what we now understand as the Japanese hardcore sound. It’s hard to tell how much of a hand he had in the Chicken Bowels record since a producer credit could mean just about anything, but there’s a certain magic to this recording that I suspect may have come from a sprinkling of Zigiyaku’s magic fairy dust.

Getting reacquainted with this EP this week, it struck me that every one of its six songs has at least one signature climactic moment. A band is lucky if they can capture a single moment like this on an entire record, but somehow Chicken Bowels got one into every track, and they’re all different. In the first track, “Keep Our Fire Burning,” it’s the striking, melodic bass line in the chorus, which always reminded me of funeral bells tolling, simultaneously melancholic and grandiose. On the second track, “You Live in Dream,” it’s the way the guitarist drops out of the riff on the chorus. “No Control” has one of the most epic guitar solos I’ve ever heard, played with all the melodic sophistication and creativity of a brilliant bebop jazz player. And there’s the entirety of “Fuckin’ Crime,” which ends the EP on a joyously snotty note that reminds me more of the Swanky’s light-hearted pogo punk than the heavier and grimmer sounds on the rest of the record.

And then there’s the record as an artifact. A big part of Japanese hardcore’s draw is that they do things I would never expect, and this EP is a perfect encapsulation of that aesthetic. There’s the band name… why on earth would you call your band Chicken Bowels? Perhaps it’s a significant phrase in Japanese language or culture, but to me it sounds delightfully absurd. And then there’s the record’s layout, which uses bright and striking colors that look more like a children’s toy than a hardcore record, the nutso cover illustration, and the idiosyncratic choice of typefaces. The lyrics are along the same lines… who knows what they sound like to a native Japanese speaker, but to me they are ludicrous, yet strangely evocative. From “Lie and Truth:”

Lie and truth Ramdom (sic) space

Lie and Truth Sloppy relation

Lie and Truth Oh, no! No! No! No!

From “You Live in Dream:”

You are very-very-nonsence

Do it! Do it! Do it! Do it!

From “No Control:”

Hurry up! No future

Drop out! Dirty crows

No! No! Control

Die! Just yourself

Go Down! Kill yourself!

Get out! Noisy crows

Make a fresh start of life

People will talk!

(Note: I’ve excluded part of the lyrics that are printed in Kanji since I don’t know how to type them.)

So, has this strange little record made me feel whole again? It has… if only a little. I’ve always been more of a gatherer than a hunter of records, preferring to enjoy the records that find me rather than chasing down wants with an obsessive zeal. When you lust after things, you build them up too much, and at some point the chase is better than the catch. Holding the Chicken Bowels EP in my hands, though, feels like coming home. It’s deepened my appreciation of a record I already loved, but also unlocked a sheaf of memories I’ve been happy to revisit here. Hopefully, I’ll continue to get a hit of that joy every time I take it off the shelf.

Jerry A. Lang: Black Heart Fades Blue (2022, Rare Bird)

This week I finished Jerry A from Poison Idea’s 3-volume autobiography, Black Heart Fades Blue. I can’t remember what rabbit hole I was falling down when I came across the page on Rare Bird’s site where you could order an autographed set of all three books, but remembering that Poison Idea-related stuff often isn’t easy to get (I still haven’t seen the Legacy of Dysfunction documentary), I grabbed it while I could. If you’re a big P.I. fan (and if you’re reading this, you probably are), I’d advise you to get while the gettin’ is good.

What did I think? It’s fucking Jerry A’s autobiography! How could I not love this? Black Heart Fades Blue splits Jerry’s story into three volumes. The first covers Jerry’s life until Poison Idea recorded Kings of Punk, the second volume covers the most intense years of Jerry’s notorious problems with addiction, and the third volume covers the period of (relative) sobriety when he picks up the pieces after living for decades as if tomorrow would never come. When I ordered the books, I wasn’t super clear on why Black Heart Fades Blue was published as three separate volumes rather than one long one, and I must admit it’s not much clearer after reading the entire set. The boundaries between the three volumes are porous, and there’s even a disclaimer at the front of each book encouraging anyone who comes across the volumes separately to read them together if they can. While I’m still a bit puzzled by the decision, it’s not too big a deal… I hate heavy books, anyway.

I read a lot of musicians’ biographies, and while it’s the music that prompts me to pick up the book, I often enjoy the parts of the books where the artists write about their childhood even more than the music-related tales. This is the case with Black Heart Fades Blue, as Jerry writes about his childhood bouncing back and forth between divorced parents in rural Montana and Eugene, Oregon. Both environments are dysfunctional and soaking in substances, but different in so many ways. I loved reading about the different drugs that were available in each environment, the different ways that kids passed the time (skateboarding versus going to sketchy swimming holes, for instance), and how Jerry had to revamp his identity and renegotiate his social standing when he moved every year. Jerry really captures the texture of a different time and place in these stories.

Speaking of stories, they’re the primary draw here. Black Heart Fades Blue is a lot like The Dirt, the book about Motley Crue, or The Hepatitis Bathtub, NOFX’s book. Like those books, Black Heart Fades Blue is bursting with crazy fucking stories, which you might expect given Poison Idea’s legendary appetite for excess. Jerry starts accumulating the wild experiences young, and they don’t stop, even when he lays down the hard drug addiction that fuels so many of his most memorable antics.

