Staff Picks

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.

I’ve been fighting the depression demon lately, so I’ve been struggling with that feeling of looking at my “new arrivals / recently listened” stack and feeling unexcited, like there’s no music I really want to hear. One nice thing about having a few thousand records, though, is that when this feeling strikes, I can usually dig through the stacks and find something I haven’t revisited in so long that it has become new to me again. That’s what happened this week as I flipped through my M’s and landed on this album from Croatia’s Majke (translation: Mothers). This album originally came out in 1988 on cassette only on the label Slušaj Najglasnije!, but my copy is the first-ever vinyl version, which came out in 2022 on the Šareni Dućan label.

While I couldn’t remember what Majke sounded like when I pulled this off the shelf, I remember exactly where and when I bought this record. In fact, I already wrote about that night in a previous staff pick back in 2022. Scarecrow had just played a gig at the MKNŽ club in Ilirska Bistrica, Slovenia, and my then-new friend Simon had a distro set up that was heavy on punk reissues from his part of the world. Some of it I recognized, but most of it I didn’t, so I basically said, “here’s how much money I have… tell me what to buy.”

This self-titled record from Croatia’s Majke was one of his recommendations, though in retrospect I’m surprised I picked it up because it has two pretty big strikes against it: it’s often described as garage-punk (a type of music I don’t hate, but also don’t really seek out) and it’s from 1988, which is a bit close to the 90s for my taste. I’m glad I took the recommendation, though, because this rips! While the group often gets the “garage” tag online, to me this album has more of a ’77 punk sound, both in the songwriting and the production. Specifically, Majke reminds me of the more rock and roll-influenced, pub rock-leaning bands of the ’77 set like the Lurkers or Eddie & the Hot Rods. When they get particularly high-energy and inject a little Buzzcocks-esque melody into their Chuck Berry-via-the-MC5 riffing, they can even sound like a rawer, nastier version of the Saints, which is not a comparison I drop lightly.

And don’t even worry about that 1988 recording date, because this has absolutely none of the sheen I associate with the 90s. It sounds like my favorite 70s recordings… raw and live, with minimal studio interference, but enough fidelity to appreciate what each musician in the group brings to the table. If you played me this with no context, I’d guess it was from the late 70s, which is clearly where this music lives spiritually.

While this record is an isolated blip to me, its only association with a beautiful Slovenian evening (actually, I recall having a lot of fun the next morning, too…), a little research reveals Majke has a long and storied career that continues to this day. While founding guitarist Marin Pokrovac was killed in a car accident returning home from rehearsal in 1989, the band soldiered on and in 1990 released Razum I Bezumlje, which seems to have been their most successful album artistically, if not commercially. I checked out a little of it online (it’s on streaming services and YouTube) and it’s definitely in a similar style to the debut, but with clearer, heavier production. I got some Laughing Hyenas vibes from parts of it. On the wantlist it goes! Sadly, the Balkan wars of the 1990s flared up shortly after _Razum I Bezumlje_’s release, which scattered Majke’s members across the newly established borders. Vocalist Goran Bare has kept a revolving-door lineup going since the early 90s, but the cover art and the number of wants these records show on Discogs do not indicate they are worth checking out. If anyone knows differently, please let me know.

And since I don’t have a proper ending for this, I’ll just say fuck war, fuck imperialism, fuck capitalism, and fuck the US government.

The record I chose for this week is the three-way split LP / compilation from 1981 called Paket Aranžman, which is Croation for “package deal.” And a deal it is! You get multiple tracks each from three OG Yugoslavian punk / post-punk bands: Šarlo Akrobata (Charles the Acrobat), Idoli (Idols), and Električni Orgazam (Electric Orgasm). Paket Aranžman came out in 1981 on the Jugoton label, which has an interesting history. Beginning early in the 20th century as a company called Elektroton, in 1947 the Yugoslavian government nationalized the company, which changed its name to Jugoton and became the leading record label, record manufacturer, and chain of record stores in Yugoslavia. Throughout its 44-year history (Jugoton changed its name to Croatia Records after Yugoslavian’s dissolution in 1991), Jugoton produced many licensed releases for Yugoslavia, much as other state-run labels like Poland’s Tonpress and Russia’s AnTrop did for their respective markets. However, Jugoton’s primary mission was to promote Yugoslavian artists. As with the aforementioned labels, Jugoton’s catalog is huge and diverse, and while most of what the label released isn’t of much interest to me, a few radical bands made it onto the roster.

Before I get into what each band sounds like, I should mention that Paket Aranžman’s track listing doesn’t present each group’s songs as a solid block, but bounces between bands. Šarlo Akrobata and Idoli each have four tracks, while Električni Orgazam has three. With three bands and two sides you’re going to end up with an awkward split no matter what you do, and while each band has music on both sides of the record, side A is dominated by Šarlo Akrobata, who contribute three tracks, while side B features three Idoli tracks (including one that’s over eight minutes long, by far the longest song on the album). Električni Orgazam has the second track, but then they don’t pop up again until track 8. It’s kind of weird, but it works… the LP listens more like a cohesive album than a compilation. It helps that the bands aren’t too far apart from one another stylistically, but it’s clear the record’s producers put some thought into the sequencing.

