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Hello and thanks for reading.
Remember last week when I mentioned the PayPal debacle in association with ABSOLUT? I explained that I had asked Daniel to try and buy a copy of the tape after I changed the product title on my website and had still no luck. Well, now PayPal has "limited" Sorry State's account, which has resulted in transactions being rejected since Saturday. Since Sorry State is such an in-depth operation, this is a million levels more of frustration than what it was like for me to personally deal with. I know there are a ton of people who use PayPal to pay for Sorry State orders, especially international customers. I'm sorry to anyone who has not been able to order as a result, and I hope PayPal can resolve this issue ASAP so we can get on with things as usual.
This week I will be writing about this killer reissue of the 1977 hit single Mucky Pup. General Speech has brought us this reissue alongside LEGION OF PARASITES. While I am equally (if not more) excited about the LEGION OF PARASITES reissue, I haven't checked it out yet, so I will focus on PUNCTURE this week. PUNCTURE technically first came onto my radar in my early teens via THE EXPLOITED. On their 1981 debut LP Punk's Not Dead, they cover Mucky Pup. The cover is actually the second track on the record. I used the word "technically" a moment ago cos while I knew THE EXPLOITED so well for so many years, I had absolutely no idea this was a cover song! I think it especially threw me off cos the track appears at the beginning of the record, rather than where I would expect a cover to be at the end of a record. It was only just a few years ago that I discovered the song I loved and knew by THE EXPLOITED was in fact originally done by PUNCTURE. We were up in Philly for Something To Talk About and ICD10 busted out a cover of Mucky Pup. I was so stoked and rocking out to what I thought was EXPLOITED, to only (somewhat) embarrassingly discover I didn't even know who the song was by, haha. When I learned the song was originally by PUNCTURE, I checked it out first thing upon my arrival home.
While I loved EXPLOITED's take on it, man nothing beats the original recording by PUNCTURE. It's like kinda janky and sort of jangling sounding. It reminds me of anarcho a bit, actually. The B side track is quite a bit different, sounding much more like a '77 band. This single was the only release from PUNCTURE, and it was also the debut release for Small Wonder Records. There is a lot of great stuff on Small Wonder, but the two bands that stick out most to me in their catalogue are CRASS and ANTHRAX. I feel like most records on this label are not super expensive or hard to come by, but I have not managed to secure myself a copy of Mucky Pup. It was reissued once before actually in 2011, by a US label. Obviously, I didn't know who PUNCTURE was in 2011, and by the time I did learn, those reissues were all bought up and pretty much non-existent on the second hand market. When I saw General Speech had this one in the pipeline, I got very excited to finally land a copy of this classic! Sorry State just got our copies in, and as I write this we are working to get them available on our site. If you check back soon we will have 'em ready for ya. I think that about sums it up for me this week. Thanks for reading, and thanks to everyone for your support!