Staff Picks

Last week I got an email from Zack from the 185 Miles South podcast asking for nominations for their year-end lists… is it really that time already? Normally I start a “best of the year” playlist at the beginning of the year and drop in things I like as I hear them. The beginning of this year was a rough time, though, and I never got around to it. So I spent a little time this weekend going through past editions of the newsletter and the new arrivals stack at my house, building my playlist from scratch. I ended up with a shortlist of 23 releases. From here I’ll listen to the playlist on album shuffle for the next couple months and let everything soak in more deeply. Some things will drop off as I listen to them more and recency bias fades, and no doubt things will get added as they’re released and/or I hear about them. Right now, the leading candidate for album of the year is the new Kohti Tuhoa LP. I realize few of you have heard it yet, but I’ve had it for a few months, and I still can’t stop spinning it. It’s one of those records that gets better every time you play it. If you have any recommendations for things you think I might like but might not be on my radar, please send ‘em along!

As for my staff pick this week, I’m writing about yet another Siouxsie and the Banshees record. Back in January I chose The Thorn EP as my staff pick, and shortly after sending out that newsletter my buddy Ben (aka Bedge) wrote to give me his pick for under-the-radar Banshees banger. It took me a few months to find a copy, but it’s my staff pick for this week:

Siouxsie and the Bansheees: Song from the Edge of the World 12” (Geffen, 1987)

(Speaking of Ben, I want to note he just published his second book! It’s called Beastie Boys: Licensed to Ill: 40 Years and it looks absolutely stunning. Here’s the book’s page on the publisher’s website, which has a bunch of page previews and links to buy the book from several online bookstores.)

“Song from the Edge of the World” came out in 1987, which was a transitional time for the Banshees. They were coming off the artistic triumph that was 1986’s Tinderbox, which I think is neck-and-neck with Juju as the Banshees’ best album. However, after that high, the band must have been on the rocks creatively. Alongside “Song from the Edge of the World,” 1987 also saw the release of the covers album Through the Looking Glass. Covers albums can be fun, but they’re not a sign a band is at a creative peak. Indeed, guitarist John Valentine Carruthers was soon out of the band, with new members Martin McCarrick (keyboards) and Jon Klein (guitar) joining for “Song from the Edge of the World” and 1988’s Peepshow, the latter of which overhauled the band’s sound and gave them their biggest US single with “Peek-A-Boo.”

“Song from the Edge of the World” straddles the Carruthers and McCarrick/Klein eras, having made its live debut in 1986, demoed during the sessions for Tinderbox, and recorded once again for a January 1987 BBC session for Janice Long’s show. Carruthers plays on these two earlier versions, while McCarrick and Klein play on the two versions released as singles. Despite being credited to the newly revamped lineup, the song sounds more of a piece with the lush, dreamy sound of Tinderbox. Indeed, while there are obvious differences between the four studio versions of “Song from the Edge of the World,” the instrumentation and mood of the track changed little across its several iterations.

When I wrote about The Thorn for my previous staff pick, I noted that it’s the only EP the Banshees released in their two-plus decade run. The version of “Song from the Edge of the World” I have is a 45rpm 12” with four tracks, but it’s classified as a “maxi-single,” perhaps because two of those tracks are versions of the same song. Or maybe it’s because the US vinyl release combines all the tracks from the different versions of the single released in the UK and Europe. The 7” of “Song from the Edge of the World” (which was available in both picture sleeve and picture disc versions) featured a mix clocking in at 3 minutes, 43 seconds and the b-side “The Whole Price of Blood.” However, if you bought the 12” version, the version of “Song from the Edge of the World” you got was 7 minutes, 34 seconds, with “Mechanical Eyes” appended as a second b-side track. Confused? Well, you don’t have to be, because thankfully the US maxi-single version features both mixes of “Song from the Edge of the World” and both b-sides. It’s one of the few cases I can think of where there are several internationally released versions of a record, and the US one is the most comprehensive and offers the best value for money. America, fuck yeah!

I read somewhere that the Banshees disowned “Song from the Edge of the World” shortly after its release because they weren’t satisfied with any of the versions. While the song had a video (albeit a low-budget-looking one), it didn’t appear on Twice Upon a Time, the compilation of singles from the latter half of the Banshees career, despite being a stand-alone, non-album single. Of course I don’t know what the band was expecting based on what they were hearing in their heads, but I think the 3:43 7” mix of the song is brilliant, on the same level as _Tinderbox_’s singles “Cities in Dust” and “Candyman.” I love the sparkling harpsichord (I think?) melody in the verses, and the chorus soars, with one of the band’s broadest and most memorable melodies: “over we go / diving for pearls / over we go / from the edge of the world.”

As for the 7:34 12” mix (dubbed the “Columbus Mix” on the US maxi-single), I can see why the band wasn’t happy with that. It’s odd, and frankly a bit amateurish-sounding in places. While the mix is double the length of the 7” version, it doesn’t get into the trance-y, dance-y groove you might expect from a 12” club mix (not that this is billed at one). Instead, the song works through several cycles of crescendo and decrescendo (including two separate drum breaks!). The drums are where this 12” mix really shines. This mix gives a lot of extra space to Budgie’s drumming, and if you’re a fan of dense polyrhythms, it’s a show-stopper. It’s wild that Budgie recorded all these vastly different passes of the song’s main rhythm, and it makes me wonder how much other Budgie brilliance they left on the cutting room floor.

As for the b-sides, they’re alright, but not essential. I’ve remarked before how the Banshees were really good at evaluating their work. In general, their singles are their best songs, the album tracks are weaker, and the B-sides are weaker than that. Their B-sides often feel like failed or at least incomplete experiments. That’s the case with “The Whole Price of Blood,” which actually repurposes drum and sitar tracks from the song “Swimming Horses,” which appeared on 1984’s Hyaena (Robert Smith was in the band at that point, and he’s the one playing sitar). The song is very percussion-heavy (including some tuned percussion), which makes it sound like Siouxsie and Budgie’s side project the Creatures. “Mechanical Eyes” is similarly rhythm-focused, though the drum machine and synth bass give early 80s electro vibes… it almost like something that might have been sampled for an early hip-hop track. Both b-sides have interesting elements, but they don’t come together as songs the way the Banshees’ best tracks do.

So yeah, that’s “Song from the Edge of the World.” I agree with Ben that it’s one of the great under-appreciated Banshees tracks, and I feel enriched by having spent time with it for the past few weeks. If you’re interested in picking up a copy, I’m pleased to tell you the superior US version is a fairly cheap record. If you’re patient, you can find a nice copy for 10−15, or if you’re impatient, you can pick up a less-than-perfect copy for that price or a nice copy for only slightly more. If you just want the banger track, you can track down the UK 7” version, or get it as a bonus track on the expanded edition of Through the Looking Glass (where it is, oddly, the only song that isn’t a cover). And if you love the song and want to get really into the weeds, you can also hear the original studio demo with John Valentine Carruthers on the expanded edition of Tinderbox and the Janice Long session version in the Siouxsie and the Banshees: At the BBC box set.