Šarlo Akrobata has the first track on the record, so let’s talk about them first. “Ona Se Budi” is a strong start to the record, leading with a fat bass sound and a heavy, in-the-pocket groove. The song is kinda reggae—especially when the guitars come in with their stabbing upstrokes—but isn’t quite there. The bass-forwardness and the locked-in groove remind me of the Stranglers, though Šarlo Akrobata’s playing is even more accomplished… they’re really at Ruts-level musicianship here. I wonder if Paket Aranžman’s producers thought Šarlo Akrobata was the strongest band, since their songs both open and close the album? Regardless, all four of their tracks are very strong, with that heavy bass tone providing the common link as they explore Pop Group-esque art-punk on “Oko Moje Glave” and frantic ska on the closer “Niko Kao Ja” (which also has a great vocal hook in the chorus).

Električni Orgazam is the second band, and oddly enough they kind of sound like the Stranglers too, though with them it’s not so much the playing as the presence of (I think) a monophonic synth. The synth takes a prominent role on “Krokodili Dolaze,” and it’s easy to imagine that track on Black and White or The Raven. The synth isn’t as prominent on Električni Orgazam’s other two tracks, both of which have a ’77-ish rock-and-roll flavor. It’s anything but generic, though… “Vi” has a dark swagger that reminds me of early Joy Division, and the song may even have nicked its central groove from “Warsaw.”

Idoli is the third band on Paket Aranžman, and while they are the scrappiest musically, I’d be willing to bet their big vocal hooks make them many listeners’ favorite band on the compilation. “Schwüle Über Europa - Omorina Nad Evropom” has a strong folk feel with a simple vocal melody, while “Plastika” is the punkiest song on the record, a high-energy, sub-two-minute sprint with a harmonica (I think?) adding some extra flavor. Something about this track reminds me of poppy 70s Finnish punk, so if you’ve been enjoying the Eppu Normaali records we’ve been pushing, give this song a listen. “Amerika” is another standout, but it couldn’t be more different from “Plastika.” “Amerika” is built on this nervous, repetitive groove, and despite its name, the vocal melody sounds like it’s in an Arabic scale, giving the song a Middle Eastern feel. It makes me think of “Punk Islam” by CCCP (which you might recognize since a live video of the track recently made the rounds on Instagram). While its eight-minute runtime might try your patience, I think it works well to break up the mostly high-energy second side of the LP.

While all three bands contribute excellent tracks, Paket Aranžman’s thoughtful sequencing and consistent production make it sound great as an album-length listen. And unlike a lot of punk from this time and place, it’s easy to hear. It’s on all the streaming services (here are links for Apple Music, Spotify, and YouTube), and it’s been reissued many times, with a vinyl pressing as recently as 2021. So if you’re interested, there’s no excuse for not checking this out. I’m also looking forward to digging into each band’s discography, since all three have several full-lengths. I’m particularly interested in hearing more from Šarlo Akrobata, but don’t be surprised if you see me write more about all three bands in the future.

This week my staff pick is URGH, the new album by Mandy, Indiana, a group from Manchester, England. I chose Mandy, Indiana’s first self-titled EP as my staff pick back in 2022, and in that piece I wrote about how I first heard them. Basically, I heard them on Radio 6 Music on the BBC. That year I drove alone from Denver to Raleigh, taking about 3 days, and I spent a lot of time listening to Radio 6 on that trip. I think Mandy, Indiana was the flavor of the week because I noted in my staff pick that multiple DJ’s had played tracks from the then-new EP. High on alone time, I remember a track from that EP hitting in that perfect, middle-of-a-long trip way where you totally get a second wind from it. I’ve had a soft spot for the group ever since.

Since that first EP, Mandy, Indiana has been plugging along at a respectable pace. Their first album I’ve Seen Away arrived in 2023 on Fire Talk, the same UK label that released the EP. We stocked both releases at Sorry State (in fact, it looks like we recently restocked that first EP), but I guess I never got around to writing about the full-length… maybe it got a stray mention in the newsletter, but I didn’t write about it at any length. I listened to it a lot, though, and I enjoyed it, though I suppose I haven’t revisited it as often as the EP.

I was pleased to see Sacred Bones signed the group for URGH, their latest album and follow-up to I’ve Seen A Way. Mandy, Indiana’s noisy, arty sound is a good fit for Sacred Bones I think. You know, I was thinking about how a lot of Sacred Bones’ American signings don’t do much for me, but I like a lot of the artists they’ve signed from Europe: Molchat Doma (though nothing will be as good as that first record), The Soft Moon, and my favorite Anika (whose Abyss was one of my favorite records of 2025). I’d be curious to know how those groups go over in their own parts of the world. All those artists seem kind of exotic to me, all of them having an unidentifiable European-ness that I find very intriguing. Would a European see it that way, or would they just sound banal? Is there a context I’m blind to that might kill it for me? Why am I asking myself such a stupid and pointless question?