The Dirt famously does not mention Motley Crue’s music at all, and one of my few complaints about the book is that there isn’t much insider info about Poison Idea. As I was finishing Volume 1, Jerry sailed past recording their early records in just a few pages. There were some quick mentions about how Pick Your King was funded by Pig Champion’s cocaine distributor and how the band hand-assembled the record, and then a few pages later he’s writing about the cover shoot for Kings of Punk, barely even mentioning Record Collectors Are Pretentious Assholes. Maybe it’s just that conceiving and making these albums generated few significant stories, but I still would have loved to hear more about it. When Jerry goes into more detail about Poison Idea’s activity, it’s often to minimize their effort and ambition. He describes making Feel the Darkness as slapping together a few songs from previously released singles with a bit of filler. Crazy! Jerry mentions several times he doesn’t think much of self-important rock stars who tout their own achievements in their memoirs, but I wonder if he might have over-corrected a bit.

One area where Jerry’s writing excels, though, is when he writes about other people’s music. Jerry clearly loves music to his very core, and that comes across throughout the book. Unlike a lot of musicians, he remains an attentive, even rabid, fan throughout his life. Many of the best stories in the book are about his fandom, whether it’s trying in vain to get Elastica to autograph his rare 7”s, or his memorable encounter with Sakevi from G.I.S.M. Speaking of which, I got a big kick whenever Jerry name-dropped obscure international punk bands like G.I.S.M. and Lama, and there are plenty of tales that will make us record nerds salivate.

More than music, though, Black Heart Fades Blue articulates the nihilism that is so central to Poison Idea’s image and ethos. I mean, I knew the band was into drugs and lived a hedonistic lifestyle, but I guess I always assumed that was, to some degree at least, a pose. I know it is for a lot of my rocker friends, who love to talk about partying but watch as much Netflix and scroll through as much Instagram as the rest of us. But Poison Idea, particularly Jerry and Tom, fucking lived it, and it makes me hear their music differently. When you hear the stories behind songs like “Jailhouse Stomp” and “Feel the Darkness,” you realize they’re not works of pure imagination… they’re drawn from real life, and are much more shocking when rendered in the stark daylight of Jerry’s prose.

I hate to poop on anyone’s parade, but I’ve always had trouble enjoying Halloween. Sure, I like the Misfits and I’ve even come to enjoy the odd horror movie after years of avoiding them, but I think there’s something fundamental to the idea of Halloween that doesn’t click with me. Maybe it’s related to being introverted. Part of the thrill of Halloween is wearing something outrageous (or maybe doing something outrageous, if you’re a big fan of the “trick” part of “trick or treat”) in order to provoke a reaction in people, and that just doesn’t hold a lot of appeal to me. Getting a rise out of people isn’t what gets me out of bed in the morning. I also make things worse for myself by never preparing for Halloween. Like many people, I’m casting about for a costume the night of the big party, and I always find that mad rush to get ready stressful, and (if I get in my head about it), disappointing when I think about how much better it could have been if I put some time into it. So, grump that I am, better to just avoid the whole thing altogether and say “I don’t like Halloween.” Which isn’t entirely true, but that’s the story I tell myself.

One thing I have always loved about Halloween, though, is cover sets. Maybe it’s because those get the preparation I’ve never put into my costume? I’ve done a few cover sets over the years, including a few like the Descendents and the Adolescents that are documented on video. I was lucky to play with some incredible musicians for those sets, and I thought they went great and I had a blast.

When Jeff asked everyone to write a Halloween-themed staff pick for this week’s newsletter, though, I struggled with what to write about. I could write about my favorite Misfits record or something, but I thought about the concept of fear, which is what Halloween is about, right? It’s about scaring your friends and neighbors, letting them experience that feeling in a low-stakes context. Which reminds me of the time Jet and I went to a haunted forest a few years ago. Every Halloween a bunch of these things crop up in the rural areas of North Carolina, and you pay twenty bucks or whatever to walk through some sketchy looking woods and get scared by a bunch of people wearing professional costumes and makeup. It’s sort of like stepping into a horror movie. The last time we went to one of these was just before I started medication for anxiety, and I had a terrible time. I was in a terrible place where fear and dread were way too big a part of my minute to minute existence. Why would I want to walk into a situation that summoned those feelings and made me confront them?

Back to the task at hand. Free associating on the word “fear,” three tracks came to mind by three of my favorite bands, and that’s what I’m going to write about for my staff pick. Three songs, three different approaches to the concept of fear.

First up, Poison Idea’s “Getting the Fear,” released as a 12” single in 1989 and later compiled on the Ian Mackaye and Get Loaded and Fuck compilations (the latter of which, ahem, we still have in stock at Sorry State). I’m smack dab in the middle of reading Jerry A’s three-volume autobiography, and I just learned the other day that “Getting the Fear” is about the Manson Family murders. I guess I’d never taken the time to understand the lyrics, which are:

Peace, love and eternal life
Ended with 169 swings of a knife
It looks like the soul really
Picked a good on this time
Death Valley, CA, 1969

Getting the fear (x4)

I am just a mirror
A reflection of what you want to see
Infinite plan of fear unto infinity
They crucified him once
But now he's back, at cost
Now it's the pigs turn
To go up on the cross

Getting the fear (x4)

There is no wrong
There is no right
There is no sin
When we dance in the night

Getting the fear (x4)

The people you call my family
You didn't want,
Left them out by the road
I took them into my dumpster
Fed them and gave them clothes
The numbers are always growing
The will is always strong
You'll learn that for love of brother
There is nothing that is wrong

I guess the key question regarding this song’s lyrics is, “who is getting the fear?” It seems like it’s not Manson’s victims (either the folks that formed his family or the people they killed), since they exist in the song’s background. Instead, it seems like who is “Getting the Fear” is the American public, who has to reckon with the idea that someone can warp the values they hold, like hope and charity and love and family, into something horrifying. It seems like it’s Charlie who speaks the line, “I am just a mirror.” The things that are the most terrifying are the things we know are within ourselves.

