Staff Picks

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?

A few weeks ago I left you with a cheeky cliff-hanger about a record I was very stoked to score while I was in Athens. I’m not writing about that record this week, though, so you’ll have to keep tuning in if you want that mystery resolved. However, my staff pick this week is another record I picked up in Athens, and I’ve actually listened to it way more than the record I was most excited about:

Αδιέξοδο: .38 12” (Enigma Records, 1986)

Sadly, I didn’t score an original of this record. It’s not even the 2013 official reissue, but a more recent bootleg. I was happy to pick it up, though, as I don’t recall ever seeing this bootleg before, and even if I had been lucky enough to find an original, I probably wouldn’t have been willing to drop big money on it since I hadn’t heard it before buying this boot. Now that I’ve heard it, though, the original pressing is definitely on my want list.

Despite being mystified by the Greek alphabet, I recognized .38 when I came across it in an Athens record shop because I’d seen it listed in the handful of 80s Greek punk discographies I’d found online and because Αδιέξοδο (whose name in Roman letters is Adiexodo and translates to “Dead End”) has two tracks on the 1984 Greek hardcore punk compilation Διατάραξη κοινής ησυχίας. Διατάραξη κοινής ησυχίας has been my Rosetta Stone when it comes to 80s Greek punk. I’m sure I’ll write a staff pick on that record at some point, but as much as I’ve listened to and liked it, as I’ve tracked down records by the bands who appeared on the compilation, I’ve been surprised to find their own records are mostly even better than their contributions to the compilation.

That’s certainly the case with .38, which arrived in 1986, two years after Διατάραξη κοινής ησυχίας. I don’t know when .38 was recorded, but if it was a few years after the comp, the band doesn’t really show any of the marks of “maturity” that can dilute a great hardcore punk band’s intensity. .38 is a nasty, raw beast, with a recording that reminds me of Blitz’s All Out Attack with its harsh and buzzy guitar sound and venomously barked vocals. Alongside the raw and in-your-face recording (note: the original pressing might not be as blown out… there’s no way for me to know), Αδιέξοδο wields their instruments like a rusty shiv, with a menacing sound that makes me think of the most primitive-sounding 80s French oi! bands like L'Infanterie Sauvage and R.A.S.

Look past that menacing veneer, though, and you find a record that is surprisingly musical. Like a lot of my favorite post-punk bands, Αδιέξοδο inverts the guitarist and bassist’s typical roles, with the guitarist playing more repetitive, rhythmic lines while the bass lines are busier and more melodic. I’m a total sucker for that. And while the guitar sound is so blown out that you hardly notice at first, the guitar work is actually very cool too, mostly sticking to big, chunky chords, but often emphasizing the off beats in a way that makes the songs sound very alive rhythmically, which wouldn’t have been the case with a Ramones-style down-picker. Altogether it creates a unique combination of immediacy and atmosphere, kind of like Hodges from the 4 Skins fronting Warsaw-era Joy Division.

Alongside .38 and the compilation tracks, Αδιέξοδο released three split cassettes with other Greek bands. While I don’t have much hope of ever finding these tapes, one of them—a split with Η Γενιά Του Χάους, who also appeared on the Διατάραξη κοινής ησυχίας compilation—got the vinyl treatment from Scarecrow Records in 2014. Better yet, the vinyl adds several bonus tracks from each band. Given all these cassette releases came out before .38, which appears to be Αδιέξοδο’s coupe de grace, I will keep my expectations low. I’m not any rush to find them, though, as I’m a long way from soaking up everything .38 has to offer.

Prisão photo by Piotr from Traume. If you’re trying to eavesdrop on K-Town, his Instagram (@xmoroccox) is the one to watch.

In my last staff pick I promised to write about this year’s K-Town Hardcore fest. Now that I’m home and the fest is a week and a half in the past, a minute-by-minute rundown feels superfluous, but I’ll try to hit the highlights. Before I get into the nitty gritty, I’ll give you my standard spiel about K-Town. All due respect to those of you who take on the monumental and thankless task of putting on a fest, but K-Town is my favorite fest in the world. First (and most importantly for me), they always book the sickest bands, and I can’t think of another current fest whose lineup fits so snugly with my personal taste. Second, I love everything about how the fest is run. K-Town is conceived and executed entirely by volunteers, and they are a truly radical organization that puts anarchist ideas and philosophies into practice without ignoring the realities of the world we live in. There are no sponsorships or other corporate BS, but the bands still get paid (and a bunch of money gets donated to important charitable causes) and there’s plenty of the stuff we all love like records and merch and booze. Everything runs like clockwork, and the organizers seem to have thought of everything in advance. The result is a great vibe for the entire weekend. I always say that K-Town is the best place to see a band. Between the great sound and the always-enthusiastic crowd, you’re all but guaranteed to be watching bands at their very best.

While a lot of people come to K-Town for the hangs and only watch a handful of sets, I’m a punk nerd at heart and usually try to watch as many bands as I can. In the past I’ve watched nearly every band, but this year I tried not to put too much pressure on myself to catch every single set. Watching so many bands is physically grueling, and there were lots of friends I wanted to catch up with, which is impossible to do when you’re crammed in a sweatbox with hundreds of other people while a hardcore band rages at maximum intensity and volume. So, sadly, I missed a lot of bands I would have liked to see, particularly during the day shows and earlier in the day on the main shows. I really wish I could tell you about seeing Status Symbol, White Collar, Phosphore, Surrogates, and the Social, but sadly I missed all these sets.

Friday was K-Town’s first and longest day, with Bootlicker kicking off the final set of the night at 1:45 AM, by which time I was hobbling around like the old man I am. They still ripped, though… the crowd went nuts and I was stoked to see them for the first time after missing their set at Skull Fest a few years ago. They also played three covers, which seems excessive on paper, but kept the rage-o-meter in the red. The Berserk was an early highlight. Even though they’re from Philadelphia, this was my first time seeing them, and despite the early hour they brought an unhinged energy and danger that stood out among the more polished bands that dominated this year’s bill. Strong Boys were another Friday highlight. I’ve liked their records, but their chunky, straightforward hardcore (which reminded me a lot of 86 Mentality) made the crowd go wild, and the band’s queer presentation undercut the macho vibes that can turn me off of tough-sounding hardcore. Prisão was my favorite band of the first day, though. I’d seen them play in Stockholm last year, but they were on fire at K-Town, their set a blur of bodies (primarily the singer Lucas’s) flying through the air. Every so often, I’m watching a band and realize they’re at the height of their powers, that they’re achieving a state of transcendence that is always fleeting, so you have to savor it whenever you encounter it. That’s how I felt watching Prisão’s set, and there’s no feeling like it in the world. Oh, and watch for their new 7” coming soon on Sorry State :)

Feeling physically wrecked from Friday’s marathon, I missed the matinee show and the first chunk of the main show on Saturday. After hearing so many Canadian friends talk about Siyahkal I made sure to catch their set, though, and it was heavy, intense, and memorable. After them was one of my must-sees for the fest, Sorry State’s own Psico Galera. They played a scorching set comprised (almost?) entirely of songs from their recently-released LP on Sorry State, and while I got the impression their strange and complex brand of hardcore went over some people’s heads, I thought they killed it. Every year I’ve gone to K-Town a couple of Sorry State bands have played, and when I watch them I always get this giddy feeling because we put out the best bands. Saturday ended with a mighty one-two punch with blazing sets from Hacker and Skitkids. I liked Hacker’s records, but they didn’t prepare me for how ferocious they were live, their singer a kinetic ball of venomous rage ping-ponging across the stage for the entire sweat-soaked set. And then Skitkids closed Saturday with a positively triumphant set. This was their first show in many years, and while I can be wary of reunion bands, I can’t imagine a single person walked away from Skitkids’ set disappointed. They were on fire, opening (and closing!) with their classic intro and blazing through a set that didn’t let up for a second. The band was super well-rehearsed, playing their dense and complex music with incredible precision and power while commanding the crowd like the veterans they are. My clothes were completely saturated with sweat by the time it was over, but it was the most fun I’ve had watching a band in some time.