Whoa there buddy, let’s get back to planet earth. What does Mandy, Indiana sound like? Their songs have the shape and outline of post-punky rock songs, but it’s like someone replaced the bass, then the guitars, and then the drums with something more texturally interesting and rhythmically striking. Pop remade in some kind of post-human, android vision… not slick like Modem or Fatamorgana, but noisy and fucked up… Bladerunner not The Matrix. You get a really good representation of that right at the beginning of “Sevastopol,” the first track on URGH. It has a propulsive post-punk background, but everything is glitching out, awash in noise… alien and slightly threatening. Listen to it at the wrong time and it’ll send your anxiety into overdrive. Danny gave it a shot and his response was, “I don’t think I got it.” I didn’t know there was anything to get!

If you’re looking for a band reference as a point of comparison, that’s tough. This really is not my world. When I wrote about the first EP, I compared them to Rakta’s Falha Comum, and I can see where I was coming from with that… you’ll definitely hear lots of noisy analog synth sounds in both. But listening to URGH so much lately, I keep thinking of the last couple of Whatever Brains records. There’s no way Mandy, Indiana heard Whatever Brains, but both groups have that sense of having the shape of something familiar hovering in the background, yet sounding totally alien, like (as I said earlier) something organic that was torn down and rebuilt by robots. Maybe there’s an entire world of artists that do something similar and I don’t know about them. Or maybe that’s just a standard musical M.O…. it’s what a lot of the Björk tracks I like do, for instance, or even 60s psychedelic pop… finding fresh sounds to cram into the classic format.

Back to URGH. While I love most of it, there are a couple of more challenging moments later in the album that I’m undecided on. First, I don’t know how I feel about rapper Billy Woods’ guest spot on “Sicko!,” the eighth track on the album. He has a rough, staccato delivery, and when you combine that with Mandy, Indiana’s noisy, quasi-industrial textures, it sounds a lot like Death Grips. Which is fine, but it also makes me realize how much I love the interplay between the instruments and the vocals on Mandy, Indiana’s other songs. There’s a sweetness to the vocals that balances out the abrasiveness of the music, and when Woods’ vocals amplify rather than counterbalance the abrasiveness, it’s just too much for me. The other track I’m not feeling as much is the last song, “I’ll Ask Her.” Most of Valentine Caulfield’s lyrics are in French, but “I’ll Ask Her” is in English. When the lyrics are in French, I might catch a word or a phrase here and there, but mostly they’re just sounds to me, and that keeps me in this ethereal, dreamy listening space. The lyrics for “I’ll Ask Her” are coming from a great place politically—it’s about how men (or maybe just people) ignore and excuse sexist, even violent behavior—but something about it feels generic… I wish there was something more literary or poetic about the lyrics I guess… subtler, too, to match the fineness of detail in the music. I could totally imagine “Sicko!” or “I’ll Ask Her” being someone’s favorite tracks on the album, though. They stick out from the rest of the album, and there’s something “pop” about both songs, like they’re aimed at a wider audience than your typical noise group.

So yeah, check it out if you are so inclined. It looks like the indie exclusive color version is still available. It’s listed as “RGB” vinyl, but my copy is just green. I wonder if copies are randomly either red, green, or blue? If so, that’s kinda neat. I love surprises.

Before I get into my staff pick this week, I want to note that Friday evening (Feb 13) I’ll once again be a guest on Mike from Analog Attack’s YouTube channel, where his What Are You Listening To? podcast meets (most) every Friday. I’ve been on several times, and this time I’m appearing alongside a couple of esteemed guests: Tony Pence from Celebrated Summer Records, Jeff Bolt from Swearin’ and Stupid Bag Records, and of course Mike will host as usual. I’ve been thinking about my picks and wondering if anyone else will have something to say about the weird-ass shit I listen to. You can watch it on YouTube after it airs, but it’s a lot more fun to watch live and interact with the show as it’s happening through the chat.

As I’m sure you know, the Descendents are remastering and reissuing their SST-era catalog on Org Music. So far they’ve done two titles: Milo Goes to College and I Don’t Want to Grow Up (available with either the original artwork or the new Punk Note edition). Milo Goes to College is an all-timer for me… a record I’ve listened to a million times and love to the bottom of my heart. At some point I wisely invested in an original New Alliance Records pressing (which sounds significantly better than the SST represses), so that reissue came and went with little effect on my listening habits. However, the reissue of I Don’t Want to Grow Up has hit me pretty hard. I’ve known the record since I was in high school. In fact, I remember ordering it from the SST mail-order catalog (the little ones that they used to include in copies of every release) on CD along with a t-shirt of the album art. I only wore the t-shirt a couple of times before I realized yellow shirts are not a good match for my complexion, so I cut it up and it became my very first back patch. I still have it sewn onto an old hoodie, but I don’t break it out too often. I stopped wearing hoodies a few years ago after someone pointed out what a marker of our times they are, and how in the future everyone will be able to tell instantly that a photo is from the 2010s or 2020s by the flaccid ballsack hanging off the back of pretty much everyone’s necks. It’s been crewnecks all the way for me since I heard that quip.