The next song I thought of was “Because You’re Frightened,” the standout first track on Magazine’s third album, The Correct Use of Soap. Even though it’s well into their career, “Because You’re Frightened” is one of Magazine’s great songs… if you assumed only their first album was good, do yourself a favor and check out Secondhand Daylight and The Correct Use of Soap. “Because You’re Frightened” is built around a killer lead guitar hook that’s descended from the Buzzcocks’ “Boredom,” which, of course, Magazine’s singer Howard Devoto had a hand in. Devoto is one of punk’s most compelling lyricists, and “Because You’re Frightened” is as good as any of the brilliant songs he wrote:

You love me because you're frightened
And I'm falling in love with you
Because I'm getting frightened
Of the things you somehow make me do
You love me because you're frightened
I can easily believe my eyes
Your fear is my finest hour
My fear is your disguise

Look what fear's done to my body

A frightening world
Is an interesting world to be in
In the Forbidden City
Or on The Roof of the World
Or at the receiving end
Of the nine o'clock news
However you put your mind to it
You can find fear where you choose

Look what fear's done to my body

You want to hurt
You want to crave
You want to praise and curse and blame
You want to believe just what you like
Then you want to hurt and crave again

They took you to the top of the mountain
They showed you the valley
You bought it
You couldn't wait, could you!

Look what fear's done to my body

You want to hurt ...

Devoto’s song about fear examines complex (presumably romantic) relationship dynamics, a place where we don’t typically think fear lives, but often does. In the relationship Devoto describes, fear is an elaborate dance… within the relationship, one can be afraid of what the other person might do or afraid of what one’s self might do under the influence of such strong feelings, and all this fear pushes them apart and makes both parties vulnerable to manipulation at the hands of the other. No one seems to know what’s going on, but both people live in this nebulous world of possibility where they’re both wondering what the other might think or do. And of course, this fear, even though it lives in this world of possibility, has real consequences: “Look what fear’s done to my body.”

Speaking of punk’s most compelling lyricists, the third song that came to mind was the Fall’s “Frightened.” Another leadoff track, this one starts the Fall’s first album, 1979’s Live at the Witch Trials. While Poison Idea’s and Magazine’s songs focus on the interpersonal power dynamics surrounding feelings of fear, Mark E Smith’s song zooms in on the individual subjective experience of fear. While the other two tracks have a triumphant tone that’s appropriate given the theme of dominance that runs through those songs’ lyrics, the Fall’s “Frightened” is as skittish as a wounded animal. Here are the lyrics:

 

Someone's always on my tracks
And in a dark room you'd see more than you think
I'm out of my place, got to get back
I sweated a lot, you could feel the violence

I've got shears pointed straight at my chest
And time moves slow when you count it
I'm better than them, and I think I'm the best
But I'll appear at midnight when the films close

'Cause I'm in a trance
Oh, and I sweat
I don't want to dance
I want to go home

I couldn't live in those people places
Oh, they might get to know my actions
I'd run away from toilets and feces
I'd run away to a non-date on the street

'Cause I'm in a trance
Oh, and I sweat
I don't want to dance
I want to go home

I feel trapped by mutual affection
And I don't know how to use freedom
I spend hours looking sideways
To the time when I was sixteen

'Cause I'm in a trance
Oh, and I sweat
I don't wanna dance
I wanna go home

I'm frightened
Amphetamine frightened

I go to the top of the street
I go to the bottom of the street
I look to the sky, my lips are dry

I'm frightened, frightened, frightened

The feelings of fear Smith describes here are tied to drug use (“Amphetamine frightened”), and beg the question, what is the relationship between fear and paranoia? To me, fear is an acute sensation. It is bounded in time, space, and circumstance. However, paranoia is more diffuse. It is a dull background drone, like tinnitus, that colors your experience of everything (“I spend hours looking sideways”). Maybe part of the appeal of this drug experience is that it takes that dull ache of paranoia and focuses it into something that’s discrete, bounded, and (possibly) controllable. When you’re frightened, you can choose to go home, to get out your current situation and to a safe place that will relieve the suffering. The song’s music dramatizes this, ambling around for over four minutes with its awkward, stumbling rhythms before getting to the big dramatic moment at the end where Smith repeats the chorus. There’s that feeling of triumph that we heard in the other two songs, and maybe that’s something bundled in with fear, the other side of its coin? Maybe I’m starting to understand the appeal…

Happy Halloween everyone!

Rachel Aviv: Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us book (2022, Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Apologies to the punk fiends this week, because my staff pick has nothing to do with punk rock. However, I always tell SSR’s staffers they can write about what they want, and my process for choosing a staff pick is usually just to take a moment to reflect on what moved me during the past week and go from there. Strangers to Ourselves is the best book I’ve read in a while, so I thought I’d share. Plus, I know there are a handful of folks out there with interests in both punk and psychology (like Angela here at Sorry State and Red who sings for my band Scarecrow), so maybe some people will learn about this book here and enjoy it. Or maybe I’m just writing to the void. That’s OK too.

I don’t have a background in academic psychology, but I kept coming across glowing reviews of Strangers to Ourselves in publications I trust like The Atlantic and The New York Times. I’ve also been craving human stories in my reading… I want to know about people, to hear their stories and their wisdom, and the case study format of this book seemed like a good fit for what I’ve been looking for. Further, I have my own experiences with mental illness and the world of mental health treatment, so I have some connection with the book’s topic. I gave it a try and downloaded the ebook, which I found difficult to put down once I’d started.