Earlier this week I got to feel that rare, fleeting feeling of completion a record collector experiences every once in a long while: I got the last record I needed by a band I love. The band in question is a 90s UK punk band called Hooton 3 Car. As is de rigueur when one completes a collection, I pulled all my Hooton 3 Car records off the shelf so I could take a family photo, but now that I’m looking at it, my dumb ass forgot to put the final piece of the puzzle in the photo. The Hooton 3 Car / Lovemen split 7” I got earlier this week was sitting on the coffee table because I had been listening to it the night before, and I forgot to grab it before I took the photo. Now I’m at work and my records are at home, and I’m left with a photo featuring a bunch of records, none of which are my actual staff pick. *facepalm emoji*

Hooton 3 Car / Lovemen: Split 7” (Snuffy Smile, 1997)

I’m surprised I’ve never written about Hooton 3 Car in the newsletter before, but that’s what the search function on the website says, so it must be true. Hooton 3 Car was a band from the north of England (specifically the Sunderland / Durham area) who formed in 1989, released their first record in 1992, and disbanded in 1998. I first heard Hooton 3 Car around the time they broke up, discovering them by following the various breadcrumb trails relating to Leatherface, who were my number one musical obsession at the time. Leatherface fans doubtless recognize Sunderland as the band’s hometown, and not only did Hooton 3 Car hail from the same region, but Frankie Stubbs worked in a production / engineering capacity on several of their records. I listened to a lot of bands in the late 90s and early 2000s that purportedly sounded like or were influenced by Leatherface, but very few scratched the same itch as the godfathers themselves. Hooton 3 Car is one of the few exceptions. While they don’t sound exactly like Leatherface—the vocals are a lot cleaner, for one thing—they’re high-energy, heavy, heartfelt, have great riffing and songwriting, and a big, roaring yet melodic sound. Plus, while Hooton 3 Car had some success in the UK (John Peel was a huge fan and the band did three sessions for his show) and a following in Japan, they were even less well-known than Leatherface in the States, making them feel like my little secret. That none of their records were released in the US, though, made collecting their discography a tall order. That’s probably why it’s taken me nearly 30 years to get them all.

As you can see from the photo, Hooton 3 Car amassed a healthy discography during their tenure, including three full-lengths, a 12” EP, and seven singles and splits. As with many bands, many people think their first record—1994’s Spot Daylight 12” EP—is their best one. It’s a hard point to argue since all four tracks are bangers. You might expect the first record to show some growing pains—a strange stylistic detour, rough-around-the-edges playing, substandard production—but that’s not the case here. Their sound was completely locked in right from the start. As good as Spot Daylight is, though, their next few records are even better. Their first proper single, 1995’s “Danny,” is perhaps their best song (though there are several other contenders). If I had to choose a favorite Hooton 3 Car record, though, my pick would be their debut full-length, 1996’s Cramp Like a Fox. It’s hard to say why Cramp is my favorite… maybe it’s just the one I got first and spent the most time with. I remember it was one of the first records I burned to a CDR when I figured out how to do that around the turn of the century. Mostly, Cramp Like a Fox differs from the records before it in the way full-lengths typically differ from EPs and singles: it’s a little more diverse, a little more spread-out, but mostly it’s just a collection of the same kind of 90-to-180-second pop bangers that populate all their records.

I consider Cramp Like a Fox Hooton 3 Car’s peak, but it’s not like it stands head and shoulders above the rest of their discography. Like Motorhead and the Ramones, Hooton 3 Car never really changed their tack. In fact, Hooton 3 Car’s records show even less sonic variation than those bands (though, admittedly, their career was much shorter). As if to illustrate the point, the band’s last release, the 1998 CD-only full-length …By Means of Maybe, features the songs from their first EP, Spot Daylight, as bonus tracks. When you’re listening to the CD, the transition from their first session to their last session is barely noticeable.

As for the unpictured record that is nominally my staff pick, it’s pretty good, though hardly essential. Hooton 3 Car has two songs. The first, “Bronko,” is the lead track to their second album, Monkey Mayor, and it’s an excellent song, but I think it’s the same version that’s on the album. The other track is a cover of the Beatles’ “Here Comes the Sun.” I remember being excited to hear that when I got the discography double-CD (where it’s the 46th and final song), but it’s kind of just meh. I really like “Here Comes the Sun” as far as Beatles songs go, and the first part of the song where they play it pretty straight is promising. But then they speed it up and it has some of that typical “pop punk band covering a classic rock song” thing that I don’t really like. It’s too short a step from that to the Atari’s covering “Boys of Summer.” Blech.

As for the other side of the record, Lovemen’s songs are pretty good, heavy and melodic punk not dissimilar to Hooton 3 Car. I don’t think I’d heard Lovemen before, even though I spent a lot of time investigating the melodic punk bands on the Japanese label Snuffy Smile. Most of the Japanese bands on Snuffy Smile I heard were a little too soft for my tastes, but there are a few things in their discography I really like. There are several Registrators singles early in the label’s discography, and I’m a big fan of them. Blew’s 1997 album You’re Not the Only One is another one I liked a lot, and I really took to the band the Urchin, partly because I got to see them when they toured the US. I’ll have to dig more into Lovemen though. I did not know they had a split 7” with Exit Condition, so I’ll have to get that. Also, it’s cool that in the photo on their Discogs page, one of their guitarists is wearing a Hooton 3 Car shirt and playing what looks to be the exact color and model of Gordon Smith guitar I have.

Before I sign off, I want to give a quick shout-out to my buddy Jim Gies. When this record popped up on my Discogs want list, I added it to my cart and started looking through the seller’s other items to see if I could grab anything else and save on shipping. As I scrolled through their items, I thought to myself, “surely I know this person.” Then, a few minutes after I placed the order, I got a message from Jim letting me know he’s the seller. Thanks, Jim!

If anyone out there is still reading and I’ve piqued your interest about Hooton 3 Car, you can listen to the aforementioned double-CD discography on Crackle! Records’ Bandcamp site. And on the off chance anyone out there has a copy of Hooton 3 Car’s demo tape, please hit me up!

The other day it occurred to me that I haven’t given an update on my mental health in some time. Earlier this year, my staff picks were focused primarily on my mental state as I used my writing to try and make sense of a very tough time I went through. I was feeling financial stress, grief, and all kinds of other emotions that all seemed to catch up with me at once, leaving me incapacitated for several weeks. I wrote pretty frankly about what I was experiencing, and many people wrote in to express their sympathy, offer help, and just let me know they were thinking of me. I can’t emphasize enough how much I appreciate that. There are still a few emails I haven’t replied to, and I feel terrible about that. I hope no one thinks I’m an asshole when I don’t get back to them… I just get more email than I can reasonably reply to. Often, it’s the emails that are most important that wait the longest for a reply, since I want to find clear headspace to respond thoughtfully, yet I never seem to prioritize actually making time to do that. So, I guess if I didn’t get back to you, you should probably take that as a compliment and not an offense, LOL.

As for how things are going now, I have to say I’m doing pretty well. My biggest stressor was definitely the process of buying our storefront from our landlord, and once we completed that transaction in early July, I felt a giant weight lift from my shoulders. Around that same time, I also started a new medication regimen that has been working well for me. I had struggled for years with side effects from the various meds I was on, and a few months after I stopped taking the main one, Lexapro (which I did, stupidly, with no medical supervision / advice and no tapering-off period), my anxiety and depression completely overwhelmed me. The new meds have me feeling a lot better. The side effects of the Lexapro have lessened and I have more energy. I’ve even gotten into a consistent sleep and work routine, which is something I’ve struggled to establish for most of my adult life. I still have my struggles, but I feel like I’m out of the very dark space I was in earlier this year.

I don’t know how obvious it is to a newsletter reader or a Sorry State shopper, but I’ve been really focused on work since we closed on the storefront in July. That’s partly because the meds have made it easier to focus on work, but mostly it’s because I felt like I had to. So many people asked if our expenses would go down after buying the store, but it’s actually the opposite. Our landlord hadn’t raised our rent in years and we were still paying 2010 prices. The monthly payment on the store’s mortgage is almost double what our monthly rent payment was, and when you add in the far more expensive insurance policy we had to buy, HOA dues for our building, and property tax, the fixed monthly expenses for the shop are nearly triple what they were. Alongside expenses going up, I had also put a lot of bills to the side while we were scrounging money to pay the down payment, and now we have to dig ourselves out of that financial hole. Fortunately, most of the people we owe money to are punks and have been extraordinarily patient. But owing money to people you consider friends is even worse than owing money to a bank, and those debts weigh heavily on me.