Sunday is always a little more chill at K-town, since everyone is a bit tired by this point and the crowd thins out as people start making their way back home for work on Monday. However, for my money Sunday had the most jam-packed lineup of the fest’s three days. Sunday kicked off with a can’t miss block of four bands: Traumatizer, Indikator B, Tiikeri, and Ayucaba. Traumatizer was killer, one of those bands that’s just stupidly good at their instruments, and watching them I was amazed that a band this killer was playing first, but that’s a testament to how stacked today’s lineup was. Next up was Croatia’s Indikator B, and even though I saw them play in Raleigh just a few weeks ago, I was pumped to see them again. I haven’t stopped listening to their recent 7” since it came out, and their set was blistering. There are very few bands out there who sound as classic as Indikator B, and I noticed many of the big 80s hardcore nerds in attendance made it a point to watch their. After Indikator B was Tiikeri, and while their melodic sound was an outlier on the fest’s lineup, the band members are familiar faces from the hardcore scene and they play with the energy and intensity of a hardcore band. It’s funny, though, when I looked around me, the front of the stage was crowded with folks from the US, Canada, and the UK… is there something about Tiikeri that appeals particularly to the anglophone world? I couldn’t tell you… I just know I love ‘em. After that was Ayucaba, and there was a buzz in the air as people packed in the room while they set up; you could tell they were on a lot of people’s must-see lists. Their LP was one of my most listened-to records of last year, but they were a different beast live. They played super tight, but the live mix emphasized the bulldozing rhythm section over the hooky guitar leads that sat at the front of the LP’s mix. Also, their style was impeccable, which certainly added to the experience. And they ended their set with a scorching English Dogs cover from To the Ends of the Earth, one of my favorite records ever. Sadly, I missed the next couple of bands, but I made it back in for a wild closing set from hometown favorites JJ and the A’s. They handed out mojitos to the crowd, filled the room with inflatable pool toys, and brought out a big-ass cake, making for a wild party atmosphere. I hear they capped off their set with an Inepsy cover that made the punks go wild, but stupid me skipped out a few minutes early to beat the rush for fresh air.

So yeah, another K-Town in the books. Thank you so much to all the bands, friends, volunteers, and everyone else who made it such a great weekend. Hopefully I’ll see you all next year.

Last week I wrote my staff pick from Stockholm, and today’s comes from Athens, Greece. When I conceived this trip back in January I decided I would take a side trip on my own between my friend’s wedding and K-town, but I ended up waiting until the very last minute to plan this side trip. (Honestly, I was in such a bad place mental health-wise that I wasn’t sure if I was going to go on this trip at all.) I looked at a few different cities, but after searching for accommodation in Athens and realizing how much cheaper it would be to go here than any of the other cities I was looking at, I pulled the trigger. I’d never been to Athens and always wanted to go, and now seemed like the perfect time. It turned out to be a great choice.

Arriving in Athens directly from Stockholm, though, was a big culture shock. This wasn’t helped by my physical state when I landed. My flight left Stockholm at 6AM, which meant I needed to be at the airport by 4AM, which meant I needed to leave central Stockholm by 3:30AM. The day before leaving I still hadn’t really recovered from jet lag or adjusted to the crazy long days in Sweden, so my sleep schedule was all flipped around. I decided to take a short nap in the evening then stay up until it was time to leave at 3:30. I might have slept a few minutes on the plane, but when I touched down in Athens I definitely had that insane, I’ve-been-up-all-night feeling. I made my way from the airport to the train station without any problems, but I had a little freakout when I was trying to figure out which train to get on and the signs were only written in Greek script. I can’t remember if I was looking at Google Maps or something else, but all the names I had were in Roman script and bore little resemblance to what was on the signs. I figured it out eventually… not that it was hard, since there’s only one train from the airport and it goes directly to where I needed to go.

It really hit home how far I traveled when I popped out of the metro station at Monastiraki, which is the neighborhood where I’m staying. In Stockholm the weather was cool and damp and everything is clean, new, and precisely ordered and managed. Athens felt chaotic by comparison. The sun blasted me like a laser beam, the air was hot and dry, the cobblestone sidewalks and streets were full of missing bricks, there’s graffiti everywhere, all the signs are in that incomprehensible Greek script, and the streets were crowded with people, their boisterous chatting and occasional yelling a marked contrast to Sweden, where nearly every person seemed to be wearing airpods and walking determinedly in a single direction. This new environment was overwhelming, but not unwelcoming, and after making it to my room (where they kindly let me check in four hours early) and taking a short nap, I was ready to hit the town.

I typed “vegan” into google maps, decided on a place, and started walking. On my way to the restaurant, I turned a corner and unexpectedly caught my first view of the Acropolis, which hit me kind of hard. Even though I was famished, I had to stop for a minute, sit on a ledge, and just look at it. I’d see much better views of the Acropolis in the coming days, but in that moment it really struck me that I was looking at something two and a half thousand years old. After sitting with that feeling for a minute, I followed the directions to the restaurant and ate a vegan mushroom gyro that blew my mind. Even better, it only cost 5 euros and 90 cents. By the time I leave here, my body is going to be made of like 80% vegan gyro and souvlaki molecules.

I wrote in last week’s staff pick about how I like seeing major historical sights, and that’s mostly what I’ve done in Athens, alongside checking out record stores, eating, and trying to keep up with Sorry State work from my laptop. (I’m seven hours ahead of Raleigh time, and I’ve been spending most evenings working so I’ll have a little bit of overlap with the crew’s working hours back home.) As you might expect, the historical stuff is pretty mind-blowing. Early in my stay I took a day trip to Delphi and visited the Temple of Apollo there, which housed the Oracle of Delphi. The Oracle of Delphi sounds like something from mythology, but it was a real thing, and for hundreds of years, throngs of people queued up there in the hopes of gaining some type of insight from the priestess who was said to communicate directly with Apollo. Another big one was seeing the Theatre of Dionysus on the southern slope of the Acropolis. While I’m a firm believer in the adage “there’s no first anything,” it was pretty amazing to see what might reasonably be called the world’s oldest theater, where the idea of theater itself was born (not a certain strain or genre or school of theater, but theater full stop). Yet another highlight was just this morning, when I visited the Benaki Museum of Greek Culture. The museum is packed with cool stuff, but my favorite was their collection of neolithic artifacts, which included pottery shards and flint tools from the early neolithic period, as far back as 6,500 B.C.E. At nearly ten thousand years old, one guidebook I read called these items the earliest human-made artifacts one is ever likely to see in their lifetime.

Looking at all this very old stuff, I’m struck both by how close and how far that history seems from here and now. On one hand I’m so physically close to these things that date back thousands of years, but on the other hand most of those artifacts really show their age. That’s particularly apparent at the Acropolis, where the site, the buildings, and the sculptures and artifacts that once populated it have all been ravaged by time, the weather, war, changes in culture, and everything else that has happened in the intervening two thousand-odd years. These are ruins, after all, and they’re pretty ruined. It’s kind of frustrating to go through the Acropolis museum, which collects all the artifacts from the Acropolis site (except, of course, for the very important ones that are controversially still on display at the British Museum), and look at what amounts to rubble. Yet I’m glad whoever manages these historical sites has largely resisted the temptation to build over them a Disneyland-like approximation of what we think things used to be like. I’m sure that’s a huge temptation, as the handful of artifacts that are super well-preserved are pretty amazing. In particular, I’m thinking of this life-size bronze sculpture of a charioteer in the museum at Delphi. Very few large bronze pieces survive from the classical period because they were almost all melted down and recycled (depressingly, I bet a lot of them ended up as weapons), but this sculpture (though missing an arm), is almost completely intact, right down to the eyelashes. That sculpture is so lifelike as to be uncanny, and, looking into its face, the two and a half thousand year gap felt bridged for just a moment.

This ain’t “Sorry State Art History,” though, so y’all are probably wondering about the record situation in Athens. As usual, I’ve tried to hit up as many shops as possible while I’m here, and there are a lot of record shops in Athens. As I mentioned last time, money is tight on this trip, and while I’ve left nearly every shop empty-handed, I still enjoy checking them out. Plus, even if you don’t buy anything, searching out record stores usually gets you to the cool, interesting parts of a city.

There are actually several shops in the touristy area of central Athens, though. Some of them are so niche that I wonder how they survive in what must be a very high-rent district. The most extreme example is a shop called Birdman Records, which has beautifully designed custom fixtures that look like they must have cost a fortune, but a total inventory of perhaps 300 LPs (which were, to me at least, totally unremarkable). Another notable shop was Record Club, a large basement-level shop with a stage that I imagine would be a pretty cool place to see a show. I was excited about this one because a photo on their Google business page featured one of my most wanted records, Siouxsie and the Banshees’ Twice Upon a Time. The store did have a pretty good inventory with lots of rarities (though leaning more toward 45s from the 60s and 70s), but everything was consistently priced four times what I would expect to pay at a typical shop. I didn’t have much hope of the Siouxsie record still being there since the photo was taken a year ago, but I’m glad I didn’t have to make the decision about whether to pay what was, I’m sure, an eye-watering price.