Strangers to Ourselves is centered on four cases studies that detail their subjects’ encounters with the mental health industrial complex. Right off the bat, this approach puts Aviv at odds with the direction psychology has been headed over the past several decades. Throughout the first three-quarters of the twentieth century, psychology was steeped in Freud’s thought, viewing mental health as highly individual, and treatment for mental health disorders involved understanding an individual’s experience through a painstaking process of one-on-one psychoanalysis. This approach fell out of favor in the latter decades of the 20th century as a new generation of psychologists attempted to bring the rigor of the natural sciences to their discipline. This change in approach gave birth to the idea of randomized clinical trials, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, and (most significantly for patients) the embrace of pharmacology, or treating mental disorders with drugs. These changes were not only significant to the working lives of psychologists and psychiatrists, they upended and changed the ways our culture thinks of mental health and the kinds of treatments people receive when they experience mental health challenges and crises.

While the case study approach has fallen out of favor as an academic tool, it makes for great reading as Aviv delves into her four subjects’ stories (as well as her own story of being (mis-?) diagnosed with anorexia as a very young child). Her subjects’ stories are rich, exhibiting the complexity and mutability of human experience. They are genuinely touching, and at its core that’s why I couldn’t put the book down.

The idea of “insight” is key to each of the four case studies, and the idea gives the book its narrative arc. On the surface, “insight” refers to a patient’s understanding of their own condition. However, we see the way psychologists understand their patients’ conditions undergo an almost total 180 over the course of the book, which calls into question the entire premise of “insight.” The book’s first case study illustrates this most clearly. The subject is a depressed middle-aged man, a successful business owner whose condition doesn’t seem warranted by his material circumstances. The place he seeks treatment (this is all happening in the late 70s) is one of the last remaining holdovers of the older, Freudian approach to psychology. The therapists there basically tell the guy to get over it, and he doesn’t respond well to this treatment. The doctors note that he doesn’t have insight into his condition. When he later seeks treatment at a more modern facility and starts including pharmaceuticals as part of his treatment plan, he makes immediate and substantial progress.

The next two case studies are interesting because their subjects exhibit a kind of insight, but not the type of insight that psychologists value or expect to see. A woman in India experiences a religious awakening that her family processes as a mental health crisis, and the conflict between those two ways of seeing her experience has a profound impact on the lives of everyone in the family. The woman has a kind of insight—in fact, the people around her view her as a literal saint later in life, once she and her family find some measure of peace and stability—but that insight has nothing to do with our models of good mental health. It’s easy to see how history’s most prominent religious figures would have been viewed as psychotics by today’s rubrics. The third case study looks at a black woman who experiences what I’d call delusions, but she has profound insight into how race frames the way psychologists and the justice system see her. Of course, this isn’t the type of insight those parties are looking for, but I’m thankful Aviv’s approach allows us to benefit from it.

The last case study was particularly interesting to me because I saw so much of myself in it. This study follows a high-achieving young woman whose life is ripped apart when she receives treatment while a student at Harvard. She is very smart, and adept at showing the type of insight her caregivers are looking for. When a doctor diagnoses her with a condition, she adopts that diagnosis as gospel truth and sees herself through that diagnostic lens. And because she appears to fit diagnostic criteria so well, she is prescribed a litany of drugs to manage her lifestyle and keep her meeting those high expectations. She is the mirror image of the first case study, whose subject just needed someone to diagnose him with depression and give him a now-standard treatment for it. Instead, it seems like what this patient needs is for people to stop doling out drugs and to see her as a complete human being rather than a bundle of diagnostic criteria.

In the last part of the book, Aviv goes into detail about her own experience with the drug Lexapro, which I also take. This part of the book hit close to home, and it deftly exhibits how the changes in psychology that upended her subjects’ lives has also had profound, if less extreme, effects on all of us who have sought and/or received mental health treatment. I worry I’ve given too much away, but if you’ve also had experience with the world of mental health care, Strangers to Ourselves may provide you with some valuable insight. It’s certainly done that for me.

7 Seconds: Old School LP (Headhunter Records, 1991)

The other day Angela, Jeff, and I were working at the warehouse together. Angela was listening to this new Operation Ivy bootleg LP we got in, and between that and Jeff pricing a stack of used Casualties records, the conversation turned to music we were into as teenagers. Before I knew it, Angela was blasting Less Than Jake for like an hour straight. Less Than Jake was my favorite band for a couple of years when I was in high school. I listened to Pezcore incessantly, and I would have thought I could still sing along with every word. It turns out that I remembered some parts, but most of it seemed only vaguely familiar to me. I guess it was like 30 years ago at this point! Still, it choked me up a little to remember so many nights of driving to the beach with my best friend Billy, blasting “My Very Own Flag” and “Johnny Quest Thinks We’re Sellouts” and singing along at the top of our lungs, stopping at the Waffle House at like 4AM and driving home as the sun rose, still jacked on shitty coffee.

I always say that 7 Seconds is a band I’m glad I discovered when I was younger, because their sunny melodies and somewhat naïve politics would grate on my ears hard if I heard them for the first time as a full-grown adult. Somewhere in the punk network at my high school, someone passed me a dubbed tape of Walk Together, Rock Together, and I just loved it. At the time I was listening to a lot of Minor Threat and a lot of Screeching Weasel, and 7 Seconds seemed to fit in the sweet spot between them, with some of SW’s goofy poppiness and some of Minor Threat’s speed and aggression. I always kept an eye out for 7 Seconds records when I was shopping, but after picking up Soulforce Revolution and Ourselves, I realized there were some 7 Seconds records I didn’t want to own (nowadays I think those albums have their merits). I needed a more strategic approach.

I entered college in 1997, just as computers and the internet became ubiquitous. By my second year of college, I still didn’t own a computer, but both of my roommates did, and whenever one or the other of them wasn’t at home, I was on one of their computers reading about punk and scoring things on ebay that I still tell tales about today. Once I realized 7 Seconds had a bunch of records before Walk Together, Rock Together, I set about chasing it all down. The Crew was easy to get and pretty mind-blowing when when I did. It was rougher, faster, and punker than Walk Together, but just as easy to sing along with. Two compilations of earlier material were even more exciting. Alt.music.hardcore (talk about a dated title!) collected the songs from their early 7”s, and if The Crew turned up the rawness and aggressive knobs from Walk Together, these earlier recordings cranked them even further. Of course today I own all those original 7”s, but I still blast Alt.music.hardcore with surprising regularity.