Anyway, I listened to that CD of I Don’t Want to Grow Up for many years, and it fueled many a late-night drive over the decades, but I don’t think I ever really understood or appreciated its context. I always knew that Milo Goes to College stood apart from the rest of the Descendents catalog in terms of both production and songwriting, and of course the vibe completely changes when they came back in the 90s (another benefit of being my age and getting into the Descendents as a teenager: I got to see them play an incredible show in a dilapidated movie theatre in Norfolk, Virginia on the Everything Suckstour). But the middle-era SST albums were just kind of an undifferentiated mass to me. Pre-Discogs it was hard to even tell what order they came in, and since LIveage! and Somery did such a good job of collecting the best songs from those albums, I didn’t really spend much time with them individually. This reissue campaign is a great opportunity to rectify that.

I Don’t Want to Grow Up was the Descendents’ second album, originally released in 1985, three years after Milo Goes to College. A lot happened in the interim, but I Don’t Want to Grow Up still feels like a continuation of Milo Goes to College. Original Descendents guitarist Frank Navetta was out, replaced by Ray Cooper, but the rest of the lineup carries over from Milo. Of course Bill Stevenson and Milo are mainstays and it’s not the Descendents without them, but having original bass player Tony Lombardo still on board is huge. I love Tony Lombardo’s playing. I hate when bass players get noodly… I’d way rather they just stay locked in, holding down the rhythm and playing mostly root notes. But Lombardo crafts these perfect lines that are sturdy as bedrock, yet often pull against the rest of the song rhythmically and melodically in a way that’s subtle but significant. Often, Lombardo’s bass line is at the heart of the song… the all-time classic bass line form “Myage” is probably the definitive example, but “Rockstar” from I Don’t Want to Grow Up definitely fits in that category too. Actually, now that I’m looking at the songwriting credits, Lombardo composed the music for the first four tracks on this LP (as well as “Theme” and “GCF”), so his writing really sets the tone for the record. I Don’t Want to Grow Up is the last Descendents with Lombardo on bass, and I feel like they were never the same afterward. (Side note: looking around on Discogs just now I ran across the Tonyall record on Cruz from 1991… I may need to investigate this further.)

While 3/4 of the Milo lineup continued on to I Don’t Want to Grow Up, the change in the guitar chair is significant. Original guitarist Frank Navetta had a distinctive style, with a lot of note-y parts that almost sound more like bass lines than guitar lines, which would weave around Lombardo’s bass in fascinating ways… the interplay between those two is one of my favorite parts of Milo Goes to College. Ray Cooper is a more conventional guitarist. He has more of a traditional “rock” sound with lots of power chords and more familiar, sometimes even slightly metallic, fills and flourishes (interestingly, Cooper also played guitar for a time in Chuck Dukowski’s band SWA… I think concurrently with this time in Descendents? I’d have to listen back to the relevant You Don’t Know Mojackepisodes to be sure). Cooper’s style is totally different from both Navetta and his eventual replacement Stephen Egerton, and while it never really stuck out to me in my first couple of decades listening to I Don’t Want to Grow Up, I have really been digging it as I’ve revisited the album over the past couple of weeks. There are so many parts on I Don’t Want to Grow Up where, had Stephen Egerton composed the guitar parts, they’d be full of weird jazz chords and dissonance… I don’t hate Stephen’s playing (one would be hard-pressed to deny his virtuosity), but I think it’s sometimes too clever for its own good. Ray Cooper is much better at getting out of the way and letting the song shine. The chunky power chords on “Descendents” sound great, and anything more would be trying too hard… better to just keep it kind of a dumb, simple song. Particularly on Lombardo’s compositions, it’s almost like the guitar and bass switch roles, with Cooper’s guitars holding down the rhythm and locking in with the drums while Lombardo’s bass is a little looser and more melodic. I love it when bands do that.

Before I get into full-on raving about the songs I like, let’s pause for a moment and talk about a few of the things I don’t like about I Don’t Want to Grow Up. The first is a relatively minor quibble, and that’s the production. If you’re a fan of 80s SST releases, it’s something you’ve learned to live with. It’s amazing that, despite using numerous studios, engineers, and producers, so many of the records from that first spurt of releases on SST sound so lackluster. I Don’t Want to Grow Up must have been one of Bill Stevenson’s first production jobs (he’s credited as co-producer alongside David Tarling, who was also the engineer and worked on many other SST releases from this era). Thankfully I Don’t Want to Grow Up isn’t over-produced, but I always thought it sounded kind of thin and flat. This new mastering job for the Org Music reissue attacks that problem by boosting the low end-frequencies and adding some crispness in the high end that was missing on the SST CD I grew up with. But man… as with so many SST releases, I can’t help but wonder what this album would sound like with a really great recording.