The most interesting shops close to the city’s center are clustered in a covered shopping arcade near the Monstiraki metro station. Here I found a couple of shops that focused on used LPs. The best of them was called Zaharias Records CD. I asked pretty much every store I visited if they had any 80s Greek punk, and Zaharias was one of the few who could point me toward anything interesting. This shop is also where I bought my staff pick for this week:

Various: Συνταγή Αντί Θανάτου 12” (FM Records, 1986)

I’m pretty sure this is the first time I’ve chosen a record I’ve never actually heard as my staff pick, since I won’t be able to listen to this until I get back home. I’m a novice when it comes to Greek punk, so before I got here I looked up as many discographies and articles about Greek punk records as I could find. I tried to absorb as many band names (which was tough because of my aforementioned unfamiliarity with Greek script) and cover images as I could. While I don’t recall coming across an image of this compilation, I recognized the band Clown’s name from a single they released in 1983. I haven’t heard that Clown single and I’ve never heard of any of the other bands on the compilation, but the cover art and 1986 date both seemed promising, so I pulled the trigger. Maybe I’ll make it my staff pick again after I actually listen to it and let y’all know what the bands sound like.

Most of Athens’ record stores—at least the most interesting ones—are in an area called Exarhia, which proves my point that seeking out record stores brings you to the most interesting parts of town. Vacant, derelict, and graffiti-covered buildings seem to be a staple of most parts of Athens, but when you enter Exarhia there’s a discernible vibe shift. Everything is way grungier and graffiti covers virtually every square inch of every building, dumpster, and anything else spray paint will stick to. Much of that graffiti features anarchist political messages and the bars and cafes are all a little seedier and more interesting-looking, making the whole neighborhood feel quite familiar if you’ve spent any time visiting European squats. Despite the numerous wheat-pasted posters telling tourists to fuck off, as a punk I felt like I found my place.

There are a ton of record stores in Exarhia, most of them small specialty shops that focus almost entirely on new releases. There are so many stores that they’re highly specialized: No Remorse, Disques Noir, Metal Era, Eat Metal, and Bowel of Noise are all metal-focused shops, with Eat Metal specializing in traditional heavy metal and power metal, Bowel of Noise focusing on death and black metal, etc. There are two punk shops, with Rhythm Records devoted largely to more ’77-influenced stuff (they were blasting Rancid when I dropped in) and Scarecrow Records catering to the crustier end of the spectrum. All of these shops had world-class selections of new releases and reissues within their given focus, making Athens an extremely well-served city for new vinyl.

Since we carry most of the new releases I’m interested in at Sorry State, when I’m traveling I’m usually after second-hand records. Aside from the shops I’ve already mentioned, Old School Records and Δισκάδικο (Diskadiko) Records both had solid selections and prices, but Art Rat Records was by far the best shop I visited. It’s a small shop with 60s and 70s music (mostly prog and psych) on the left side and new wave and punk on the right side. A quick glance at the wall told me I had found the spot for deep heads: on the new wave/punk side, I noticed a first pressing of the Times’ Pop Goes Art! with a hand-drawn cover, and on the left side I saw an original UK pressing of Pussy Plays. Price tags were on the back of the records, so you had to flip it over to see what they cost. I didn’t even bother flipping over that Pussy record.

I started flipping through the punk/new wave bins and the selection was pretty great, with a good mix of genre staples and more obscure, under-the-radar stuff, mostly from the US and UK, but plenty from western Europe as well. After a few minutes of browsing, all the other customers had left the store, so I decided to pop the question: “got any 80s Greek punk?” The guy said, “yeah, next door,” and he led me outside and unlocked the shop next door, which was an entire second record store packed to the gills with god-knows-what. He pointed at a shelf with about 100 LPs and said, “here’s the Greek stuff.” One of the first LPs I found was the one album I had most hoped to find on this trip. But we’ll have to cover that in a future staff pick…

Wow, I sure covered a lot of ground this week! It’s Wednesday evening as I write this, and I have one more day in Athens before I leave for Copenhagen and this year’s Ktown fest. As usual, there are a ton of sick bands playing, so hopefully in my next staff pick I’ll run down my highlights. Jeff and Usman will also be there, so maybe they’ll write about it too. Until then…

In last week’s mini newsletter I mentioned I’d be traveling for the next little while, and as promised I’m writing this week’s newsletter from my first port of call in Stockholm, Sweden. I think I’ve visited Stockholm four of the past five years, and it’s starting to feel really familiar (I’m sure even more so for Jeff and Usman, who have been here even more often than I have). Stockholm is also just a very comfortable place to be, at least for a visitor like me. Everything is clean and orderly, the people are warm and kind (and virtually all of them speak perfect English), the landscape is stunning, nearly every restaurant has several great vegetarian / vegan options, and public transport is easy to use and seems to go everywhere. I also love how ridiculously long the summer days are. Today the sun rose at 3:34 AM and set at 9:59 PM (though it never really gets completely dark) and all the sunlight makes me feel energized all the time (the nearly constant 65-degree temperature doesn’t hurt either). I know there’s another side to the coin—I couldn’t imagine months of soul-crushing darkness and cold—but I see no reason to dwell on that now, especially since I’ve been in such a dark place mentally these past few months.

This time around I didn’t do much sightseeing, so I don’t have much to tell you about from this trip. When I was here last summer, though, I got to spend a little time visiting tourist attractions. I know that isn’t a priority for some people, but whenever I travel I like to visit museums, historical sites, and other big landmarks. I love art and history, so walking through a museum, learning about something, and seeing a bunch of cool stuff is my idea of a good time. And while tourist traps can definitely be a drag, a lot of these places attract tourists for a reason. I’m glad I’ve seen the Louvre, the Vatican, the Tower of London, and most of the other big tourist destinations I’ve visited. Some of these places have attracted visitors for hundreds of years, and there’s a reason they resonate with people. So I always try to read a travel guidebook and research what people like to do and see in a place I plan to visit.

If you want my tourism pick for Stockholm, it has to be the Vasa Museum. The Vasa was a ship built in 1628, but due to a design flaw it sank just a few minutes into its maiden voyage, and it sat at the bottom of Stockholm’s harbor for over three hundred years. Thanks to the unique properties of the harbor’s water, the wooden ship was very well preserved, and in the 60s they pulled the whole thing up and reassembled it on land. They’ve built a museum around the ship, and while the thing itself is something to behold, the museum also does a brilliant job of giving you enough (but not too much!) historical context to deepen your understanding and appreciation of what you’re seeing. It’s a huge delight for anyone with even a little bit of history nerd in them.

On this trip, though, I’ve mostly spent time visiting friends. Well, that and working. (I had to frame this trip as a “working holiday” to convince myself to actually go.) The main reason for this visit was my friend Melody’s wedding, and that was epic. We had a very long and grueling overnight flight and I hadn’t really recovered from it when I arrived at the wedding, but there were so many friends there and the occasion was so joyous that I still had an amazing time. Since then, it’s been all about fighting jet lag, getting in little mini-hangouts with friends, and working on the closing checklist for buying the store during US business hours (2-10PM here).

This time around I only made time to visit one record shop, and if you’re familiar with Stockholm’s record scene, you know which one it was. If you’re a record collector, no visit to Stockholm is complete without a trip to Trash Palace. This has to be one of the best record stores I’ve seen anywhere in the world, with a ridiculously high density of cool and collectible records. The punk and metal records are off to the side in their own room, which is decorated with old flyers and posters and has a vibe totally distinct from the main shop. The first thing you see is the wall of rare 7”s, which is always populated with rarities from all over the globe. Every time I’ve been to Trash Palace, most of this wall is covered in punk records so rare I’ve never seen them in person, and this time was no different. Of course there are also thousands of LPs (a store with a dedicated section for eastern European punk is one after my own heart) and boxes and boxes and boxes of 7”s at every price point, but that wall of rare 7”s is what the heads come to see.

Even though money is pretty tight on this trip, I knew I couldn’t walk out of Trash Palace empty handed. While there were plenty of things to tempt me, I am very happy with my big score: Lost Kids’ 1979 single “Cola Freaks.” I’m not sure when I first heard this Danish punk classic, but it made a big impression and has been on my want list for at least two decades. I can’t recall ever having the opportunity to buy a copy before today, so when I saw it I knew I’d be taking it home. If, by chance, you are unfamiliar, this 1979 Danish TV appearance is a great introduction.

Until next week…

If you haven’t checked in with the newsletter in a while, I’ve been using my staff pick space to document / explore / reflect on something that’s been happening in my mind lately. I’m not really sure how to refer to it just yet. A rough patch? A mental health struggle? A nervous breakdown? Every week I wonder if this content would find a more appropriate home in a private journal, but I keep putting it here anyway. I’ve been an avid journaler for a few decades, but for the past few months my journal has deteriorated into basically a document of what media I have consumed (mostly books and movies… I listen to far too much music to catalog it all there) and whatever other content I’ve piped in automatically. The thrill of pure self-exploration has worn off… I need that mild sense of danger that comes from knowing someone might actually read my writing in order to get the words on the page. I could spend some time pondering why that’s the case, but not today.