And then there’s my staff pick from this week, Old School. The recordings that make up Old School were meant for 7 Seconds’ debut LP, which was supposed to be called United We Stand, but it never came out. A few of these tracks came out on a 7” titled Blasts from the Past, but they scrapped most of the songs from this session and re-recorded them for The Crew and other records. I did some quick googling, but I wasn’t able to find any info about why they scrapped these sessions. Does anyone know if there’s somewhere I can hear that story? Why hasn’t anyone made a book or a movie about 7 Seconds yet? Get on that, punk nostalgia industrial complex!

Making your way through the 7 Seconds’ discography is all about how the band balances their impulses toward hardcore aggression and big pop melodies, and for me Old School is where they achieve the perfect balance. Only a handful of tracks have blatant, Sham 69-style singalong choruses with lots of whoa-oh-type singing, and even those are backloaded onto the end of the record (“Red and Black,” “Clenched Fists, Black Eyes”). The more straightforward hardcore songs that make up the rest of the album benefit from the band’s songwriting chops, but the emphasis is on getting across that feeling of pissed-off rambunctiousness. “Wasted Life (Ain’t No Crime)” sounds like it might have drawn some musical inspiration from early Minor Threat, and tracks like “War in the Head” and “You Lose” are just perfect early 80s US hardcore.

The song that was doing it for me as I blasted this while driving around this week, though, was “Diehard.” “Action’s being taken cause of this / you fucked with us, and now we’re fucking PISSED!” Maybe I’m a little too far from my Less Than Jake fanboy days to sing along with those songs, but driving around this week yelling along to “Diehard,” I felt like I’d been transported right back to 1998, when I was a dumb-ass teenager hearing this stuff for the first time.

999: S/T LP (1978, United Artists Records)

For the past few weeks, I’ve been spending time visiting parts of my record collection I haven’t touched in years. What’s been getting me into these nooks and cranniesis something I like to think of as “playing records,” sort of the way little kids play with toys. This is something I used to be weirdly ashamed of, which would complicated the joy I get from it. However, I remember reading this book by Questlove of the Roots called Creative Quest a few years ago, and it advocated for something like this. I don’t know much about Questlove’s music, but something about Creative Quest caught my eye and made me want to read it… perhaps it was my inference that the book combined popular psychology (a semi-guilty pleasure of mine) with music, which is pretty much exactly what it did. In the book, Questlove advocated spending time just fiddling around with things—reorganizing his iTunes library, editing tags in his music files, rearranging his vinyl and CDs, etc.—without pressuring yourself to create or to get anything from the process except the intrinsic joy. There’s some invisible voice inside my head that says “it should be all about the music, MAN!” and that this sort of administrative work is, at best, a chore, and at worst something that distracts you from engaging with the music itself. However, with Questlove’s permission I’ve allowed myself to “play records” with no pressure to even listen to music. I’ve really enjoyed it, and it’s led me into interesting and under-appreciated parts of my collection.

A big project I’ve been engaged with for the past several months is reorganizing my vinyl. People often ask me how many records I have. I can’t tell you an exact number, but it’s around 4,000. While that’s a huge number for your average person, I think it’s a pretty slim and tidy collection by record store owner / music fanatic standards. I know plenty of people who have a lot more records than I do. Despite the relative tidiness of my collection, it long ago outgrew the shelving I have in my living room, which is where I like to keep my LPs. Once the shelves in the living room filled up, I put a couple of shelves I acquired with a collection in another room, and over the past few years I’ve filled those as well. The records in my living room are alphabetized and entered into my Discogs collection, but the records in the other room are not on Discogs and are alphabetized among themselves, sort of like a whole second record collection in the other room. The big project is to fold those records into my main collection and get them entered into Discogs, shelved, and alphabetized. It’s a big job, particularly when my day job often entails doing very similar tasks at work all day.

Another part of that reorganization project is re-sleeving all of my LPs. This is some nerdy ass shit. Previously, my LPs were in whatever polybag (or not) they came with, which seemed fine for a long time. Then a few years ago I bought a collection where everything was in these crazy nice 5mil crystal clear polypropylene sleeves from Sleeve City, what they call the “ultimate outer 5.0.” There was an extra bag of these sleeves in the collection, so I took them home and put a few of my most valuable and/or treasured records in them, and I was blown away. They made the records look beautiful. After I saw that, I took the sleeves off all the records in that collection and took them home. I decided I wanted to put all of my LPs in these sleeves, but when I ordered a batch from Sleeve City, my order sat unfulfilled for a couple of months until they finally canceled it. I checked the Sleeve City website every couple of weeks, but they were always on back-order. Of course, today, as I go to grab a link for this piece, they’re back in stock. However, I’ve moved on.

Giving up the Ultimate Outer 5.0 ghost, I searched other vendors for something similar. I knew I wanted the crystal clear polypropylene sleeves (rather than the slightly cloudier polyethylene sleeves we use at the shop), but no one sold them any thicker than 2 mil, and all the ones I tried at that weight had problems with seams splitting, particularly with gatefold or oversized LPs. Eventually I found a 2mil polypropylene sleeve I could live with from a company called Clear Bags, and I’m about 3/4 of the way through the re-sleeving process. Even though they’re not precisely what I wanted, they still look fantastic. Having my LPs in uniform plastic sleeves makes them look tidy on my shelves, and with these super clear polypropylene sleeves I can actually read the records’ spines. And when you pull the record off the shelf, it looks nearly as good as it does in the Ultimate Outer 5.0.