The other thing that bums me out about I Don’t Want to Grow Up is the casual misogyny you hear in some lyrics. There’s a distinct incel vibe to a lot of the early Descendents lyrics. The most egregious example on this album is “No FB” (which stands for “No Fat Beaver”), which bums me out every time I hear it… all the more so since I really like the music, which feels like a callback to the Fat EP. “Pervert” also feels kind of weird, but I guess it’s defensible in principle… of course it’s fine to like sex. However, I feel like even the “love” songs have this way of flattening the object of the narrator’s affections in this way that feels not just immature, but slightly violent. Like I said… incel vibes. I think some songs on Milo Goes to College are even more guilty of that than I Don’t Want to Grow Up, but I should also note that some of my feelings might be colored by hearing stories from old Raleigh heads about when the Descendents played here on the tour supporting Grow Up. Apparently they came off as major creeps who were only interested in scamming on girls. I assume they’ve long grown out of that, but it’s something that always comes to mind when I listen to these songs.

Back to the actual album. For me, I Don’t Want to Grow Up is a record of two sides. Side one, starting with those four Lombardo compositions and with the fifth, Milo’s “No FB,” also calling back to the band’s earlier era, feels like a bridge from the old to the new. But then side two just takes off. In fact, I think the B-side of I Don’t Want To Grow Up is the best and most consistent side of vinyl the Descendents ever put out. Two of the tracks—“Silly Girl” and “Good Good Things”—almost aren’t even worth talking about at length because they have been so thoroughly canonized as classic Descendents tracks. Surely any die-hard Descendents fan would count them among their favorites, and both appear on Somery. But the other three tracks are excellent too. I’ve really fallen in love with “In Love This Way” during this recent spate of listening. It’s a Milo song with jangly, countrified guitar and some great walking bass from Tony… it wouldn’t be out of place on a Replacements album, and its chorus is divine. “Christmas Vacation” is right up there with “Silly Girl” and “Good Good Things…” just a classic Descendents tune with driving verses (kudos on the simple, chugging palm muted part Ray!) and a super melodic chorus with vocal harmonies that I can’t resist singing along with. And then “Ace” ends the album on this kind of mysterious, atmospheric note. I love Ray Cooper’s arpeggios, the chorus’s haunting melody, and the way the song veers briefly into the super-melodic with the “with all of your mind / and all of your soul” part (is this a bridge? I don’t know about songwriting LOL…), but then retreats back into the unsettling and mysterious when it moves back to the chorus. The song feels like a series of counterintuitive moves, but it just works. It’s one of those closing tracks that makes you want to just sit in the dark for a minute and ponder what you’ve heard rather than immediately throwing on another record.

Holy shit, I did not know I was going to write so much about this record. But, like I said, I’ve been listening to it a lot, and I had lots of thoughts. I’m looking forward to sitting down with Enjoy! when that comes out (presumably it’ll be the next in the series). I know “Wendy,” “Sour Grapes,” and “Get the Time,” but I don’t think I’ve ever owned Enjoy! and certainly haven’t spent much time with it. Maybe it’s the toilet paper roll on the cover, but I always assumed it was weighed down by too much goofiness. But we shall see. If it moves me maybe I’ll crap out another couple thousand words for a future staff pick.

So, this is the Sorry State newsletter’s Best of 2025 edition, but as has been the case for the past few years, I won’t spend a ton of time talking about my favorite new releases from last year. Most of them I’ve talked in the newsletter already throughout the year, but once again I’ve also shared my picks outside the Sorry State ecosystem. I blew the deadline for Maximumrocknroll’s year-end lists in the fog of grief after Red’s passing, but I did get together with Mike from Analog Attack and Eric Anderson (from MRR, Cvlt Nation, and several other publications) to talk about our favorites of 2025 on Mike’s YouTube channel. You can watch that video here if you haven’t seen it already… it’s worth it not just for my picks, but Mike’s and Eric’s too! Here’s my list:

• Steroid: Chainmail Commandos 12” (Crypt of the Wizard)
• London Clay: Private View 12” (La Vida Es Un Mus)
• Necron 9: People Die 12” (Unlawful Assembly)
• Kaleidoscope: Cities of Fear 12” (La Vida Es Un Mus)
• Ultimate Disaster: For Progress… 12” (Grave Mistake)
• Anika: Abyss 12” (Sacred Bones)
• Haram: Why Does Paradise Begin in Hell 12” (Toxic State)
• Tàrrega 91: Ckaos Total 12" (La Vida Es Un Mus)
• Ayucaba: Operación Masacre 12” (Metadona)
• The Massacred: Nightmare Agitators 12” (Active-8)

Those are in no particular order, except for the Steroid LP, which is without a doubt my favorite record of 2025. There are few other records in my life that have given me as much joy as this one. I go into detail about all these in the video (and also drop a few honorable mentions at the end), but I’ll give a quick shout-out to London Clay and Anika, two new releases I didn’t get to talk about much in the newsletter. Anika’s LP sounds kinda like Nico singing for Dinosaur Jr while they’re covering the Bad Seeds, and it’s totally brilliant. London Clay tiptoes along the line between hooky UK post-punk/DIY and super experimental UK post-punk/DIY, with just the right mixture of each for my tastes. We’re down to our last couple of copies, but if I can get a restock from LVEUM, I might make it Record of the Week sometime soon and talk about it at greater length. As for the rest, you probably don’t need me to tell you how great Necron 9 or Ultimate Disaster or Ayucaba or the Massacred are… they’re on everyone’s lists for a reason.