Another thing that’s helped me deal with financial stress lately is that, for the first time ever, Sorry State has a bookkeeper who is not me. My therapist had been recommending that I hire a bookkeeper for some time, but I resisted, partly because I thought it would be too much work to train someone to do it, and partly because I was scared I was doing something wrong and it would be a giant pain in the ass to fix it. However, a couple months ago I learned my friend Stephanie is a bookkeeper and she kindly agreed to help us out. She’s been really amazing. Not only has she taken a lot of really tedious work off my plate, but also having regular meetings where we talk about finances helps relieve much of the stress. In the past, when I’ve been stressed about money, it’s all fallen on my shoulders because I didn’t feel like I had anyone I felt like I could talk to. Stephanie has given us some great ideas about things we could do better, but the biggest impact is from having someone to talk things through with and to tell me my ideas and decisions are not wrong or crazy.

Focusing on work and making some much-needed changes to how we do things at Sorry State has yielded promising results so far, but it’s also a really challenging time in the record world. I don’t know if you’ve noticed our subtle pleas to sell us used records, but collections have not been coming in as frequently lately as they have in the past. It seems like every day new businesses are opening that sell vinyl, existing businesses are expanding into vinyl, and many (most?) record collectors also double as dealers or side hustlers, so there’s just a lot more competition when it comes to sourcing good used stuff. Since we’re getting in less used stuff, the proportion of used versus new stock we sell in the shop has been changing. As I’m sure you’re aware, profit margins are slim on new records, so selling more new records and fewer used records changes the math that makes Sorry State work, making everything just a little bit harder. I think Sorry State will be around for a long time—those of you who read this every week and rely on us to keep you up to date on the punk world will keep us running, and we are extremely lucky and grateful for that—but I have a feeling we’ll see a lot of these newer record shops close in the coming months and years. It’s already starting, but I think there’s a lot more to come.

On that depressing note, let’s get to the record I wanted to write about this week:

D.I.: S/T (aka Team Goon) 12” (Revenge Records, 1983)

People who know me probably assumed I already owned D.I.’s first 12”, and I definitely did at some point. I can’t remember why I sold it, but I have a feeling the thought process went something like this: Horse Bites, Dog Cries is D.I.’s shining moment, and this first 12” EP is basically just a slow wind-up. Nowadays, though, I feel differently. I still hail Horse Bites, Dog Cries as a seminal piece of the Rikk Agnew canon (alongside All By Myself, Only Theatre of Pain, and the first Adolescents album), but nowadays it sounds a little slick and pop-punk-ish to me. It’s like the most ripping pop-punk ever, but it’s still kind of pop-punk.

I think a big part of me turning that corner on D.I. was watching Suburbia in the theater a while back. They did a screening at the Alamo here in town and a big group of punks all went together… it was sick. Of course I’d seen Suburbia before, but this time around D.I.’s appearance in that movie, where they do “Richard Hung Himself,” hit differently. It’s so dark and menacing… it made me appreciate the grittiness of the early material, particularly the death-rock leaning tracks from this EP: “Richard Hung Himself,” “Venus De Milo,” and “Purgatory.” “Guns” (which they re-recorded for Horse Bites) and “Reagan Der Fuhrer” still feel like fetal versions of Horse Bites, but the other three songs are something else entirely. I really wish D.I. had an entire record in that style.

Another reason I might have ditched my previous copy of this record is because I confused the original release with subsequent reissues, which drastically change the track listing. Generally, having more tracks is a good thing, but the later versions of D.I. (which, according to Discogs at least, were retitled Team Goon) totally reimagine the track listing, and not for the better. A cover of Gary Glitter’s “Rock and Roll Part II?” I’ll go to a baseball game if I want to hear that song. Their cover of Devo’s “Uncontrollable Urge” is alright, but the other two bonus tracks, “Nuclear Funeral” and “The Saint,” are very Horse Bites, Dog Cries-esque, but not as good. It probably would have been fine if they put all the bonus tracks after the EP’s original running order, but they put three of the bonus tracks before the EP (starting the record with the Gary Glitter song… who OK’d that?) and the Devo cover at the end of the record. So weird. I guess I’d rather have heard these songs than not, but I think the way they were added waters down the aspects of this EP I’m feeling most these days.

Thankfully this bad boy is back in my collection, and I’m glad to have a new appreciation for it. I’d be bummed about having to re-buy it (for, I’m sure, way more than I paid the first time), but honestly it was kind of fun. Maybe I should sell all my records and slowly buy them all back again. Or maybe you should sell your records to us and slowly buy them back again, LOL.

I’m swamped this week, so I’ll keep my staff pick short. It’s a record I first heard many years ago, but has re-entered my world from a few different directions lately:

Legionaire’s Disease Band: Rather See You Dead (Than With Wool on Your Head) 7” (Lunar Lab Records, 1979)

I can’t remember whether I first heard Legionaire’s Disease Band on Bloodstains Across Texas or Killed by Death #12, but the a-side of this single is a song I associate with my initial dive into the deep end of KBD-style punk. For me, the seminal Killed by Death-style songs are usually totally over the top, to the point where they can sometimes be a bit goofy. I’m thinking of songs like the Nubs’ “Job,” the Mad’s “I Hate Music” (RIP Screaming Mad George!), the Freeze’s “I Hate Tourists,” and Freestone’s “Bummer Bitch.” While I wouldn’t say “Rather See You Dead” flirts with goofiness, the song’s chorus—an apparently wordless, vomit-like scream—is definitely over the top. While that scream is the highlight, the song’s main riff is badass too. It’s basically the as Zero Boys’ “Civlization’s Dying” (which came out two years after this) with some chunky palm muting steering it more toward Dead Boys / (Detroit) Dogs-type menace. The b-side rips too. While it doesn’t have the over-the-top quality of “Rather See You Dead,” it’s similarly heavy and nasty-sounding.

There are few original Killed by Death-type records I’ve ever hoped to own. I’ve lucked into a handful of things over the years—Public Disturbance’s S&M, the second single by the Eat—but I’ve never really pursued KBD originals the way I seek out original hardcore records. I just assume almost those records are astronomically expensive, so when I walked into Vinyl Conflict earlier this summer and saw a copy of Rather See You Dead on the wall for $50, I assumed it was a reissue. Actually, it was, kind of… a minty copy of the second pressing from 1979. The original self-released pressing (which came out earlier in ’79) is pretty expensive (current Discogs median: $160.92), but the second pressing goes for a fraction of that. To me, that seems silly. Yes, it’s on a different label, but to me a record that came out the same year as the first pressing is still an original, and I can assure you my copy sounds great. I can’t imagine upgrading to a first press would bring much additional joy into my life.

I’d been rocking my new-to-me copy of “Rather See You Dead” for a few weeks when Zack from the 185 Miles South podcast asked me to be a guest on an episode discussing his top 100 punk records of the 1970s. The episode hasn’t aired yet, so you’ll have to wait to see his full list. Hopefully, though, Zack won’t mind me telling you he ranked “Rather See You Dead” quite high. When he talked about the record during our discussion, he was clearly smitten with it, which made me stoked to listen to it even more. Zack’s analysis of music is so detailed and thoughtful that it often prompts me to hear records I’ve known for a long time in a different, fresh way.

While the episode on Zack’s 100 favorite punk records of the 70s hasn’t aired yet, he also covered Legionaire’s Disease Band in a feature called Six No Skips that appears on the 185 Miles South Substack (there’s also an audio version of the feature on their Patreon feed… behind the dreaded paywall (bwah ha ha ha ha)). You can read Six No Skips #4 here, and be sure to make it to the part where Legionaire’s Disease Band’s singer fakes his own death as part of a scheme to promote the record. What a wild man.

If you haven’t heard this single, check out the a-side here and the b-side here.

Until next week…

Before I get into my staff pick for this week, an addendum to my pick from last week, when I wrote about the Hungarian punk band Nagy Feró És A Bikini. A couple of actual Hungarian punks wrote in and shared some interesting info with me. First, I have to correct an error they both pointed out. I linked to a Bikini 7” and said it was the one Jonah held up on What Are You Listening To?, but it turns out I linked to the wrong record. The record Jonah actually held up was this single, which features two album tracks from the record I wrote about last week. I know this because one of the Hungarian punks who wrote in, Dini, is the person who gave Jonah the record! Small world. The record I linked to by mistake is a very rare 7” featuring two Bikini songs with alternate vocal tracks where the lyrics are in English. This 7” is very rare… no one knows how many exist, but it is certainly very few. Viktor who wrote in called it “a Hungarian punk holy grail,” so don’t hold your breath waiting for a copy.