The gist of today’s update is that things have not been great in Daniel-land. What started as a habit of spending too much time worrying congealed into a uniform sense of dread that blanketed my entire existence, then for the past week or so, that evolved again and started erupting into full-on violent panic attacks. This is not the first time in my life I’ve had panic attacks, but it had been a few years. They are monstrous, evil things. And like the demons in hell, each one is unique, preventing familiarity from blunting their impact. Sometimes I burst out sobbing. Sometimes it feels like all of my muscles clench so hard I become completely paralyzed. Sometimes I get light-headed and feel like I’m going to pass out. Sometimes it’s all in my stomach and I have to fight the urge to vomit. It’s a real smorgasbord of psychological terror. My go-to response when I feel one coming on is to find somewhere quiet, safe, and alone and either do a guided meditation with an app on my phone or just focus on counting my breath. More often than not, when I’m able to close my eyes and focus on my breath, I lose conscious pretty quickly. It’s sort of like sleep I guess, but it’s more like a blackout. My mind is like a computer that flashes the blue screen of death and then I’m just gone. When I emerge, typically half an hour to 45 minutes later, the worst has passed, but I feel like I’ve been run over by a truck. One of the strangest things about panic attacks is, at least in my experience, they feel like purely biological occurrences. Typically there is no trigger that I can identify; it’s just something my body decides to do for no apparent reason. Sometimes I can identify a trigger, but often it’s comically benign. I had a really bad one on Sunday when my wife and I were sitting at a coffee shop and someone at the next table mentioned the name of my bank. I started sobbing and had to retreat to the sweltering back seat of the car, passed out and woke up an hour later, soaked in sweat and aching like hell.

My plan had been to ride things out, hoping that after I get through the major stress of buying the store that I could regain some stability and control. However, this week the closing date for the store got delayed (I’m not sure for how long, but at least a few weeks) and between that and the panic attacks ratcheting up in frequency and intensity, I decided it was time to seek treatment. I went back to my therapist for the first time in a couple of years. I put down the book about Swedish death metal I had been reading and started looking for books that might help with an anxiety flare-up. I remember during a major depressive episode a few years ago this book called The Noonday Demon really helped me, so I started reading a book called Beyond Anxiety that seems promising so far. I also made the decision to start taking medication again. I had been on Lexapro for years, but stopped a few months ago. I had been fed up with the side effects for a long time, but what really made me stop was that it felt like the medication was keeping me from processing Red’s death, that I wasn’t feeling everything I needed to feel. I thought things had been going fine, but when I asked a couple of close friends if they thought I should get back on the Lexapro, all of them said yes immediately and with no hesitation. So I guess I’m going to go back to being sleepy all the time, constipated, and having a perpetually sweaty ass crack.

As with my staff pick from last week, this struggles I’ve been experiencing have been the major factor in choosing what music to listen to. Last week I felt so untethered that I needed the sound of my favorite band to ground me and remind me who I am. This week I have been looking for music to soothe me. I’ve been looking primarily for sounds that are spacious, drone-y, and move slowly. I was listening to Agitation Free earlier today and that was getting pretty close to the sweet spot. I went for some Popol Vuh, but I think I chose the wrong album; Letzte Tage - Letzte Nächte was a little too bombastic. Nila Sinephro’s Space 1.8was right on the money. Mind you, I have an entire shelf of Eno records, basically everything he released under either his own name or the Ambient series up to the late 80s, but I haven’t touched them yet. I worry I’ve leaned on those too much during past anxiety flare-ups and have come to associate them with anxiety itself rather than its relief. Maybe I’ll spend a little time with those this week and report back. No promises.

My pick for this week, though, is Alice Coltrane’s 1971 album Universal Consciousness. While Alice Coltrane’s music tends to put me in my happy place, I haven’t actually listened to her too much for the past couple of years. I worry that I’m letting the incessant chatter about her in the “vinyl community” ruin her for me. I have a bad habit of letting other people ruin music for me. My go-to example of this is Infest. I loved Infest when I was young. I bought Slave from a distro box at a show when I was 16 or 17 just because I thought it looked cool and I was blown away. Then I got a bootleg discography CD off Rick Ta Life’s distro at a 25 Ta Life gig and wore it out for a couple of years. But then in the early 2010s, around the time Infest started playing again, things took a turn. I saw them a couple of times and it wasn’t the gigs that ruined them for me (they were pretty sick!), but the cult that grew up around the band. It was very intense in Raleigh. There was a new crop of young hardcore kids in town and they were obsessed with Infest. These kids had a band called Abuse., and they put out a total scorcher of an LP on To Live a Lie in 2013 that you should absolutely check out if you have any interested in Infest-inspired hardcore. However, I could not listen to it. I had heard Infest’s name too many times by that point, and the hate had grown too strong within me. I had gone over to the dark side. The side where you don’t listen to Infest.

I really don’t want that to happy to Alice Coltrane’s music, because I truly love it so much. Though the hatred in my heart is probably the reason I reached for Universal Consciousness over Journey in Satchidananda or Ptah, The El Daoud, arguably her two greatest albums and the ones I’ve spent the most time with. But I’ve seen them posted on Instagram and Reddit too many fucking times. Why does that matter? It shouldn’t! But, as you can tell by all the stuff I wrote about my panic attacks above, as much as I would like it to, rationality does not govern my world.

I’m glad to spend some time with Universal Consciousness, though. While it’s not as blissed out as the two aforementioned classics, I think it’s still a really strong album. Alice switches off between organ and harp for the entire album, which is wild because the two instruments are so different. Alice Coltrane was a virtuosic pianist, but something about the organ’s timbre really makes the less conventional notes she plays stick out. I’m not sure whether her playing is chromatic or modal or what, but the organ’s strange mechanical buzz is a stark contrast to how an acoustic piano sounds so human, how it’s wide dynamic range leaves a lot of space in the sound. But then when she switches over to the harp, it’s an equally strong contrast, but from the opposite direction. The harp lines are these gentle washes of color that sound so airy and ethereal. I actually don’t know much about the harp as an instrument. Are there strings for all the notes in the chromatic scale, or are they in a certain key like a harmonica? You don’t really hear people pluck out tunes on a harp; they just kind of spread these waves of swirling musical color that don’t sound, to me at least, like they have a tonal center.

I’ve spun Universal Consciousness a few times over the past few days, and I’m eager for more. It feels like the album is starting to open up for me in a way it hasn’t previously. I’m thankful I picked up this and all her other records before they were such hot commodities. My shelf worn copy still has a $12 price sticker on it, and I think I remember the weird little store in Greensboro where I bought it. Often it feels absurd to own thousands of records, but it feels perfectly sane and right at moments like this, when you pull an under-appreciated one off the shelf and discover it has way more to teach you.

Thanks for reading, everyone. And if you have any recommendations for soothing, quiet, and/or meditative music, please send them my way.

Apologies to anyone who doesn’t find my staff pick an appropriate place to document my ongoing struggles with mental health, because that’s where we’re starting again. It’s been a rough week for me. Money has always been a very negative trigger for me. I so envy people who grew up with a healthy attitude toward money, because talking and even thinking about money is apt to make my brain go completely haywire. I wouldn’t say I grew up poor, but my parents lived paycheck to paycheck throughout my childhood, and while they were often clearly stressed about money, they never talked about it with or even in front of me. Consequently, money became, for me, a boogeyman, a shadowy presence that could manifest at any moment and completely ruin your day or even your life. I’d like to think I’m a smart guy, but I have trouble applying logic to financial matters. I can never seem to see the potential for a positive outcome, and instead I’m left cowering in fear of the boogeyman, my brain an ineffectual lump of fear and insecurity.

I’ve been dealing with a lot of grown-up business stuff as part of the process of buying the store, and it’s really been stressing me out. Like, a lot. I’m not even sure why, really. If something happens and things don’t turn out the way I expect, I’m sure we’ll find another path forward, and no matter what happens my friends and family and everyone who is part of the Sorry State extended universe will be with me wherever the road leads. But that’s not what the voices say, and the voices are loud right now. And thanks to my fucked up relationship with money, I don’t talk about it with anyone. I just whisper cryptic fragments and complaints into the megaphone that is this newsletter.

When you’re feeling down or stressed, what better way to counteract that than by revisiting the music of your favorite band? I was talking about the Fall with Tom from Static Shock Records a few days ago, and that prompted me to pull out the record I’m writing about this week. Before that, though, a quick story. Tom was telling me about how he sold his Fall LPs before he moved from England to Canada and was regretting it because he had really been feeling the band lately. Then I remembered that, way back in 2010 (if I remember correctly), Tom gave me a copy of the Fall’s second album, Dragnet. I was about to drive his band the Shitty Limits on their second and final tour of the US, and before they flew over, I mentioned casually that I was looking for an original pressing of Dragnet. Even though it was just a few days before they left, Tom managed to source a copy and gave it to me as a gift when they arrived. He apologized because it was a little beat up, which was no bother to me, but then years later I came across a pristine copy in the bins at Chaz’s in Durham (shout out Chaz and R.I.P. Bull City Records, which had its final day of business this past Sunday). I rarely keep duplicates of records, but the copy Tom gave me held so much sentimental value that I never got rid of it. And now, over a decade and a half later, I get to send that copy back to Tom to fill a gap in his collection. Lovely how that worked out.