Re-sleeving my records has reminded me about a lot of records I’ve had for years but haven’t listened to in ages. It’s also brought to my attention several embarrassing gaps in my collection that I’ve been working to fill. How did I not have Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables on vinyl? Or Generic Flipper? Or Millions of Dead Cops? I’ve plugged those holes, but there are a lot of other common records I’m still after. Hit me up if you want to sell me copies of the first two UK Subs LPs, Zen Arcade, Black Flag’s In My Head… I could go on. I’ve also been having an intense internal struggle over whether I should splurge on a copy of Frankenchrist with the poster, or whether I should settle for a copy without one. It’s not like I’m going to hang that thing up.

Another thing I’ve been doing when I decide to “play records” is work on my digital music library. I have a shitload of music on my phone, but my digital music collection is totally separate from my physical music collection. I think this is because I use my phone to explore new music, while I reserve physical copies for records I want to go back to. Usually when I’m walking or driving and listening to music on my phone, I want to hear something new, but sometimes you just want to blast a classic on a long drive, and my digital music collection didn’t have many of my favorite records in it. So, I started the long process of getting a digital copy of everything in my physical collection into my digital library. It took an afternoon to get through all the numbers and A’s, but getting these titles on my phone has gotten me to listen to things I haven’t heard in ages. The first Acid Reflux EP rules! Absolut’s Hell’s Highest Power melted my fucking brain the other day. I also put on 999’s first album for the first time in many years.

I love 999, and I have a lot of their records. However, at some point I decided that High Energy Plan was my favorite, and that’s the one I always threw on when I wanted to hear 999. High Energy Plan is one of those mongrel records they used to make for overseas markets, compiling some (but not all) of the tracks from the band’s second album, Separates, with a couple of tracks from non-album singles. Usually these mongrel albums pale in comparison to the originals, but High Energy Plan is a back-to-front ripper, and it’s nice that it pops up often in the US, typically for $10-$15. Whenever I find a cheap copy in another store, I always buy it to re-sell at Sorry State to someone who likes the Buzzcocks or the Undertones.

Back to 999, though. It’s really good! There isn’t a dud on the record, and the hits are plenty. “Emergency” is a fucking belter that No Love used to experiment with covering, though we never performed it at a gig. “No Pity” is a high-energy rave-up a la the Damned’s first era, and “Me and My Desire” has a coy, sultry vibe that you don’t hear on too many punk records. I always got the impression that 999 had a pre-punk past, and I hear a lot of David Bowie and other glam / art rock in a track like “Me and My Desire.”

I remember picking up this LP at Amoeba on Haight Street in the early 2000s. I was on a cross-country trip with my ex-wife, and she was patient enough to let me visit a lot of record stores. I remember we were listening to lots of 999 on the long drives, and I had a premonition that I would find this album somewhere on that trip. That was a long shot since 999 has never been pressed in the US, but there it was waiting for me at Amoeba. I had a similar thing happen with Naked Raygun. I had every Naked Raygun LP except Basement Screams, and I was convinced I would find a copy in Chicago. Indeed, it was sitting there waiting for me at Reckless. I remember the $50 price tag stung a bit, but I rationalized it was OK to pay extra for a copy with local provenance. Looking at the Discogs prices now, I guess it turned out to be an OK deal.

OK, that’s enough for this week. What a long, rambling staff pick! Hopefully you gleaned something useful, and if nothing else, don’t feel guilty playing with your records!

Rigorous Institution: Lords of Misrule cassette (self-released, 2022)

Last night Scarecrow played a fun as hell, stacked gig in Richmond with 80HD from New York, Public Acid, and Relief from Virginia Beach. It was Red from Scarecrow’s birthday (and close to the birthdays of the 1,000 other neurotic Virgos in attendance), so everyone was in a good mood and ready to have fun. The bands all killed it, and I was stoked to hear 80HD has a record coming at some point… whenever they can get it pressed, which is still a huge problem at the moment. Public Acid also played a couple of hot new tracks, opening with a new song that begins with some crushing mid-paced death metal riffing that is bound to soundtrack to numerous injuries in the future. You couldn’t ask for a better night.

A few weeks ago I was at the same venue for my first opportunity to see one of my favorite current bands, Rigorous Institution. This was just a few days after Scarecrow got back from our long European tour and the idea of snuggling with my dog on the couch was a lot more appealing to me than driving three hours in each direction for a sweaty punk show, but I couldn’t miss the opportunity to see Rigorous Institution. They were great, as expected, and the show was super fun. I was especially glad I went because Rigorous Institution was selling a new 2-song tour cassette. You know I grabbed a copy, and that’s my staff pick this week.

The a-side and centerpiece of the tape is a cover of the song “Horrible Eyes,” originally by the cult Italian band Death SS. For a band that has such an identifiable sound, Rigorous Institution has always been adventurous, yet “Horrible Eyes” still feels like something new for them. The song is more straightforward than most of their originals, moving along at a steady gallop that allows the focus to move from the song’s hypnotic organ melody (this is Rigorous’s invention and doesn’t appear on Death SS’s original version) to the always captivating vocals (the song’s lyrics are tailor made for Rigorous Institution) to a surprisingly structured, rock and roll guitar solo. I don’t think the track is streaming anywhere, but any Rigorous Institution fan is gonna love it.