Both Dini and Viktor recommended several Hungarian bands for me to check out, but Dini also told me about his appearance on the long-running Canadian punk radio show Equalizing Distort in 2015. I was really intrigued when I saw his setlist for the show, but when I started playing it I was surprised to hear that, in addition to the songs, there’s also a lengthy interview with Dini about punk in Hungary. I had planned to let the radio show play in the background while I worked, but the interview was so interesting that I had to stop it and save the rest for a time when I can listen with full attention. If you didn’t already know, every episode of Equalizing Distort is preserved for posterity on the Internet Archive. Links to larger files on the Internet Archive can be finicky, and I couldn’t get the embedded player at the link above to work. However, if you go to the file’s page on the archive, click the link on the right side that says “VBR MP3,” and wait a good long while, you will (hopefully) be rewarded. Enjoy!

Now for today’s staff pick, which is another record I picked up while I was in Greece this summer:

Deus Ex Macina: Motorpsycho LP (Hitch-Hyke Records, 1991)

This is one of several records I bought on the suggestion of the owner of Art Rat Records. I’m thankful for the recommendation, because I’m not sure Motorpsycho would have stood out to me otherwise. Not that it doesn’t look cool, but the 1991 date, the longer song lengths (only one track under three minutes) and all the biker imagery (the back cover features the slogan “Body is the Motor / Rider is the Soul”) aren’t typically signals that something is going to be in my wheelhouse.

So, I was somewhat skeptical when I eventually threw this on the turntable, but it knocked me out immediately. First of all, it doesn’t sound at all like what I would have expected. Not that I knew what to expect from early 90s Greek biker punk, but I wouldn’t have expected this. The record starts with a tough-sounding mid-paced groove and a total skate rock riff. As the song develops I get a surfy vibe, particularly when the guitars ring out and the bass and drums keep charging forward at that head-nodding tempo. The vocals take a loooong time to kick in, and when they do they’re pretty minimal. After a couple of songs, I realized what it reminded me of: Agent Orange’s Living in Darkness. Not as surfy, not as California-sounding, but there’s something very similar there. As the record keeps spinning it just gets more and more exciting, particularly when they do that thing I love where the guitarist repeats a short rhythmic figure while the bass player does something more stretched-out and melodic underneath it.

I didn’t know anything about the band or the record and I had no idea what I was going to say in my staff pick, but when I did a little research on Deus Ex Macina, some things clicked together. As it turns out, Deus Ex Macina was started by two members of the band Αδιέξοδο (Adiexodo), whose album I also picked up while I was in Athens. I wrote about the Adiexodo album in a staff pick back in July. The Deus Ex Macina record is very different from the Adiexodo album, which is roughly recorded, rather primitively played, and has a tough, even thuggish, vibe. But there are some similarities too. When I wrote about Adiexodo, I pointed out how the guitarist is very rhythmically oriented, while the bass player is busier and more melodic, which is exactly what struck me about Deus Ex Macina. It’s very cool that a band like Adiexodo, who had a very primitive charm, found a way to develop that allowed to lean into their strengths without feeling watered down.

Looking at Discogs, Deus Ex Macina has a substantial discography with releases all the way up to mid-2010s. I haven’t yet explored, but if I pick up anything else maybe I’ll cover it in a future staff pick.

Continuing down the Eastern European punk rabbit hole I’ve been exploring for the past however long, let’s head to Hungary for my staff pick this week:

Nagy Feró És A Bikini: Hova Lett... LP (Start, 1983)

This LP sat on my want list for a couple years, long enough that I couldn’t remember much about it when I finally laid hands on it. I couldn’t even make sense of the artist’s name… what is the relationship between Nagy Feró and Bikini? Is this a split record? A collaboration? Something else entirely?

After giving it some thought, I remembered the route via which this record landed on my want list. Some years ago, Jonah Falco (of Fucked Up, Career Suicide, and a zillion snappily-written record descriptions for labels like Beach Impediment and La Vida Es Un Mus) was on the old What Are You Listening To?podcast / show. As one of his picks, he held up this sleeveless 7” from a Hungarian punk band called Bikini. I don’t think Jonah knew much about the record, but he said it was cool, and the combination of Jonah’s recommendation and my interest in eastern bloc punk prompted me to look up the single and listen to it. Of course the single got added to my want list (no luck yet… one hasn’t sold on Discogs since October 2024), but I guess I also liked what I heard enough to follow the links and explore the rest of Bikini’s discography, which is extensive. I added this LP, Hova Lett…, to my want list and saw plenty of copies on Discogs for less than $10, but always from European sellers. I hoped to find a copy on my travels in Europe, but I never did. Fast forward to a few weeks ago and a copy popped up for $12 from a US seller. The buy button was smashed with a quickness.

I had totally forgotten what the record sounded like, but I’ve been spinning it a bunch since it arrived. I’d call Hova Lett… a very energetic art-punk album bolstered by excellent playing and top-notch production. One of the few English-language reviews I found had this to say about the record: “Side A ends in the middle of a drum solo, this way a 3 minute song is cut into 2 parts. Yes, that's intentional. It says a lot about the album.” I’d respond by saying yes, I agree, but it doesn’t say everything about the record. There is a little bit of obtuseness / obnoxiousness, but most of the record is new wave-ish, sometimes leaning towards ska (think early XTC) and at others more riffy and rocking a la Tubeway Army. There are a few moments that are quite unexpected, like the strange medieval melody in “Ótyi-tyótyi - Ping-pong,” which sounds like something Hobbits would play on a pan flute as they’re marching through the shire. But there are also parts that are straight up ripping, like the second track, “Maradj Már.” This track is the only one that’s hardcore fast all the way through, but there are a handful of other moments on the album where they speed up to this ripping tempo. With the great production and the singer’s similar voice, these songs remind me of Mushi-era Stalin. If you’re reading this Jonah, check out “Maradj Már…” it’s even better than the two songs on the single.

As I prepared to write my staff pick I did some research that helped me understand a little more about how Hova Lett… fits into its context. First of all, the artist name: Nagy Feró is the leader of the band, so it’s an Iggy & the Stooges / Jesse & the Rippers-type situation where the band’s frontperson is so charismatic they get top billing. (Incidentally, you may also see his name written as Feró Nagy… in Hungarian (as in a lot of Asian languages) it’s conventional to put a person’s surname first and their given name second, so sometimes they flip it around to follow our name order convention.) Nagy Feró appears to be one of the prime movers of the Hungarian punk scene, having formed the band Beatrice, who released a cassette called 78 in 1979. I only found one song from that tape on YouTube, but it’s cool, with a chunky riff and quite aggressive vocals. Feró left Beatrice in 1982 and formed Bikini, releasing Hova Lett… in 1983 and then leaving Bikini (who continued on without him), eventually reforming Beatrice as his main project, which appears to still be active. I poked around the Beatrice and post-Faró Bikini material that is available online, and while I found a handful of cool moments, it seems like Hova Lett… is the moment where they really leaned into the energy and aggression and made something that might properly be called punk rock.

Judging by his Wikipedia page, Nagy Feró seems to be an antagonistic, polarizing frontperson in the Johnny Rotten mold. In the 70s, he referred to himself as "A Nemzet csótánya" (which translates to “roach of the nation”). That sounds pretty cool, but it also sounds like (as with so many other punk contrarians) he has also been associated with right-wing politics. In the 90s, he was a member of a Hungarian political party called the “Hungarian Justice and Life Party,” which sounds pretty bad. While Faró left the party in the 90s and claimed political independence, after a series of dissolutions and mergers the Hungarian Justice and Life Party was subsumed into something called the “Our Homeland Movement,” which appears to be one of the evil far-right, nativist political groups that have sprung up (and often seized a great deal of power) all over the world in the past several years. Bummer.