I could easily write about Dragnet_—in fact, it would be cool to share with you the Dragnet-inspired coffee mug my potter wife made me a while back—but I’ll have to save that for another day. Because today I wanted to write about another record Tom and I were talking about: 1983’s Kicker Conspiracy_.

The Fall had a penchant for releasing records in weird formats. I’ve heard some people speculate this was a semi-intentional act of sabotage to keep their records out of the charts, since the main singles and albums charts never seemed to know where to put a record like Slates, a 10” EP that might be the Fall’s single best record. Whatever the reason, Kicker Conspiracy certainly fits the bill. It’s four songs spread across four sides of 7” vinyl… a double single? A maxi-EP? A single with a bonus disc? Who’s to say, really? If you’re trying to put the Fall’s music into boxes and categories, you’re on a fool’s errand. Maybe that’s what the weird formats are all about?

Even the side designations are idiosyncratic. Starting with side AA, the title track is, in my estimation, a very good to excellent Fall song. While it’s from 1983, it sounds more like the Fall of a few years earlier, and much about it is prototypical early 80s Fall: the rockabilly tinge, the driving bass line, and the catchy chorus with Mark’s trademark falsetto yelp. The lyrics are about professional football / soccer, and that’s something I know absolutely nothing about, so perhaps that’s the reason it doesn’t resonate with me as much as other tracks, but musically it’s banging and memorable as fuck.

Side AB, though, is the real gem in my book. “Wings” might be in my top five favorite Fall songs. It’s odd in that, while most Fall songs have the bass at the musical center, “Wings” is built around a guitar riff, and an absolutely brilliant one at that. It’s this mysterious, haunting thing that repeats for the entire song, but I never get tired of it. I think they could play it for another ten minutes and I wouldn’t mind. And while the bass isn’t the lead instrument, the way Steve Hanley moves around that guitar line is just beautiful, and as eloquent an example of his brilliance as you’ll find. The rest of the band plays it understated, which leaves a lot of room for the lyrics and vocals, which are outstanding. At the beginning of the track, we hear that the song’s speaker “purchased a pair of flabby wings” (what an image!), and from there it gets way, way weirder. Gremlins, time travel, paradoxes, “incorrect things…” I have no idea what to make of the whole thing, but the words and images tickle my brain in the most pleasing way. Like all the Fall’s best music, it’s a song I could listen to for the rest of my life and never feel like I’ve figured it out.

The second disc of Kicker Conspiracy features two tracks from the Fall’s many Peel Sessions. The first, on side BC, is “Container Drivers,” one of the most recognizable songs from their third album, 1980’s Grotesque. This Peel Session version is a little different from the album version, but not notably so. Great song, but I can’t think of much to say about it here.

Then you get the big closer on side BD, “New Puritan.” This is the song Tom called out when we were talking about the record over email, and it’s kind of a mythical Fall song. While there is a pretty great version on the canonical live album Totale’s Turns, this Peel Session version is the only time the Fall recorded “New Puritan” in a studio. Musically, it’s in that minimal and haunting vein a la “Wings.” The lyrics, though, are what really fascinate me, because they find Mark E. Smith talking about the music industry, and maybe even the Fall’s place in it (as usual, it’s hard to tell). “Bands send tapes to famous apes” seems typically cynical in the manner of _Grotesque_’s “C ‘n’ C-S Mithering,” but then there’s the famous couplet that so succinctly summarizes the dilemma of the perpetually ahead-of-the-curve artiste:

The conventional is now experimental

The experimental is now conventional

Preach it, brother! And then there’s this verse:

Why don’t you ask your local record dealer how many bribes he took today?

What do you mean “What’s it mean? What’s it mean?”?

"What’s it mean? What’s it mean?"

Putting aside for a second that the record dealer writing this has never once in my life been offered a bribe (I’d love one! I’m broke!), I love Mark shouting with increasing agitation, “what’s it mean?” It’s like I was saying about “Wings:” I love the way it tantalizes me with these cryptic details, but playfully withholds anything that would enable you to pin it down, to say clearly what it “means.” That’s the game, but it’s not really a game because the space between confusion and understanding is productive. Maybe it’s where imagination lives? As if to illustrate his point, this verse comes at the end of the song:

I curse the self-copulation

Of your lousy record collection

New puritan says “Coffee table LPs never breathe”

When I hear “the self-copulation of your lousy record collection,” what I take it to mean is that when a record is successful, a wave of copycats will swoop in and try to replicate its success by copying it. It’s the same process by which the experimental becomes conventional, and it suffocates the imagination and the artistic impulse. What’s a “coffee table LP?” One that sits on your table to show your taste rather than being played? Maybe? Maybe not! That Mark E. Smith is a wily one, and I’d like to think he’s somewhere in the great beyond, smirking at us trying in vain to figure it out.

I rarely listen to music from the 90s, but when I pulled a bunch of records from the shelves to spin this week, the pile contained several 90s records: Lush’s best-of collection Ciao!, Dinosaur Jr’s Where You Been, and my staff pick for this week: Drive Like Jehu’s Yank Crime. It’s gotta be the weather that’s putting me in this 90s mood. We’re in our semi-annual period of near-perfect weather here in North Carolina, and the bright sunshine and explosions of plant life (bright, blooming azaleas everywhere!) puts me in the mood for the polished, richly detailed 90s major label studio sound. When I’m trapped inside because of the cold or the heat, dingy and atmospheric recordings make sense, but with the sun shines a bright light on everything, revealing a rich tapestry of budding life, I need sounds to match.

If you’re in your 40s like me, there’s a good chance you first encountered Drive Like Jehu in the same place I did: the used CD bins. While Jehu’s first self-titled album came out on the San Diego indie label Headhunter, the band was swept up in the major label feeding frenzy of the early 90s, signing to Atlantic / Interscope alongside their brother band Rocket from the Crypt. The way I’ve usually heard it told is that Jon Reis from Rocket from the Crypt—who was the subject of an intense major-label bidding war—insisted the label sign his weird post-hardcore project alongside his ready-for-the-masses rock band. I doubt anyone in the band or at the label expected Jehu would do Nirvana numbers, and while they didn’t get the big media push that Rocket did, they certainly manufactured a lot of Yank Crime CDs, which were not hard to find in the mid and late 90s. Yank Crime wasn’t quite in dollar-bin territory like Sugar’s Copper Blue, but like another weird 90s major label anomaly, Jawbreaker’s Dear You, it would turn up fairly often if you were a regular bin-trawler like I was. While it was obviously way too weird for MTV, my ears were definitely open to this type of music. I was super into Fugazi’s albums from around that time like In on the Kill Taker and Red Medicine, which do similar (though not as extreme) things with unexpected rhythms and textures and have a similar sense of post-hardcore-ness about them.

I’m glad Yank Crime came out of the major label system because it sounds fucking great. I mean, maybe it would have sounded great regardless, since Jehu’s drummer Mark Trombino co-engineered and mixed the record. Trombino would later work on records by Blink 182 and Jimmy Eat World and become one of the most sought-after producers in rock music, so surely he was an invaluable asset. There’s something about those 90s major label recordings… thick, dry, powerful, yet rich with detail. That sound largely went away in the 2000s and afterwards as ProTools put professional-sounding recordings within reach of anyone with a computer, but a lot was lost in that transition. Even if any schmoe could put ProTools on their computer, they didn’t have the millions of dollars worth of microphones, acoustically treated rooms, and outboard gear, or the decades of experience the pros who worked on major label records in that era had. It’s a sound we’ll probably never hear again. Capitalism giveth and capitalism taketh away.

Even more than most bands, Jehu benefits from a powerful recording because their music is so dense. I love guitar players who use weird chords; Wretched, Die Kreuzen, Voivod, Honor Role and so many of my favorite bands feature guitar players whose vocabulary extends well beyond power chords and open major chords. Jehu’s chords are always rich with strange notes and harmonies, and with sloppy execution, some of these would probably just sound wrong, like the guitarist put their fingers in the wrong place by accident. But Yank Crime is so locked in that there’s no mistaking it… these are chords that are meant to be like that, to make you feel a little uncomfortable. Same for the rhythms. Jehu often gets described as mathy, but I think their rhythms are more quirky than complex, like an amped-up version of Devo rather than King Crimson or something like that.