With that out of the way, let’s get to my main topic: my 2025 in record collecting. I mostly write about older records in my staff picks, but I don’t get too nerdy about record collecting throughout the year. I’ve always seen myself as more of an accumulator than a collector, but looking back on my acquisitions every year is a nice opportunity to reflect on the state of my collection.

First things first, in last year’s piece I identified three main wants I hoped to acquire in the near future, and I nabbed two of them. Not bad!

I picked up both on Discogs, though I have to give a shout-out to Eduard from Mendeku Diskak, who provided a much-needed assist when Trump’s dumb-ass tariffs suspended all shipments from Spain (among other countries) to the US. The record I didn’t get last year was the Nerorgasmo 7”. I was planning on featuring that on my want list this year, but now that I see I’ve been fiending after it for well over one cycle around the sun, it has officially achieved the status of TOP WANT. If you can help me get one of these bad boys into my hands, please get in touch.

One collection I’ve been actively working on this year is my attempt to get every record by the Finnish band Vaavi. I’ve been meaning to write a staff pick about Vaavi forever, but 1. I don’t have much info about them and 2. I was reluctant to blow up the spot before I got all their records. But fuck it, here’s where I’m at right now (one or two of these might have been acquired in 2024… I don’t really keep track of that and can’t remember off the top of my head):

So now I’m mainly missing two Vaavi 7”s: EP:n Nimi and Kun Rakkaus Kuolee. I suppose I’ll also eventually want Ei Palata Voi Eiliseen, which the band released during a brief reunion in 1986, but that’s not a high priority. I also picked up a copy of the double LP collection Tytöt Hymyilee while I was in Finland this summer, though I didn’t include it in the photo since it’s not an OG artifact. It’s pretty alright and has a bunch of tracks from all of Vaavi’s eras.

Speaking of my trip… last summer I was lucky enough to visit Finland and Sweden again, and that’s where a majority of my record-buying happened. (I’m still paying off my credit card… ugh!) Let’s start with Sweden, since (despite a visit to Trash Palace), I went considerably less crazy there:

Actually, come to think of it I didn’t buy either of these 7”s in Sweden. D.T.A.L. was a hookup from a friend (I can’t remember but I think he might have had a double?!?!?!), and the Headcleaners I actually got from Sorry State. Jeff had a little hoard of rare records he was saving for a special occasion, and when I saw it, I was like, “I need that Headcleaners!” I still need Extrem P and the Picnic Boys split… one day. Ebba Gron completes my collection for the band, which I started on my first visit to Sweden in 2009, when I picked up their first LP, We’re Only In It for the Drugs. It’s all about the long game, folks!

And now Finland… whoa mama, I got some Finnish jams this year:

So, the heavy hitter 7”s in the photo I kinda got hooked up on. Terveet Kadet and Lama were more friend hookups… a homie upgraded their copies, and I was lucky enough to get the cast-offs, which is a-OK with me. Kaaos is the blue vinyl first pressing, and it was definitely a splurge at Trash Palace. Pohjasakka my friend Markku got for me for a great price when it turned up in a shop in his town. Most everything else, though, I got from shops in Helsinki. I love 77-style Finnish punk, and that’s most of what you see here. Nolla Nolla Nolla and Kollaa Kestää I knew but never really had any hope of owning, while a lot of the others are relatively new discoveries… some I bought semi-blind, just from seeing them on Discogs and other lists of Finnish punk classics. Fucking Pelle Miljoona! I think Jeff picked up a copy of that while he was in Finland this summer too.

I’ve been collecting Japanese hardcore records for at least 20 years, but I haven’t been able to add much to that collection lately. Still, I nabbed a couple of heaters:

I’m the third person in Raleigh to own that copy of the Geizz 7”… the other two passed it on because there’s a small jump on one track, but it doesn’t bother the king of the beater copy, i.e. me. And when that Juden Souchi flexi showed up in the mail, it included an original, unpublished photo of the band the seller hadn’t mentioned. Score!

Next up, a handful of heavy hitters I NEVER thought I’d own:

These bear some explanation. I always tell people I don’t fuck with original Misfits records, but there are exceptions. I own 3 Hits from Hell because, amazingly enough, we had two copies for sale in the shop at the same time and I figured I should keep one of them. This copy of Beware was on the wall at Academy when I visited New York this summer. As with most of my records, it was kind of a beater, yet it still sounded great to me and was priced such that I literally could not walk away without it. One perk of owning a record store is that I know, should buyer’s remorse strike, I can offload it pretty easily. No Thanks popped up on Discogs for an extremely attractive price and I smashed that buy button. It’s not the rarer red vinyl, but it’s minty as hell. And Urban Waste… I could write a novel (or at least a novella) about that one. It came from a store in Greenville, North Carolina, that acquired a collection of EXTREMELY cool records. The problem was they were totally trashed… most were water-damaged, torn covers, nary an insert to be found, etc. They looked like a pack of wild dogs had gotten to them, yet they were all priced as if they were NM collector’s pieces. Somehow I lucked out and nabbed the Urban Waste for a price I was willing to pay. No insert, a little scuffy, but it still sounds great and I ain’t gonna pony up for a NM copy any time soon.