That’s all I have about this one. See you next week!

As I mentioned last week, I went up to Pittsburgh for a long weekend for this year’s Skull Fest. This year I rolled solo and got a small but nice place to stay with no roommates, which resulted in a very different experience than my previous Skull Fest, where not partying 24 hours per day felt like an uphill struggle. I took it very easy, going for long morning coffees where I sat and read outside for hours (the weather was amazing!), taking my sweet time getting to the gigs, and not putting pressure on myself to watch every band. I missed a lot of bands I would have liked to have seen, but even with my slower pace, the weekend was exhausting. I guess the solo drive, 8 hours each way, had something to do with that.

You may have heard the big story of the weekend: two members of Death Side were refused entry to the US. While it would have been totally understandable for them to cancel, they made things work by playing with one guitarist and enlisting Joe BB (from Fairytale, Salvaje Punk, No Fucker, and tons of other bands) on drums with something like two days notice. Everyone who was in the loop kept this very quiet… I had no idea about the situation until someone told me just before Death Side played. Despite the setbacks, I still thought Death Side was incredible. The lack of a second guitarist meant there was a hole in the sound (particularly on the leads, which Chelsea often harmonized on the recordings), but the band’s tightness, energy, and charisma, and the strength of the material (the set list was incredible, hitting most of their discography’s highlights) were so far beyond 99% of the bands I’ve ever seen that I was still blown away. As for the drums… wow. Death Side’s songs are burned into my brain and I’m sure I’d hear it immediately if anything was off, but Joe played everything note-perfect and with all the power and energy he brings to his own bands. Joe BB: undisputed hero of Skull Fest 16.

Death Side was the reason I went to Skull Fest this year and they delivered, but there were plenty of other highlights. I particularly enjoyed sets by Savage Pleasure, KOS, Lifeless Dark (it’s been too long since I’ve witnessed Ryan Abbott beat the hell out of a drum kit), the Hell, Alienator, the Nervous, and Consensus Madness. The older bands were pretty hit and miss. I love the State, but their young drummer didn’t seem like a good fit for the band. Mau Maus played a good set with a lot of energy, but the guitarist had this very processed, Fat Wreck-y guitar tone that kind of pulled me out of it. Final Conflict was alright, but they started their set sounding kind of sluggish, and I felt like they’d lost a step since I last saw them at the final Chaos in Tejas 13 years ago. I was, however, excited to buy a shirt with a full-color print of the Ashes to Ashes artwork at their merch table.

The other older band that played was UK crust legends Deviated Instinct. Ultimate Disaster had played with them on their UK tour a while back and they told me Deviated Instinct was good, but only had one original member and didn’t really play their old material (I did not fact check any of that, so don’t take it as gospel!). That’s fine by me, because I’m a Deviated Instinct n00b. I never owned any of their records until fairly recently, and when I’d checked out their early discography in the past, I never found my way in. Maybe that’s just because I was listening to low-quality YouTube rips. I often need the physical version to pull me into a band or a record, so perhaps it’s unsurprising that when I finally got a piece of Deviated Instinct vinyl to call my own, I fell head over heels.

Deviated Instinct: Guttural Breath LP (Peaceville, 1990)

This copy of Guttural Breath came in with a collection a few months back. Like I said, I’d only checked out Deviated Instinct’s earlier material, so Guttural Breath’s full-color cover, which takes conventional crust imagery (skulls, Celtic knots, barbed wire) and makes something new and distinctive out of it, was intriguing. It’s the kind of record you look at and think, “what on earth does that sound like?” because it just doesn’t look like anything else. I remember I took home and put it on the turntable, and as I listened I kept turning up the volume higher and higher. My wife walked in the house at some point and found me sitting in front of the stereo blasting this straight into my face at show-level volume. It was just so heavy and powerful… I loved the sound of the record so much I just wanted to bathe in it. I love how heavy the tones are, but what really strikes me is the ensemble playing on Guttural Breath. Deviated Instinct has these unique churning rhythms and odd, Celtic Frost-like tempo changes, and they executed them in a way that feels natural and organic rather than mechanical. I always think of Animosity / Technocracy-era COC when I listen to Guttural Breath, and I think that’s the reason… it’s a great band playing with near-telepathic communication.

While I fell in love with Guttural Breath, it hasn’t been part of my life long enough to know it inside out, and I couldn’t even tell you whether or not Deviated Instinct played any songs from it this weekend. However, despite the lineup changes, they still had that heavy and grooving sound, and live they scratched the same itch that listening to Guttural Breath does. If you have the opportunity, they’re well worth seeing.

Thanks so much to all the organizers, workers, and other folks who make Skull Fest happen, as well as all the bands that played, the folks who attended, and everyone else who made it a great weekend. And thanks also to everyone who said hi… sorry if I was awkward or weird. I’m doing my best out there!

Oh man, today has been a day. Let me tell you all about it in another installment of…

Tales from the Bins

I’ve been going back and forth with this woman over email, text, and phone calls since early this summer. She told me she has about 1,000 rock and blues LPs and lives about 45 minutes from Raleigh, but we just can’t seem to connect. After a few missed appointments, long lapses in communication, and other annoyances, we finally have an appointment set for this morning at 11:30. I told myself that if she cancels this time then I’m done with her, but when I text her this morning she confirms. I stop by U-haul to grab some boxes and hit the highway.

Her place is in one of those cute little towns dotted all over rural North Carolina, right off the main (well, the only) drag. I pull up and the house is charming, a mid-century building with a little garden in the front and tons of sculptures and tchotchkes in the yard and garden. It looks like the kind of place an older artist type would live. I get out of the car, and when I’m about fifteen feet from the door I’m smacked in the face with the distinctive stench of cat piss. The porch is covered in old, broken-down furniture and garbage. The woman answers the door, I introduce myself, and she lets me in, and the odor gets way, way more intense as I cross the threshold. The house is a total wreck, a maze of old furniture (way too much for the space), empty boxes (most of them from Chewy), waist-high stacks of bagged cat litter, and at least half a dozen litter boxes (all of them some degree of full). I don’t know how many cats are living there, but my guess is there must be at least eight or ten, and I heard at least one dog barking in the back room too (though I never saw it).

I hate to sound mean or judgmental because clearly these cats were rescues… there was one missing an eye and most of them were some fucked up in some way or another. God bless this woman for taking care of these animals, but this place was one of the nastiest living spaces I’ve ever been to look at a collection, and trust me when I say I’ve seen some real doozies. There was cat shit all over the place, flies buzzing around everywhere, and the cat piss odor was so strong that I had to restrain my gag impulse. Both the woman and a man who was apparently in one of the back rooms (I never saw him) were constantly coughing. I wanted to tell them they shouldn’t be living like this, but I didn’t want to be judgmental, so I just went about my business. Speaking of which… the records.

The woman showed me the records, which were on four shelves spaced around the dining room area, with a foot-wide path to each through the old furniture and other junk. Right away I could see the cats had been using the records as a scratching post for many years. The spines were all shredded. I thought about turning around and walking right out of there, but I just can’t not look through a pile of records… it’s not in my nature. I start on the first shelf, and there are a LOT of Beatles records. Which, honestly… whatever. A lot of people have a lot of Beatles records. They were clearly bought used and are in widely varying condition, but some are not bad. There’s also one of those discography box sets that came out in the early 80s, and while the box would need to be thrown away, the records inside appeared to be pristine, and we could definitely sell them individually. Then I move to the second shelf and there are thirty or forty Bowie albums. That’s when I was like, “fuck… there are cool records here. I’m not going to get out of here any time soon.”

I quickly formulated a plan. Before I got too deep, I offered the lady a per-record price if she let me go through and take what I felt like I could salvage. This was a price that I felt like made it worth my while to exist in this space for the couple of hours it would take me to go through the records, and for all the shit I would get from the staff when I brought all these nasty-ass records back for them to price. Honestly, I would have been just fine if—as is so often the case—she insisted she was sitting on a goldmine and needed to be compensated adequately. But she went for my proposal and I got to work.