“Luau” is _Yank Crime_’s centerpiece As you might expect from a 9-minute song, it goes a lot of places… there are parts that are pretty, dissonant, difficult, driving, rocking, and a bunch of other adjectives too. The song is built around this lumbering waltz rhythm with the first beat stretched to its breaking point, and my favorite detail is the odd note that rises up from that first beat for much of the song. It’s an odd note to begin with, but it’s also bent in a way that accentuates its harmonic strangeness, and played in a way that makes it jump out from the rest of the riff. It almost sounds like a sample rather than live playing, and for me it always brings to mind that high-pitched squealing sound in the main loop to Public Enemy’s “Bring the Noise.” What a magical part! But the song is full of great parts, including probably Jehu’s most infectious chorus. “Loooooooo owwwwwwww / looo ow looo ow.” What an odd word, an odd set of sounds. Froberg had a knack for making great choruses out of unexpected words, and this is one of his best.

Sadly, Drive Like Jehu was not long for this world after _Yank Crime_’s release. I never got to see them live, but Hot Snakes played “Bullet Train to Vegas” the first time I saw them, perhaps because the show was in Chapel Hill and local label Merge Records put out that song on a single. While I didn’t see Jehu, I am thankful to have seen Hot Snakes several times, and they were always great. As much as I like Jehu, ultimately I prefer Hot Snakes. The rhythm section is stronger, and while the songwriting is way more direct and streamlined, they still have plenty of Jehu’s trademark weirdness, particularly in Reis’s wild riffing and Froberg’s brilliantly surreal lyrics.

So yeah, Yank Crime is not a record I’m in the mood for very often, but at a time like this when I’m ready to hear it, it hits hard. And unlike a lot of 90s major label releases, it’s pretty easy to get a physical copy. While the CD was on Atlantic / Interscope, Headhunter got the vinyl pressing and has kept it in print and accessible since its initial release. Jah bless.

It’s been a crazy week and I haven’t squeezed in much time for record-listening, so excuse me if I don’t touch too much on music and records this time. I’m sure I’ll be back at that soon enough. I wanted to start this week by pouring one out for a couple of institutions that have been important to me in my punk journey.

The first one might not mean much to anyone outside central North Carolina, but last week Chaz announced he’d be closing Bull City Records after 20 years in business in Durham (Raleigh’s neighboring city). I first walked into Chaz’s shop in its original location next door to Cosmic Cantina (what a combo!) shortly after it opened. I still remember I found an original pressing of the Hypnotics’ Indoor Fiends that day, and Chaz had a customer for life. Of course I got to talking with Chaz—as everyone does... he’s the nicest guy ever—and he’s been a good friend ever since. Alongside being a top-notch record dealer, Chaz has also made huge contributions to the scene, most importantly helping make live gigs happen. After he had a few bands play in the shop’s original location, he commandeered a vacant room across the hall and started hosting gigs there, and that’s the room where I booked my first show and where I played my first ever gig with my first band, Cross Laws. The Marked Men even played a legendary gig in that spot. That probably marked the end, sadly, as the space was on the second floor and when the proprietors of the shop below came in the next morning, they found most of their ceiling had fallen in. Undeterred, Chaz helped spearhead a new DIY spot called Bull City HQ that went on for several incredible years and hosted a ton of great gigs, including Cross Laws’ last show. It was always clear to me that Chaz was doing it all for the right reasons, the right way, and committed to making things happen with zero fuss, controversy, or pretension. I think Durham is losing something super important. As with just about every other city, there are now a bunch of small shops in the town (in fact, Chaz’s current / final location is directly across the street from Carolina Soul), but Chaz wasn’t a side hustler or a Johnny-come-lately… he’s hard-working, knows his shit, and ran a proper fucking record shop. His shop will be missed, but I hope I still get to see Chaz from time to time… maybe he’ll even have more time to go to gigs without having to man the shop all the time.

The other institution I wanted to mention is dear to a lot of Sorry Staters’ hearts, and that’s What Are You Listening To?, the weekly livestream show on Analog Attack’s YouTube channel. Jeff and I have been guests on the show several times, and the show had become a big part of my world. The host, Mike, is very engaged with the little corner of the music / punk scene Sorry State focuses on, to where I wondered if I should reach out about sponsoring or bankrolling the show. So many of Sorry State’s customers appeared as guests, and they often showed records they bought from us, which was always awesome to see. There was a spell after Angela left and before we hired Trevor when I was packing a pretty sizable portion of our regular mail order, and invariably I’d end up working late on Friday night, watching WAYLT? as I packed orders. I always enjoyed popping into the live chat to give stock and order updates. It felt like WAYLT? was a kind of public square where a bunch of people from our scene gathered, communicated, discussed, etc. There’s a lot of record talk to be found on YouTube and other forms of social media, but few feel as intimate and as real as WAYLT?. Mike mentioned there’s a possibility it could come back in the future, and I hope it does.

A few days after he announced WAYLT?_’s end, Mike posted a video talking about why he stopped the show, and his main reason was that (I’m paraphrasing here) the grind of running the show and trying to sustain and improve it had become triggering to his depression and anxiety. And while it’s a little outside “our” scene, I couldn’t help think about Bo from the Hardlore_ YouTube channel, who sadly took his own life last week. Especially with Bo, someone like me looks at him and thinks he has it all. Not only was he a very successful YouTuber, but he was also in a big-name band and apparently had a near-limitless supply of vintage metal and hardcore t-shirts. What a life, right?

But how things look from the outside are not always how they feel from the inside. I was thinking about this a lot this weekend as we ran our sale. I hesitate to put this out there because I worry it makes me seem ungrateful, but as successful as the sale was, it stirred up a lot of tough feelings. My anxiety was through the roof as I drafted the newsletter and tried to find the right words to tell you all what was going on and ask for your help. There were constant nagging voices in my head telling me it’s shameful to have to ask for help, that a successful business would be profitable enough that we’d be able to cover this expense easily, and that I’m a failure for not managing my / Sorry State’s finances well enough to make it all work. I worried I’d be mocked or otherwise attacked, but of course none of that happened. Unfortunately, once I put out the word and sales started coming through, the negative voices still didn’t stop. Every so often I’d check how sales were going, but rather than being pleased we were progressing toward our goal or that people cared enough to help us out, the negative voices found all kinds of crazy shit to shout back at me. I’d think, what if the loan doesn’t go through and we can’t buy the shop and people are pissed because they donated for no reason? What do I owe all the people who contributed? What if the economy tanks or records suddenly become uncool and Sorry State has to close in a few years? My mind immediately reframed all the love people were showing as debts and obligations. All weekend I’d check my phone, see more sales had come through, and rather than smiling, I would feel my stomach clench and bile force its way into my throat.

It got so bad that the other day I actually googled, “why do I feel bad when good things happen?” After scrolling past the AI-generated slop that was telling me god-knows-what, I read what some credible sources had to say, and it made me feel better. I think, for me at least, these kinds of reactions are grounded in a low sense of self-worth. There’s something in me that constantly tells me I’m not worthy of people’s love, affection, and support. When people express these things to me, I feel guilty because I don’t think I deserve them. And any good thing that happens, my brain will reframe as either a backhanded dig or some kind of crisis in the making. It sucks. But it seems like exactly the type of habit or pattern that therapeutic approaches like CBT counteract. So I’ve been reaching into my psychological toolkit and revisiting some old strategies. I’ve also been trying to be more social and connect with friends. (I’ve been very isolated this winter.) The other night I went out for a beer with some buddies, and that felt great. Tonight is the Indikator B show in Raleigh, and then Saturday is a birthday party for one of my closest friends. As the weather warms, hopefully my social calendar will stay busy and I’ll resist the urge to feel overwhelmed by it.

Ending things on a completely different note, another social thing I did this weekend was attend Fire Fest in Star, North Carolina. My wife Jet is a potter, and after taking a long break from clay to focus on her teaching career, over the past few years she’s really immersed herself in the pottery world, which is its own vibrant subculture with many parallels to the punk scene. Last week she was at the national ceramics conference in Detroit, and this weekend was a big gathering of North Carolina pottery folks at Fire Fest, which happens at Starworks, a huge pottery compound in Star, just near the famous North Carolina pottery town of Seagrove.

The main event of Fire Fest is the opening of the petal kiln. Each year they invite a visiting artist to make a large sculpture they fire in this kiln. They work all week feeding the fire with wood and getting it up to temperature, then at nightfall on Saturday, they dramatically open the kiln when it’s at its hottest, revealing a glowing, white-hot sculpture. While the kiln is open, they pelt the sculpture with wood ash and other combustibles, which creates little explosions and causes interesting atmospheric effects that change the color and texture of the sculpture’s surface. It’s pretty amazing! I think someone said over 800 people were there for the kiln opening. It was a totally DIY affair, and since a lot of potters are weirdos of the type you’d see at a punk gig, it felt like we were at a show. It felt a lot like the huge outdoor shows they have under the I95 bridge in Richmond. Only instead of watching a band, we were all staring at this burning sculpture.