If you like it (or just if you like music I suppose), Death SS is a band who is worth investigating. While the material collected on the compilation The Story Of Death SS 1977-1984 is within the era of heavy metal proper, Death SS doesn’t sound like a band influenced by metal’s first or second waves, but a group inventing the genre for themselves. They take a lot from Black Sabbath (they’re often name-checked in histories of doom metal, and Pentagram fans should look them up), but Alice Cooper’s shock rock was at least as big an influence. The band’s visual aesthetic is wild, a kind of campy horror schtick that’s like the New York Dolls crossed with Immortal. The music is like the Pentagram recordings collected on First Daze Here, but some parts are unexpected and off the wall… check out the song “Schizophrenic,” for instance. Also, here’s a tip. If you enjoy The Story Of Death SS 1977-1984, rather than jumping to the reunion album In Death of Steve Silvester (which only features the original vocalist), instead follow guitarist Paul Chain’s career. After Death SS, he started a group called Paul Chain’s Violet Theatre that continued pulling Death SS’s most interesting musical threads.

Back to Rigorous Institution. “Horrible Eyes” is backed with a rough, 4-track recording of the Cainsmarsh album track “Criminal Betrayers,” and it’s worth hearing if you’re as big a fan as I am. As I noted above, neither track appears to be streaming anywhere, but the tape’s insert says one or both tracks (it’s unclear) will appear on a 4-song cassette EP (also titled Lords of Misrule) Rigorous Institution will release in late 2022 on a new label called Dogs of Altamont. Hopefully Sorry State can get a big stack for all you freaks. In the meantime, listen to some Death SS and get wild.

Underage: Afri Cani 7” (Attack Punk Records, 1983)

It’s been a while since I featured an obscure 80s hardcore record as my staff pick, so I’m righting that wrong today with this 1983 EP from Italy’s Underage. It goes without saying that I’m a huge fan of classic Italian hardcore. After filling in on guitar for Golpe for a few gigs, I even consider myself something of an honorary Italian. (Since those shows, I’ve noticed my spaghetti tastes more authentic). That peninsula produced (and continues to produce!) so much great punk, much of it with a distinct flair you don’t get from anywhere else in the world. There’s also something romantic about the original vinyl from this scene. I remember when I was first hearing this stuff, records like Raw Power’s You Are the Victim or Cheetah Chrome Motherfuckers’ 400 Fascists seemed unattainable, but I’ve tracked down copies of both over the years. I still don’t have a Wretched / Indigesti split, though! What I couldn’t have known until I held these artifacts in my hands was that the packaging and design was often just as distinctive as the music, typically handmade and packed with text and graphics, in keeping with the anarchist values so many in that scene held.

Back to Underage. Underage was from the Southern Italian city of Napoli. While I’m no expert, I am aware of the cultural divide between Northern and Southern Italy, the North being richer and more connected to European culture, while the South is poorer and more connected to the Mediterranean world. I wish I knew enough Italian to glean more from the dense insert booklet that comes with Afri Cani, particularly the essay on the back page by Jumpy from Attack Punk Records. It starts with the words, “Africani, Marrochini, Terroni”—Africans, Moroccans, and Terroni (a racial slur referring to people from Southern Italy and/or of Southern Italian heritage)—and the words I can make out paint a picture of a turbulent environment rife with injustice. There’s clearly a lot to be said about that topic, given that most of the classic, best-known Italian hardcore bands came from the more affluent North.

Musically, Underage is—like so many other Italian bands—most notable for their idiosyncrasies. They clearly take Discharge’s raw and primal hardcore as a big influence, but the charmingly shaky drumming, piss-raw production, and (most of all) the truly bizarre guitar sound are the aspects of Afri Cani that I find the most interesting. The EP’s highlights include “Thanks U.S.A.” with its Void-like pitch-shifted backing vocals, and “Entro Domani,” which captures something of Discharge’s sinister tone on Hear Nothing See Nothing Say Nothing, albeit without that record’s huge production. Both politically and aesthetically, Afri Cani feels like a radical statement, which is in keeping with Attack Punk’s other releases by raw bands from under-appreciated scenes like Spain’s MG15 and Yugoslavia’s U.B.R. It’s clear from the 9(!)-song track listing and the dense insert booklet that Underage had so much they wanted to say to the world.

While I couldn’t find much info about Underage in English, I discovered their drummer, Davide Morgera, wrote a book about his time in the band and the scene called Africani, Marrochini, Terroni, though it’s in Italian and also appears to be out of print. The one anecdote I found about Underage presumably comes from that book. 1983, Underage was offered an opening slot for the Exploited in Bologna, and after traveling all the way from Napoli to Bologna for the gig, the band Bloody Riot (whom I also like) jumped on stage and played instead of Underage, bullying the band out of their prestigious opening slot. After traveling dejectedly back to Napoli, the guitarist quit the band, effectively bringing Underage to an end.

Our Flag Means Death, TV series, 2022

I’m going to mix things up with my staff pick this week and write about a TV series I enjoyed. I don’t watch a ton of TV. My wife and I often watch an episode while we eat dinner, and afterward she begs to keep watching while I try to get us to go in the living room to listen to records. While I find the good in most records I listen to, I’m not impressed with most of what I see on TV. The things I like tend toward the silly and the absurd. What We Do in the Shadows is probably my favorite current TV series, if that is any indication.

My wife Jet recommended that I watch Our Flag Means Death even though she had already watched the entire first season while I was away on tour. I gave it a try for a couple of reasons. First, it’s set in the 18th century. Longtime readers will know that I did my PhD in 18th century studies and I still have a fondness for the art, architecture, fashion, and literature from that period. Second, the lead role in Our Flag Means Death is played by Rhys Darby, whom I loved in his roles as the manager Murray in Flight of the Conchords and as the leader of the werewolf pack in the original film version of What We Do in the Shadows.