As I went through the remaining shelves, the records got even better. There was a lot of 70s punk and new wave, with most of the big names from the early punk scene represented… the Clash, the Pistols, the Ramones, etc. A good amount of college rock like REM, later Hüsker Dü, and stuff like that. A lot of canon proto-punk and glam… Eno, Roxy Music, the Velvet Underground. A few more underground surprises, like Mission of Burma’s Vs., the first four Stiff Little Fingers albums… I could go on and on. And, as with the Beatles, a lot of the more popular / prolific artists had multiple copies of their records. There were probably two dozen Talking Heads LPs, multiples of all Patti Smith’s early records, and several other artists like that.

The cat claw damage on the spines was worse in some spots than others. A few of the shelves appeared to be mostly out of their reach, but some spots got it bad… I had to leave behind most of a very healthy Prince collection because they were just too fucked. The thing about cat claw marks, though, is that while they look terrible when records are shelved with the spine out, most of the time any individual record will just have a few marks on its spine and otherwise looks pretty decent from the front view. There were definitely issues other than the spine damage, though. The records clearly hadn’t been touched in years, probably decades, so some of the jackets were stuck together (thanks North Carolina humidity!). There was a thick coat of cat hair and dust across the top of everything. Just pulling them off the shelves induced fits of sneezing. I saw some silverfish running around too.

As I was going through the last shelf of records, the whole thing collapsed and a couple hundred LPs fell right on my head. The woman was in the other room when it happened, and she shouted, “are you OK?” I said “yeah, a couple hundred records just fell on my head.” No response… I just heard her go back to watching Instagram reels with her phone speaker on maximum volume.

After about two hours, I had a pile of around 400 LPs. Killer titles, and since I’d brushed off most of the dust and left behind the dross, they didn’t look too bad. I boxed them up, paid the lady, and got the fuck out of there. I’m slightly allergic to cats… just slightly. I own a cat and it only bothers me when I pet him he sits close to me for a long time. But when I was driving away I could feel my eyes swelling shut, my face itched in a way that could not be relieved, and my throat burned from the smell.

I am not a super clean person. I shower most every day and try to wash my hands several times a day, but I think a lot of the cult of cleanliness that consumes so many people is just bullshit invented to sell personal hygiene products. I have not worn deodorant for probably 20 years. There are definitely times when I go into a nice-ass suburban house and get the impression the people who live there think I’m scummy and gross. I remember earlier this summer I drove down to South Carolina to buy a collection, and at some point I got drowsy and pulled off at a highway rest stop to take a nap in the back seat of my car. When I woke up I was completely soaked in sweat, and as the sweat dried out on the rest of the drive, I noticed I was starting to smell really bad. When I got to my destination I fucking reeked, and I swear the dude winced when he let me in his house. (I still got his records, though!) All this to say that I drove straight from today’s buy to my house, where I immediately took a shower and threw all my clothes in the wash. It’s the only time I can recall doing that in my decade and a half of buying collections.

Let’s change gears completely and end on a more positive note. When I was up in Richmond last weekend I finally got a chance to visit Brian’s Books. It’s been open for a while, but even though I go to Richmond pretty often, I usually drive up there in the afternoon, get there in time for a gig, and make a late-night drive home right after. The shop was everything I expected / hoped for… basically the bookstore version of a cool-ass, highly curated record store. There are also a ton of zines (not just music) if you’re into those. I bought a pretty healthy stack, including this copy of Theodore Sturgeon’s More than Human, which I’ll make my staff pick for this week.

Unlike a lot of punks who are also big readers, I didn’t grow up on sci-fi. My best friend growing up was a heavy sci-fi / fantasy head, and he lent me a few of his favorites when we were early teens. I remember reading Heinlein, Asimov, and a few others, but they did not do it for me. Heinlein in particular really turned me off… it was just so masculine, to the point of being bro-y. I decided sci-fi wasn’t for me and actively avoided it for a long time, but later in adulthood my view softened. A lot of that has to do with getting into Star Trek, another thing I didn’t like when I was a kid. I loved the episodes of The Next Generation that explored classic philosophical problems, and I particularly loved Deep Space Nine and the way it engaged with multiculturalism, empire, and other big issues in a very thoughtful way. And then a few years ago I read a book by Ursula K. Le Guin and it cracked me wide open. I don’t even remember which book I started with because after reading it I immediately devoured everything by her I could get my hands on. It turns out I love sci-fi, but it has to be philosophically engaged and consonant with my values.

At some point I did some research to find more authors I might like and added some books to my “to read” list. (BTW, I keep my reading lists on Storygraph… if you’re on there follow me @hexenduction… I’d love to see what other folks are reading!) Theodore Sturgeon was one of those authors, and I picked up a few of his books at Brian’s. More Than Human, which I gather is one of his most well-regarded books, is the one I read first. The verdict? Yes, this is my kind of sci-fi. I won’t summarize it lest I spoil it for anyone, but I really loved the book’s third and final section. The first two sections set up and explore the book’s premise, and in the third section Sturgeon explicitly takes on the moral and ethical implications of that premise, and by extension goes into some pretty deep stuff on what ethics and morality are and why they have them. This is what separates good from mediocre sci-fi for me. Yeah, it’s cool to hear creative premises about technology or speculation about the future or whatever, but for that to feel really significant, I need some kind of philosophical payoff. And that payoff in More than Humanis huge. I’m still rolling it around in my head, and probably will be for a while.

Also, now that I’m done with the book I look forward to not getting White Zombie’s “More Human than Human” stuck in my head every time I pick it up.

That’s all for this week. Tomorrow morning I’m heading up to Pittsburgh for Skull Fest. (Death Side!) I hope to see some newsletter readers and other friends while I’m there.

Photo of the high-flyin' Invertebrates by the legend Chris Boarts-Larson.

It’s been a super busy week for me with virtually no time sitting by the turntable, so I don’t have a proper staff pick for you, but I’ll tell you what I’ve been up to anyway. Of course it all revolves around music anyway. I am who I am, as Popeye wisely said.

I went to see the Briefs play in Raleigh a few days before I wrote my last staff pick, but I didn’t mention it last week. I love the Briefs! I’ve mentioned them in the newsletter a few times and Jeff wrote a whole staff pick about them a few years ago, but this was only the second time I’d seen them live. The first time was well over 20 years ago, when I drove down to Charlotte to watch them play an all-too-brief (LOL!) set opening for the Real McKenzies. I had no idea who the Real McKenzies were going in, and that was… something. Anyway, the Briefs were visibly older than the last time I saw them and had swapped out a few members, but they still sounded great. My favorite Briefs record is Off the Charts, so I was pleased that we got several songs off that, including my favorite, “Ain’t It the Truth.” I hadn’t revisited the Briefs’ catalog in a while so it wasn’t fresh in my mind, and throughout their set I kept thinking, “oh yeah, THIS song!” A great way to spend a Monday night.

On Friday afternoon I drove up to Richmond to catch a screening of Jawbreaker, the documentary film about Anti-Cimex. I have several friends who had seen the movie and they all told me they enjoyed it, but that it wasn’t what you might expect from an Anti-Cimex documentary. So I went into the screening with tempered expectations and left very pleasantly surprised. It seems like there isn’t much killer footage of the band that survives, so you don’t get anything like a visual equivalent of the sensory assault of listening to Anti-Cimex’s records. However, I thought the movie did a good job of exploring what made the band tick. You get well-developed portraits of each member (they were an interesting conglomeration of personalities, something I knew nothing about before the film) and they talked a lot about the philosophy and intent behind Anti-Cimex’s music. I’m very happy to have seen the movie, and even happier the money I paid for admission to the screening went directly to the filmmakers rather than some shitty streaming service.