While the kiln opening is the main event, they have an entire weekend of activities at Fire Fest, with demonstrations, artist talks, and lots of other things to do. While most of them have to do with ceramics, they also did an iron pour on Saturday. When we arrived in the afternoon, the ironworkers were using hammers to break apart old iron things like cookware and fencing. Then they got their own fire going and melted the scrap into molten metal. Once they were ready to pour the iron, they set up a PA system and started blasting fire-themed heavy metal (get it?) songs while the workers toiled away. When the first cauldron of liquid iron came out, they queued up “Iron Man” as the workers poured the molten metal into molds for sculptures and tiles. Cheesy, but it hit. The event was small enough that I could get very close to the action, and I found it totally hypnotic to stare into the cauldron of bubbling liquid metal.

Alright, that’s all for this week. Thanks again for your help everyone! We’ll be back at it next week.

I think I mentioned this last week, but my wife has been out of town at a conference for the past week, so my normal routine has been shaken up. Between that and trying to spend a good chunk of every day outside to enjoy our brief window of nice weather here in North Carolina, it’s felt like I’ve been living in some kind of alternate reality. Honestly, I kind of needed an alternate reality. I’ve been having a tough time lately. I worry I complain too much in this space, but it feels appropriate to check in each week and let you know where I’m at, and what kind of headspace I’m in when I’m listening to the music I write about. Along those lines, I feel like my media consumption lately has been all about escape. I guess it always is to an extent, but escaping feels good lately.

Since I’ve been spending most evenings at home taking care of the animals and keeping them company, I’ve been watching a movie most every night. I try to take a similar attitude to selecting movies as I do books, feeding my core interests while striving for breadth. In the core interests department, I watched that new documentary on White Flag’s Bill Bartell and really enjoyed it. I’ve liked White Flag for a long time (particularly Third Strike) and I knew a little about Bartell, but so much in the documentary was utterly surprising to me. It’s definitely worth a watch, particularly since Dave Markey is the director and he’s been around the block enough times to know how to make a stronger-than-average music doc.

A few days ago, I also treated myself to another film by the English directors Powell and Pressburger. I feel like I’ve raved about this movie to everyone I’ve talked to in person over the past few months, but I watched their 1948 film The Red Shoes a few months ago and was completely blown away. Watching that movie was like hearing A Love Supreme or The Velvet Underground & Nico or Pink Flag for the first time… a conscious feeling that I was encountering something strange and beautiful and very important. A few weeks later I watched another of their films, 1943’s The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, and enjoyed it just as much. The other night I watched 1947’s Black Narcissusand it was another hit. Powell and Pressburger only made a handful of films together, so I’m doling them out to myself slowly, saving them for evenings when I have the time and mental energy to lose myself in them. I would love to see some of them on the big screen for an even greater sense of immersion, but even the places around here that play old / art / independent movies aren’t screening too many films from the 40s these days.

Another of my big escapes lately is this book The Truth About Animals by Lucy Cooke. Cooke is a British zoologist, but her writing voice is very cheeky and silly. She knows her stuff and is a working scientist, but it also seems like she could hold her own amongst a group of witty talking heads on a comedy quiz show. The book presents a bunch of interesting facts about animals (particularly animals that are misunderstood by humans), with a focus on the scatological, bawdy, and otherwise non-staid. For instance, did you know that vultures, in lieu of sweating, shit on themselves to keep cool? If that fact intrigues you, I promise you’ll learn quite a lot about exotic animals’ defecatory habits in this book.

One of my favorite stories has been about the hyena. I don’t think I was aware of this, but hyenas are typically portrayed as hermaphroditic in mythology and folklore. That’s because female hyenas (which are larger, more aggressive, and socially dominant over male hyenas) have a full set of faux-male genitalia, including fused labia that resemble a scrotum and an elongated clitoris up to seven inches long, a full “pseudo-penis” through which they urinate, have sex, and give birth. Scholars have struggled to discern the purpose of this adaptation, since it makes most of these activities way harder. A huge percentage of hyena mothers and babies die during childbirth because of the long, narrow birth canal, and sex is also very tricky, as it requires the male hyena to insert his actual penis entirely inside the opening of the female’s pseudo-penis. Perhaps you can see why I can’t seem to put this book down.

I should probably write about some music too, right? Outside of listening to new releases and other stuff for Sorry State, I’ve been spinning a lot of 70s Finnish punk, which has been my go-to feel-good music for the past several years. Here’s what’s at the front of my “recently listened” stack… I reserve to write a full staff pick about any or these in the future:

Loose Prick: Valkoiset Sotilaat

Se: Pahaa Unta?

Cathedral of Tears: S/T

Pekinška Patka: Strah Od Monotonije

Swell Maps: Jane from Occupied Europe

Voivod: Dimension Hatröss

Thanks so much for reading, everyone. And thanks also for participating in our big sale, if you were able. Until next week…

Last week I was on a house call, looking at a collection. It was a fairly standard, if slightly boring, collection, but there were a handful of classic rock titles that would sell well for us. What I usually do on a house call is put the more valuable records together in a stack so that I can look at their condition more closely and pay the seller a better price for those titles, but as I started going through my “good stuff” stack on this buy, pretty much every record was scratched up. Which was weird because the jackets were in perfectly fine shape… I’ll never understand how that happens. Do some people wipe their LPs with sandpaper before each play? I ended up passing on the collection, but I noticed a copy of this LP that didn’t look too bad, so I gave them a few bucks for it and took it home for myself:

The Velvet Underground: Loaded 12” (Cotillion, 1970)

When I gave them the money, they thanked me and asked, “what is that record?” They did not know who the Velvet Underground were, LOL. Which is probably a good thing, because this LP avoided the sandpaper treatment the rest of their records got. After clearing the dust off with Sorry State’s VPI machine, it sounds fantastic.

I don’t think I’ve ever owned a copy of Loaded, but when I took it home and played it, none of it was unfamiliar to me. I guess I just absorbed all these songs through the cool music zeitgeist, hearing them on bootlegs, compilations, through cover songs, in DJ sets, or wherever else it is you hear non-mainstream music. It’s crazy how a record can be part of your consciousness like that without ever having deliberately listened to it.

I don’t think I really listened to the Velvet Underground until well into my adulthood (probably my 30s, TBH), but once I listened closely, I recognized right away how deeply they had shaped so much of the music I loved. If I had to summarize the Velvet Underground’s historical significance to someone who knew nothing about them, I’d say they were the first band to bring together the worlds of rock and roll and fine art. To many people, this is probably a bad thing. Usman always says he hates art, which is an absurd statement, but what I take him to mean is that he hates the culture around fine art: museums, galleries, dealers, institutions of higher education, etc. I understand hating that world, but also that world is a big part of who I am. Starting in the 10th grade, I attended a magnet school for the arts, and the teachers there indoctrinated us into the art world’s ways of seeing, interpreting, and interacting with the world. I was discovering punk rock at the same time, so my connections to the art world go just as deep as my connections to punk. Actually, for me, the two are inextricably linked. My peers in my hometown were all listening to whatever horrid post-grunge was on the radio, but the cool older kids at my magnet school were listening to underground punk. I saw listening to cool music as part of the same maturation process that would (hopefully) make me a “real” artist.

I’d be curious if any readers pop up with examples of earlier rock and roll / fine art crossover than the Velvets’ first album. The obvious candidate would be the Beatles, but I’d argue they’re not precisely the same thing. John Lennon went to art school, and it’s clear he absorbed many of the same things I did when I went to art school half a century later. But, for me, the Beatles made music that was art_ful_, but not really art per se. They elevated pop music above the level of disposable trash / popular culture where it had (arguably) previously resided, but even something as daring as “Tomorrow Never Knows” goes down relatively smooth. It’s not “Venus in Furs” or “Black Angel’s Death Song,” much less “European Son.” The Velvets challenged their listeners aggressively, in the same way that the most daring modern painters and sculptors did. They felt no responsibility to keep your toe tapping. They were doing something else entirely. And the path they opened up is walked by so many of my all-time favorites, from the Stooges to Can to PiL to Siouxsie and the Banshees to Wire and all the bands they influenced. Any time I listen to music that has one foot in rocking and one foot in this other (higher?) artistic impulse, I feel like the Velvets are right there.

Back to Loaded, though, where you don’t really hear any of that. By this point in the group’s history, they had fired Andy Warhol as their manager, Nico was long gone, John Cale was out, and Mo Tucker was on a leave of absence from the band for maternity leave. Guitarist Sterling Morrison and guitarist / vocalist / songwriter Lou Reed were the only holdovers from the band’s early artistic peak. I’ve read enough books about Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground to know Lou Reed’s connections to the art world and the avant-garde run plenty deep, but by the time they made Loaded, he didn’t seem interested in exploring that in the Velvet Underground. Famously, they titled the record Loaded because they thought it was loaded with hits, and indeed it’s a tight, snappy collection of rock and roll songs that doesn’t sound, on the surface at least, all that different from what was happening in the mainstream in 1970. If anything, it might have sounded a few years out of date. I mean, Fun House also came out in 1970!