Here’s a stack of rando 7” acquisitions:

Zmiv I think was another hookup… though I can’t really remember at this point. (I buy too many records!) Shout-out to newsletter reader Marko, who hooked me up with the KGB single after I mentioned it in my staff pick about the Punk Que? Punk comp LP… this record is fucking GREAT! Johnny Concrete I’ve wanted for years, but literally never saw a copy for sale… friend-of-a-friend Dee Dee hooked me up with that one and the Eyes, making Rhino 39 the only significant gap in my Dangerhouse collection. Nasty Facts I’ve wanted forever… this is a UK pressing, though, and honestly I was disappointed with the sound. Does anyone out there know if the US pressing sounds significantly better? It’s funny, after hunting for that 7” for well over a decade, I’ve seen several copies pop up on Discogs since I picked up this one. The sleeveless 7” is Silver Chalice’s “Wasted” single, which was Jeff’s staff pick just last week! If Jeff is holding out for a copy with the sleeve, he’s likely in for a long wait. (If anyone out there wants to photocopy theirs for me, I would be happy to do something nice in return.)

And now stray 12”s:

I’ve been looking for an OG of Abwarts’ first album for years, and one finally popped up (alongside a similarly minty copy of their second album) from a US seller on Discogs, and I was stoked. Essential Logic and Kommunity FK were from the same collection as Urban Waste, and both are trashed. Kommunity FK skips a bunch and I paid way too much for it, so I’m kinda bummed, but Beat Rhythm News finally completes my Essential Logic collection, and a beater is fine because I’m pretty sure I own 3 different reissues of that record already. A.O.A. / Oi Polloi I’ve been after for a few years… as you already know, Sealed Records reissued it late last year, and then of course an OG copy (a beater once again, but totally playable) walks in the store with a collection like 2 weeks later. The Gladiators is my cool reggae find of 2025… I seem to get one cool reggae record per year. Most of the rest is from eastern Europe (aside from La Broma De Ssatán, which I already wrote about in a staff pick). My friend Markku—he of the Pohjasakka hookup—introduced me to these two Greek records, and that Stress LP is my favorite new-to-me old record that I have discovered in many years. I have listened to it like a bazillion times since I got it. And the Διατάραξη Κοινής Ησυχίας compilation is the 2013 reissue… probably the most recent pressing included in this entire roundup, but it was hard enough to find that I have little hope of owning an original.

So yeah, there you go. One year in the life of a certified lunatic. I realize how completely insane I am, and I hope everyone takes this in the spirit it I intend, i.e. sharing my love of punk rather than bragging about shit I bought. I live a pretty spartan lifestyle, and aside from the constant takeout meals that keep me fat, I spend almost all my money (and then some) on records. I don’t think I’ve bought a new pair of underwear in like 5 years, but got forbid I suffer the indignity of listening to 80s Greek punk on YouTube. I love a deal, too, and as I’ve mentioned many times, I’m perfectly happy with a beater copy that plays through halfway decently. Here’s hoping plenty more of those are in store for me in 2026.

But before I go, I must update the want list for 2026!

• Nerorgasmo 7” (as I mentioned above, this is now officially a TOP WANT)
• Various: Navidades Radioactivas LP (Dro, 1982)… and the other Dro compilation while we’re at it!
• Pekinška Patka: Bolje Da Nosim Kratku Kosu / Ori, Ori 7” (with picture sleeve, please!)
• Various: Great Punk Hits LP (I’ve been holding out for one with an obi… it’s absurd that I don’t have this record by now)

Of course there are plenty more I’d love to have, and a lot more than that I won’t even get my hopes up about, but that’s what’s currently in my sights. If you can be of help with any of these, please hit me up through Sorry State! And to the rest of you: please don’t rob me! These records are all I have LOL.

Siouxsie and the Banshees took a long time making their way onto my list of favorite bands. I’ve been aware of them since before I can remember, but during the self-education on 70s UK punk I gave myself in my 20s, they never really registered. I knew songs like “Hong Kong Garden” and “Love in a Void” and I thought they were alright, but they didn’t knock me out the way “What Do I Get” or “One Chord Wonders” or “Neat Neat Neat” did. I basically thought of Siouxsie and the Banshees as ’77 also-rans who had a fluke pop hit way after the fact (1988’s “Peekabo,” which I remember being all over MTV).

Then, sometime in my late 20s, I picked up 1981’s Once Upon a Time: The Singles and fell head over heels. The punky “Honk Kong Garden” and “Love In a Void” where there, but what blew me away were the batch of singles that came after that: “Happy House,” “Christine,” “Spellbound,” etc. It’s those singles from 1980 and 1981 that made me a fan and made me curious to explore the Banshees’ discography further. After picking up the first four albums, the shape of that discography and the band’s story became a little clearer. Siouxsie and bassist Steve Severin were the creative core, and they played with many musicians before a lineup with drummer Kenny Morris and guitarist John McKay solidified around the time they signed with Polydor. That lineup did the first two albums and a handful of singles, but imploded in September 1979 when Morris and McKay quit the band mid-tour. Budgie, recently off playing drums on the Slits’ phenomenal Cut, joined on drums and became the group’s third creative pillar. The trio then worked with a succession of guitarists (most of them incredible) for the rest of the band’s run, their music continuing to change and evolve until the very end.