Despite the fact that I was sick (I’m pretty sure I was running a fever during the Cimex movie… apologies to anyone I had close contact with!), I stayed in Richmond another day to catch the homecoming show of the big Public Acid / Invertebrates tour. I’m not sure if I mentioned it in the newsletter, but a crew of Raleigh folks drove down to Charlotte a few weeks ago to catch the first date of the tour, so I got to see both the first and last shows. I was curious if there would be any change or development over the weeks, but both Invertebrates and Public Acid were exactly the same amount of killer on the last date as they were on the first. They have achieved maximum rippage and there’s just nowhere to go from there. Alongside the returning heroes we also got sets from Ultimate Disaster (who played several new songs, I believe), Destruct, and K.O.S., making for an insanely stacked lineup on which everyone thoroughly delivered. The show sold out, and all the bodies packed into the venue on a hot August night made the place a real sauna. I bought over $40 worth of Liquid Death beverages at the bar and my clothes were soaked through with sweat by the end of the night. Still, there’s no way I’d rather spend my time than going to a gig this great.

I got a short, one-day break before K.O.S. landed in Raleigh for their gig here. There was a low-energy, Monday-night vibe hanging in the air, but I thought the bands were really good and KOS pummeled. While I was scared to get too close to them in Richmond for fear of being moshed into oblivion, I got to stand right against the stage and get blasted with sound at the Raleigh gig. K.O.S. are master craftspeople of d-beat, and they do it so well they make it look easy. But when you listen closely you realize how much they mix up tempos, song structures, and arrangements to keep the energy level so high and how precise their playing is, like the way they use volume pedals to switch instantly from silence to full-frontal noise assault in perfect unison. Much like Destruct, K.O.S. sweats the details in order to make their chaotic, noisy hardcore hit with maximum impact, and their care shows. They’re one of the most crushing hardcore bands you can see live in our day and age.

So yeah, that’s my week. I still haven’t completely shaken off the sickness that was bugging me at the Cimex movie, so after I get the newsletter out tonight I’m looking forward to finally getting a decent night’s sleep. So, until next week…

In my last staff pick two weeks ago, I wrote about this joker who lured me to an isolated island off the coast of North Carolina with the promise of cool used records, only to vanish when I actually arrived. After the newsletter went out, my friend Shane at Black Water Records in Portland wrote to tell me something very similar had happened to them recently. Once he gave me details, it was clear we had been dealing with the same person… they even sent us the same pictures and videos of the records they were purportedly selling. Then, a few hours later, I learned about this thread on Instagram started by the store Limited to One in New York, who was targeted by the same scammer. I guess this person was using the same M.O. to scam record stores across the US and Canada. Sadly, they succeeded a few times, too. Stay safe out there, folks!

Last week was my annual beach vacation with my family in Nags Head, North Carolina. This year my wife rented a surfboard for the week. I have surfed a few times, but hadn’t tried in many years. I guess I don’t really work my paddling muscles much in daily life, because as soon as I tried to paddle into a wave, I pulled a muscle in my chest. Honestly, it was pretty bad, and for the first day I couldn’t take a deep breath without wincing in pain. It’s still bothering me more than a week later, and while it’s significantly better, sneezing still makes me yelp in pain. So, besides watching out for scammers, please stretch!

Most of my listening time since I last wrote has been taken up with catching up on new releases. There are a lot of great ones! The KOS LP is on constant rotation (well, the digital version… we’re still waiting on the vinyl), the new reissues on General Speech, the Carp, Cel Ray, Beast of Beast, and the Dream World LP on Sorry State have all been getting a lot of time. I’ve also gotten previews of a couple of cool upcoming releases, including the new Rat Cage album we have up for pre-order and the upcoming Kohti Tuhoa album, which is jaw-droppingly good. If only there were more hours in the day to listen to all this great stuff!

In the evenings, I’ve been making my way through the stack of vinyl I bought when I went down to Charlotte last month. At the mighty Lunchbox Records I picked up both volumes of the Tobacco A-Go-Go compilation, but when I listened to the first volume it didn’t make much of an impression, so it took me several weeks to get around to playing Volume 2. This one hit me way harder, and it’s my staff pick for this week:

Various: Tobacco A-Go-Go Vol. II: 60s Carolina Psychedelia LP (Blue Mold, 1987)

I swear these Tobacco A-Go-Go compilations were a staple of North Carolina record store bins for years, so I’m surprised to see on Discogs that the first volume came out in 1984 and the second volume in 1987. Perhaps they were repressed, or maybe someone knew someone who had access to some dead stock, because I swear I recall seeing them in the new bins for 15−20 for years. I never picked them up, always figuring I’d do so next time. Then a couple of years go by without seeing them, they pop up in a used bin for twice the price, and suddenly I find them irresistible. Funny how that works.

A big reason Volume 2 hits harder for me is that it starts with an absolute screamer, “Abba” by Charlotte’s the Paragons. I was familiar with this song thanks to a bootleg of the single that came out a few years ago. We ordered a big stack of that bootleg and almost all our copies were warped beyond playability when they arrived. That stack of warped 7”s sat on my desk for years. I can’t remember what I did with them… maybe threw them away? Anyway, “Abba” is a scorcher, a high-energy garage rocker with a monster singalong chorus. It reminds me of one of my 60s favorites, the Open Mind, but way rawer and nastier. A top-shelf nugget, if you ask me.

The other standout to me is Raleigh’s the Marke V, the only band on the compilation with two tracks. Their 1967 single “Pay” b/w “The Leader” was so good they had to give us both sides. “Pay” smashes the Seeds, the Byrds, and the 13th Floor Elevators together with a great vocal melody, while “The Leader” is an old-fashioned garage stomper with a killer call-and-response chorus and an instrumental break that again makes me think of the Elevators and the Byrds’ “Eight Miles High.” Since this is from right here in Raleigh, I can hold on to a fantasy that one day I’ll stumble across a copy. Who knows, maybe there’s a copy in the dozens of boxes of unsorted 45s I have in our storage space? I would only be slightly surprised.

While the Paragons and the Marke V are the highlights, the comp is a solid listen overall, with the other tracks ranging from syrupy Beatles / Herman’s Hermits-style pop to bluesy proto-hard rock and plenty in between. I like some tracks more than others, but there isn’t anything I’m inclined to skip. These tracks are short and punchy anyway, so even if something doesn’t move you, you’ll be past it and on to the next one in less than three minutes.

That’s what I’m feeling today. Until next week…

Last week I wrote about an interesting collection call, and somewhere in there I noted that while I often have fun on these trips, it can go sideways just as often. That happened earlier this week. Sometime last week, we got a message via Sorry State’s Facebook page about an interesting-looking collection. The person sent videos of themselves flipping through the records and they seemed like good titles in good condition, and they said they were flexible on price and mainly concerned with getting the records out of their house rather than getting a ton of money for them. All that sounded great to me. As we were talking, they mentioned they were on this island called Ocracoke on North Carolina’s Outer Banks, which happens to be my and my wife’s favorite beach. Ocracoke isn’t easy to get to—there’s no bridge, so you have to reach the island by ferry—and, assuming I wouldn’t be willing to make the trip, they offered to ship the records to me. They also mentioned me paying a deposit before they shipped the records, which was a bit of a red flag. I told them I didn’t think it was a good idea to send money to a stranger, but that since my wife and I like Ocracoke so much, I’d be willing to drive out there and pick up the records. They said they were fine with that, but then I was on the road for a few days and wasn’t able to reply to any of their messages. They pinged me on Saturday and asked what was up, and I told them I was ready to schedule a time to come out to the island.

While all this was going on, I couldn’t shake the feeling there was something fishy going on. Asking me to make a payment up front was a red flag, but the flip videos of the records seemed legit. So far the evidence was inconclusive, so I investigated further. The Facebook profile that was sending these messages was locked and had no public information aside from a couple of photos that were so pixelated you couldn’t really distinguish the person’s features. I tried searching for the person’s (very common-sounding) name along with keywords like “Ocracoke,” but couldn’t turn up any solid information. The whole thing seemed weird, and I kept telling other folks the whole story in the hope they’d have some kind of insight about whether or not I should trust this person.