But despite it’s conventionality, Loaded still sounds like a great record to me. It also reveals part of the secret sauce that made the Velvet Underground’s early records so special. They weren’t just a collision of fine art and rock and roll… they were a collision of fine art and fucking great, top-shelf rock and roll. I can’t imagine John Cale’s screeching viola or Nico’s deadpan vocals would have sounded 1/10th as brilliant if they weren’t delivered within the context of Lou Reed’s songwriting. I guess it makes sense that, at this point in his career, Lou Reed would want to dispense with all the artsy-fartsy crap and place the focus squarely on what a brilliant songwriter he was. You’d be hard-pressed to find a more tightly packed string of classic melodies than the first three songs on this album: “Who Loves the Sun,” “Sweet Jane,” and “Rock & Roll.” His lyrics remain daring, particularly on character sketch songs like “New Age.” And I love the loose, exciting little touches he injects into his songs (the kids might call it yolo), like the silly falsetto when he sings “fine, FINE music” in “Rock & Roll” (a trick he probably picked up writing novelty songs for Pickwick Records early in his career). Lou was a genuine artist and craftsman who understood how pop songs work and how they might channel something deep and significant, much the same way a painting, novel, or film can.

I feel silly writing about the Velvet Underground because they’re one of the most obsessively documented and dissected bands in the history of popular music. There are countless people who know more about them and have thought about them more deeply than I have. But whereas I have a hard time hearing records by obsessively deconstructed bands like the Beatles or the Stones with fresh ears (to where I can’t imagine feeling compelled to put on one of their records ever again), the Velvets’ records remain vital to me, even an arguably lesser one like Loaded.

I’ve been reading a lot lately. There hasn’t been shit going on here and I’ve been struggling to get out of my head, and there’s nothing like a good book for taking me some place else. I just finished Budgie from Siouxsie and the Banshees’ recently released memoir, and while I don’t think I’ll write an entire staff pick about it, I really enjoyed it. Budgie is an interesting dude… very thoughtful. And, needless to say, he has some unique life experiences that I’m very much interested in reading about. I highly recommend the book, though there isn’t a ton about the Banshees’ actual music in it. It seems like the music came easily to them, for the most part; it was the personalities and everything else that they struggled with. And boy, did they struggle! Anyway…

After finishing Budgie’s book, I launched straight into this new book on Voïvoid: Always Moving: The Strange Multiverse of Voïvod by Jeff Wagner. I heard about the book when Wagner was interviewed on one of the spinoff podcasts from You Don’t Know Mojack, but I’ve actually read one of his books before: Mean Deviation: Four Decades of Progressive Heavy Metal. Kind of a weird book for me to pick up as I’m not into a lot of progressive metal (and I can’t remember what spurred me to read it), but I enjoyed the book and I was eager to read Walker’s thoughts on Voïvod, whom I’ve always liked. Particularly since, as his interview with Brant from Mojack revealed, he’s a Voïvod superfan who has spent a lot of time listening to and thinking about them and also had a massive collection of Voïvod clippings and ephemera. Sadly, they mentioned in the interview that Wagner recently went through a devastating house fire in which much of this collection was destroyed… so heartbreaking. All the more reason to order a copy of Always Moving directly from his website, which I did. I believe Jeff himself mailed it out, and it was at my house in just a few days.

Walker self-published Always Moving, which I applaud, though it means that you can’t get it on Amazon, which I think is still where almost everyone buys their books these days. God bless him for standing up to that behemoth… it certainly means he’ll sell fewer copies, but fuck Amazon always and forever. Though Always Moving is self-published, it’s extremely well-done. The layout and print quality are great, and it’s free of the copy-editing issues that plague most self-published books (and that drive me bananas while I’m reading). It’s clear Walker wrote the Voïvod book he wanted to write, though I wonder if a publisher would have assigned him an editor that might have tightened things up a little. Maybe I’m reading into this because I know Walker is a fan of progressive metal, but he can be wordy. Most of the book is oral history-style, but the interview passages are broken up by sections of Walker’s writing, in which he typically soliloquizes about Voïvod’s music. Sometimes his prose can get a bit overwrought. (I’m one to talk… I know.) I get it… you can only say “this rips” or “this is great” so many times, but I think perhaps there’s some of the progressive musician’s attitude of “why play one note when seven will do?” at work here. Also, the book is organized around Voïvod’s album releases, and the chapter structures can feel repetitive after a while. Most chapters start by setting the scene and having the band members talk about how they were transitioning from the previous album, some details about writing and recording, then Walker waxes rhapsodic about the album, then you get quotes from a bunch of (primarily European progressive metal) musicians about how great the album is. That’s great if you want to pick up the book and read a chapter or two, but when you're plowing through it in one shot like I’m doing, it can feel familiar. I wonder if a good editor might have offered suggestions about how to organize the book to avoid that? Even so, all things told, it’s an excellent book, chock-full of analysis of Voïvod’s music and career, and overflowing with tasty little nuggets of info. (Like, for instance… did you know that Voïvod’s drummer Away eventually joined Men Without Hats?!?!?!)

The book has me listening to Voïvod for the first time in a while. Surprisingly, though, it’s been the early stuff that has caught my ear this time. Like many people, I always saw the trilogy of Killing Technology, Dimension Hatröss, and Nothingface as Voïvod’s creative peak, and I’ve spent way more time with those albums than any of their others. I also went through a period a few years ago of listening to their sixth album Angel Rat quite a lot. For some reason, though, I had it in my head that their first two albums, 1984’s War and Pain and 1986’s Rrröööaaarrr were not worth listening to. I remembered them being derivative, sloppily executed, and poorly produced, but now that I’ve re-listened, I can’t imagine where I got that impression… these albums rip! War and Pain in particular has been in constant rotation. The style is total punk-metal, hovering in the region between Venom and Slayer, and not only is the playing on point, but I really like the production too… it has a similar feel to a lot of 80s punk and hardcore classics done in cheap studios on small budgets for independent labels. (They mention in the book that it was recorded in a studio used primarily for radio jingles.) As I always say, that’s my favorite shit. If you have a band that sounds great, just mic ‘em up and put ‘em to tape with nothing fancy production-wise. And while the music isn’t as unique as where Voïvod would end up, I think there’s more than enough personality in their playing (particularly in Piggy’s riffing) to separate them from the then-emerging thrash pack. Rrröööaaarrr is a slightly tougher listen… the production is a little weird, and it has this odd, kind of stilted vibe, but I’ve been connecting with that record too. You can hear so much influence from Hear Nothing, See Nothing, Say Nothing in it, though it’s very much put through the Voïvod filter.

I haven’t sat down and listened to any of the albums in that key trilogy since I started reading, but I’ve been watching videos and listening to songs here and there to refresh my memory. And, honestly, I’m not digging that stuff as much. Maybe I’m just not in the mood, but right now those records sound kind of cold and clinical to me… which I realize is a big part of what Voïvod is all about… that distant, sci-fi-informed vibe is basically their brand, but right now I’m connecting with the raw energy of the early stuff. Another thing I’m noticing is that I think I don’t like Away’s drumming very much. When I listen to extreme music, I want to hear the drummer beat the fuck out of their kit, but Away is kind of a tapper… it’s not as bad on those first two records when they’re clearly trying to be as extreme and as heavy as their peers, but as they de-emphasize speed and heaviness, it seems like Away’s drumming gets markedly less aggressive. Leave that shit in Men Without Hats!

As for Angel Rat, after reading that chapter and watching the video for “Clouds in My House” (which I’d never seen), I’m convinced all the people who hated on Angel Ratwhen it came out were reacting to that video and not the actual record. I played Angel Rat a ton when it got reissued on vinyl for the first time for Record Store Day in 2022, and I remember being flummoxed about why people disliked the record as much as they did. Yeah, it has a little of that 90s alt rock in the sound, but way less (and less awkwardly!) than most other 80s metal bands who were trying to adapt to new world grunge order (not that Angel Rat was a reaction to that… it came out in 1991, a few months before Nirvana broke). Angel Rat still very much sounds like Voïvod, and while the riffs are more concise, they’re still Voïvod as fuck. “Clouds in My House” is a perfect example… that main riff is killer! However, when I watch the video where the bands are dressed in Seinfeld puffy shirt-type pirate costumes, it doesn’t go down nearly as smoothly. They just look lame. That must really suck, to spend a ton of money on a video and watch it back and be like, “fuck, we look like dorks.”

We’ll see if I dig into Voïvod’s later discography as I finish up the book. I never followed the band post-_Angel Rat, except for their 2018 album The Wake, which I picked up used at some point because I had heard so many people raving about how great it is. I also need to find myself a copy of Rrröööaaarrr_, which I inexplicably don’t own… what the fuck? I swear I had that record at some point, but god knows what happened to it. Thankfully, it doesn’t seem like a bank-breaker, so with a little patience I should be able to plug this shameful hole in my collection.