Our Flag Means Death starts as a farce, following Rhys Darby in his role as Stede Bonnet, a wealthy aristocrat who abandons his family and estate in order to become a pirate (Bonnet was a real person, upon whom the story is loosely based). Bonnet buys a ship and hires a crew, and hilarity ensues as they embark upon the pirate life. Bonnet’s crew is just as inept as he is, but many of the best jokes come out of Bonnet’s inability to turn his back on his previous lifestyle, either its creature comforts or its deeper moral and philosophical assumptions. For instance, Bonnet’s captain’s quarters are outfitted with a massive library and an enormous wardrobe, the latter of which supplies Bonnet with ridiculous outfits that gain him no respect from fellow pirates or potential adversaries.

When Bonnet encounters the legendary pirate Blackbeard in the series’ fourth episode, the stage is set for even more fish out of water silliness. In one of my favorite episodes, Bonnet takes Blackbeard to a high society party full of foppish aristocrats wearing massive wigs and pancake makeup, with Bonnet teaching Blackbeard the art of passive aggression. (This episode’s guest stars Nick Kroll and Kristen Schaal are hilarious too.)

I enjoyed all the silliness, but I probably wouldn’t be writing about this show in my staff pick if it weren’t for the final two or three episodes, where the show takes an unexpected turn. It’s not so much a plot twist as a wholesale reconfiguration of the show… what happens in the final few episodes essentially changes the show’s genre and makes you look back on everything that happened earlier with fresh eyes. I can see why Jet wanted to watch the entire series again.

If you decide to give Our Flag Means Death a try, do your best to avoid spoilers. I worry I’ve already revealed too much, but it’s not just the surprise of what happens that’s so exciting. It’s the subtlety, depth, and beauty with which it’s executed. There’s a second season on the way too, so now is the perfect time to catch up.

Harry Sword: Monolithic Undertow: In Search of Sonic Oblivion (2022, Third Man Books)

Monolithic Undertow arrived at Sorry State in early July, just before we left for our big European tour. Based on the book’s description and my trust in the Third Man brand (particularly when it comes to the written word… how many times can I tell you to read Maggot Brain?), I was excited to read it, but I decided against dragging it through a dozen-plus countries and fighting to read it through bouts of carsickness. I’m glad I exercised patience, because I enjoyed the book and I’m not sure that would have happened if I didn’t give it the attention it deserved.

Monolithic Undertow investigates the history and significance of the drone, tracing humans’ engagement with the idea through millennia of cultural development. Sword defines the drone as an “audio space” where “sounds don’t (or, crucially appear not to) change at all.” He casts a wide net, finding examples of the drone in everything from the persistent hum of the natural world to the clatter of city life to the myriad musical traditions, both ancient and modern, that de-emphasize change and modulation. The significance of the drone is, ultimately, the reaction it causes in humans. Confronting a phenomenon that (theoretically, at least) does not change throws the emphasis back on our own (often fragile, mutable) psyches, much like the psychedelic experience, sending us to a third place where we are both participant in and observer of our own consciousness. It’s not about listening so much as being. I’m hitting a wall attempting to articulate what I mean here, but if you don’t have a taste for philosophizing, Monolithic Undertow probably isn’t for you.

While there isn’t a big section break at the halfway point, Monolithic Undertow is a book of two halves. Roughly half the book covers music up to and including the Velvet Underground, while the latter half of the book examines the rock era. The Velvet Underground is crucial for Sword because they’re the bridge between the avant-garde and the mainstream, the underground and the overground, carving a door to the wider world that everyone from Faust to Sunn O))) could charge right through.

For me, the first half of Monolithic Undertow is the real meat of the book. Sword goes way back, surveying a field called archaeoacoustics that I never knew existed. These scholars examine archaeological evidence, drawing conclusions about what the past sounded like. Swords spends much of the first chapter writing about the acoustic properties of Neolithic gathering spaces in caves, analyzing the way these spaces reverberate and imagining what sorts of sonic rituals might have happened in them thousands of years ago. It all feels very speculative, but that’s par for the course with paleoanthropology, since the archaeological record of the Neolithic period is so sparse. From there, Sword examines the drone as a motif in a range of religious and cultural traditions across the world and throughout recorded history, with a heavy emphasis on the Indian music tradition that so shaped 20th and 21st-century music. This is all history I was dimly aware of, but Sword is an excellent guide, providing plenty of signals of where to continue exploring if your curiosity is piqued.

I enjoyed the second half of Monolithic Undertow, but it was less revelatory for me. Sword’s history of the drone in the post-Velvet Underground musical landscape amounts to a capsule history of “head” / drug / psychedelic / trance / etc music, with a chapter each on kosmiche / German progressive / “Krautrock” (including Hawkwind, the main British purveyors of that style), doom and drone metal, and ambient and electronic music. The former two genres I’ve spent some time exploring so there wasn’t much that was news to me, but the electronic music chapter introduced me to some interesting new sounds (like, for instance, JK Flesh, a Justin Broadrick project that fuses techno, industrial, and dub reggae). Besides these histories being well-trod ground for music critics, I felt like Sword’s concept of the drone gets very loose in these chapters. Several times, I found myself thinking, “wait, what does this have to do with the drone?”While Sword doesn’t say this (at least that I remember), it seems as if in more recent music, the drone is less a musical motif and more of an idea(l), a semi-inchoate resistance to the idea that everything needs to be changing, evolving, and generating excitement all the time.

While I have these minor quibbles, Monolithic Undertow taught me about a bunch of music I didn’t know about, and it and kept me thinking long after I put the book down. In my mind, those are the marks of a great music book. Score another win for Third Man.

Note: Of course, just as I chose this book as my staff pick, we sold our last copy. I’ll try to get a restock next time we order from Third Man, and if you’d like to be notified when the restock comes in, there’s the handy “email me when available” widget on our website.