Then, on Sunday afternoon, they wrote me again to ask if I could come pick up the records on Monday. Along with the message, they sent a photo of the records boxed up in their kitchen, ready to go. I told them that should be fine, but I needed to check my calendar and talk to my wife to make sure I could get away, and that I’d message them back shortly. I messaged them back about an hour later confirming I could come. I waited through the afternoon and into the evening for a reply, checking my messages constantly, but never heard anything back. Of course my wife Jet wanted to come with me and sneak in some beach time, so she was bugging me to figure out what we were going to do. I wanted to wait for their reply, but a ferry to the island and a place to stay the night (it’s too long of a trip to make it there and back to Raleigh in a day) had to be booked ahead of time. I showed Jet our conversation and she also wasn’t really sure what to make of the whole thing, but she really wanted to go to the beach and she said the worst case scenario was that we would end up at our favorite beach with nothing to do. So I booked the trip and messaged the person to tell them I was coming.

We got up at 6AM Monday morning in order to drive across the state and catch the 10AM ferry we’d booked. Literally as we are driving onto the ferry, the person writes back and says they can’t meet today after all. I told them I’d be on the island until 2PM on Tuesday, and if they could find 30 minutes for me to look at their records and load them up, I’d be available at any time. They didn’t write back the entire time we were on the island. This morning (Wednesday) I finally got a reply saying they could ship the records if I paid them $500 up front. Ugh. Now it’s their turn not to get a reply.

So, the worst case scenario came to pass, and obviously it wasn’t bad. Jet and I got to spend a little bit of time on the beach and eat some good food, and our dog Patti had an absolute blast. I’m way behind on work now, but I’ll live. I just have a lot of stuff I need to get done before my actual planned beach vacation next week.

As Jet and I were driving home, she asked me to pick what to listen to next, and browsing her Spotify, I came across Solid Space’s Space Museum, which I hadn’t listened to in some time. Space Museum originally came out on cassette in 1982, but I first heard about it in 2012, when Sorry State carried a vinyl bootleg of the tape. As I remember, that bootleg was distributed mostly within the punk/hardcore world and a bunch of minimal synth heads must have missed out on it, because it wasn’t long before the bootleg was selling for hundreds of dollars on Discogs. Thankfully the mighty Dark Entries gave Space Museum the official reissue it deserved in 2017. I try to keep that in stock as much as possible, but it looks like we’re sold out right now. As for me, I decided to keep my bootleg rather than upgrading to the official reissue. It sounds great and works just fine for me.

While we were listening to Space Museum, Jet asked what this style of music is called. I told her I usually hear Solid Space called minimal synth, but that never quite made sense to me because the synth isn’t really at the center of the arrangements. The music is minimal and there is synthesizer, but the synths are generally there more as background texture, with the vocals and guitars holding down most of the melody. It definitely wouldn’t be the same without the synths, but if you’re expecting pure bleep bloop, you might be disappointed. If you love great post-punk pop songs, though, Space Museumis absolutely brilliant. Every song is different from the last, but all of them are equally brilliant. Give it a listen if you haven’t heard it before.

Until next week, watch out for the scammers…

So, what is with the odd collection of items in the above pic? All will be revealed on this week’s episode of…

TALES FROM THE BINS

Last Friday I made an appointment to drive down toward Charlotte and check out a record collection. On paper, it was a drive I probably shouldn’t have made. The person only had about 250 LPs and it sounded like pretty run-of-the-mill classic rock stuff, but we’ve been kind of low on inventory lately, the lady was very nice over email, and if I set the appointment early enough in the day, I could make a day out of it, driving the rest of the way to Charlotte to hit a couple of record shops and get some food. So, somewhat against my better judgment, I made the appointment and left bright and early Friday morning.

After driving for around two hours, I pulled in the driveway of a cute little rural house and knocked on the door. The woman let me in and she had kindly put out all the records so they were super accessible for me. The 45s were on a folding table for easy perusal, and the LPs were in white boxes on the floor with plenty of space to browse and maneuver. Of course I went for the LPs first, and as we chit-chatted I could see right away that I wasn’t going to be interested in these records. There were four boxes of LPs and the first box was almost entirely pre-Beatles pop music (which no one really buys anymore), and the jackets all had seam splits and heavy wear around the edges. As I went through the rest of the boxes, there were some 60s and 70s rock titles we could probably sell, but most of them weren’t in good enough condition. After flipping through all the albums, I decided to go ahead and give the lady my assessment, letting her know that I could probably find 10 or 15 usable LPs in her collection, but that I thought it would probably be better for her to keep the collection together and try to unload it herself in a lot via Facebook Marketplace or something similar.

She asked me some questions about how she should make the listing and I gave her suggestions and instructions. Then she gestured toward another box on the floor and said, “and I have no idea what I’m going to do with all this.” The box was full of reel-to-reel tapes, not the 7”-sized reels that most consumers used, but the smaller reels that I think were more typically used by radio stations. I started to give her my standard spiel about reel-to-reel tapes (the gist: it’s an extremely niche market I have little or no experience with) while I poked through the box to see if I could learn any more about the tapes. There was a wooden plaque in the box with the name Gordon Solie on it, and I blurted out something like “oh, wow… Gordon Solie.” And she said, “yeah, he was my dad.”

Once she realized I knew who her dad was, the stories started flowing. I remembered Gordon Solie from my brief fascination with wrestling when I was a young kid. We weren’t able to watch WWF events, so Hulk Hogan and Roddy Piper and that whole crew were a mystery to me, but they showed WCW matches on our local cable channel and I watched them all the time. The Four Horsemen, the Road Warriors, the Rock N Roll Express… that was my era. My parents even took my brother and I to a few matches in Norfolk and Hampton when we were kids. Solie’s daughter told me about how he started out in broadcasting and was an auto race announcer early in his career alongside calling wrestling matches. She told me about the wrestlers she got to meet when she was a kid and told me some of her dad’s many stories.

I was having a blast chit-chatting with her about all this stuff, and when she saw how interested I was, she dug up copies of two books about her dad she helped write. I read a good chunk of one this weekend and I’ve really enjoyed it. I love biographies that shed light on worlds I don’t know about, but I read so much about musicians who grew up in the 50s and 60s in the United States and the UK that I feel like I’m in a bit of a rut when it comes to those subjects. But Solie grew up in Minneapolis in the 30s and 40s and moved to Florida after that. His dream was to be a broadcaster and he was clearly a personable guy who put himself in the middle of a lot of little interesting worlds, like local broadcasting in the Tampa Bay area in the 50s, the emerging world of stock car racing, and of course professional wrestling. This is the world my grandparents grew up in, and I’ve really enjoyed how the book takes me there.

Of course, since nowadays punk rock is a much bigger part of my life than pro wrestling, when I hear Gordon Solie’s name, the first thing that pops into my head is the band Gordon Solie Motherfuckers, whom I love. I had to ask the lady, “do you know there’s a punk rock band named after your father?” She said yes, she was aware, and that she had written them to ask why they wanted to use her father’s name. I told her that I knew the guys in the band were wrestling fanatics and they were probably just big fans. I left it there. I could not bring myself to say the word “motherfuckers” in front of this sweet lady.

She was very concerned on my behalf that I had driven all the way from Raleigh and not bought her records, but I wasn’t too worried… I mostly just wanted to get out of town and I was stoked to meet her, hear some cool stories, and get two interesting books. But as we were chatting, I noticed a Beatles Mobile Fidelity box set sitting in the corner of the room. I asked what was up with that, and she said it was missing the white album, but that it was her father’s. Apparently father and daughter shared a love of the Beatles and he bought the box for them to enjoy together. I looked the box over, and it turned out it wasn’t missing a disc; she must have remembered wrong. After checking the condition of all the LPs, I told her what I thought it was worth and what I could pay her, and she was very excited to sell it to me. I know Dominic hates these expensive Beatles boxes (we’ve had them numerous times before) because they take a long time to sell and invite punishment from meticulous Beatles collector types, but picking this up made this lady’s day and meant that today’s trip wasn’t a financial write-off for us.

So yeah, anyone want to buy a really expensive Beatles box set once owned by Gordon Solie?