So, it’s spring 2025. I’m chilling, living my life as a Siouxsie & the Banshees fan, and YouTube serves me a video called Siouxsie and the Banshees: Ranking the Albums from “The Scream” through “The Rapture.” I feel like I know my Siouxsie records pretty well, but the three guys in this video totally outclassed me with their knowledge, and I was learning so much that I ended up watching the whole 90-minute video. The guys in the video rate some of the Banshees’ later albums more highly than I do, which made me want to spend more time with those records, but the video’s big revelation for me was learning about a record they kept bringing up called The Thorn.

The Thorn came out in 1984, and it is the sole EP Siouxsie and the Banshees ever released. Which is kinda weird, right? The Banshees were students of the craft of making both singles and albums, so why did they neglect the humble EP? I love EPs. I like that you get a little more than a single with an EP, but it’s not as weighty as an album. Perhaps for that reason, I think a lot of bands’ best work is on their EPs, which have a way of catching artists at transitional stages. Napalm Death’s Mentally Murdered, the Fall’s Slates, and the Clash’s Black Market Clash all come to mind as great EPs in that transitional vein.

And Siouxsie and the Banshees were, indeed, in a period of transition when they recorded The Thorn. Guitarist John McGeotch (formerly of Magazine, and later of Public Image Limited) quit the band in 1982, and Robert Smith from the Cure (who had also filled in for a spell in 1980) joined the Banshees as his replacement. However, the Cure was hitting their own creative stride during this period, and eventually Smith left the Banshees to focus on his own band. The Banshees then recruited journeyman musician John Valentine Carruthers (whose most recent gig was in Clock DVA) as Smith’s replacement. The Thorn is the first thing Curruthers recorded with the group, and it served as an introduction to the Banshees’ new lineup.

How do the Banshees choose to kick off the Carruthers years? Curiously, by revisiting some old tunes. Not the greatest hits, mind you, but a motley collection of album tracks and b-sides from several lineups before (including three from the Morris / McKay lineup that had disbanded four years prior… the lineup that recorded the not-as-great earlier stuff). They chose four tracks: “Overground” originally appeared on the first Banshees LP, The Scream, while “Placebo Effect” was on the second album, Join Hands. “Voices” was the b-side to 1978’s “Hong Kong Garden” single, while “Red Over White” backed up 1980’s “Israel” single. If someone forced you to make a list of the worst 10 songs the Banshees had recorded up to that point, these would almost certainly be on it. They all sound unfinished, but some of them sound barely started. I guess bands do this all the time—revisit old material that didn’t quite work the first time around—but most bands are better at relegating those early attempts to the cutting-room floor. I think it’s rare for a band to reclaim and revise their earlier material like that, and particularly rare for them to do it successfully.

All four tracks on The Thorn are completely reworked, reimagined really, as Banshees circa 1984. The minimalist sketches that sat on b-sides are now ambitious, orchestral, dramatic as all fuck… they shine. Earlier this week I was driving around listening to Twice Upon a Time, the sequel to Once Upon a Time that covers the rest of the Banshees’ career, noting how many covers appear on that compilation. I thought to myself that perhaps where the Banshees were really in a class of their own was as arrangers. They constructed these massive, layered soundscapes that sounded like nothing else (well, at least until Robin Guthrie ripped it off and turned it into a whole subgenre). Though the bones of the songs on The Thorn are not great, they are still captivating in these versions. However, when the Banshees took their power as arrangers and welded it to truly great _songs_—whether covers of classics like “The Passenger” and “Dear Prudence” or their own compositions like “Cities and Dust” and “Swimming Horses”—they achieved highs very few other artists ever matched.

So yeah, The Thorn kicks ass, but sadly it ain’t easy to get. It came out on vinyl only in 1984, wasn’t released in the US at all, and has never been reissued. Aside from Overground appearing on Twice Upon a Time, the only place you can get these tracks digitally would be as part of 2004’s Downside Up CD box set (Discogs median price check: $133.50… also, I hate to be a bummer, but the rest of the box is kind of a slog). Since I learned about _The Thorn_’s existence a few weeks before I went to Europe last summer, I made a mental note to keep my eye out for it. I actually found it at the very last shop I visited on the trip. It wasn’t expensive… there are a ton of copies on Discogs for $15 (or less, if you’re willing to skimp on condition), but you’re gonna have to pay that international shipping.

And speaking of Twice Upon a Time and un-reissued Banshees records, get that back in print! Twice Upon a Time came out in 1992, and they only pressed vinyl in continental Europe (not even the UK!). I do not want to pay several hundred dollars for that record, but give me a halfway decent reissue and you can have my $50.

Alright, I guess it’s time to shake off the cobwebs and write my first staff pick in a couple of months. Do I still know how to do this? We’ll see, I suppose.

A couple of weeks ago we flipped the calendar over to 2026. In early January in years past, Jeff has always quoted Embrace’s song “End of a Year:” “It’s the end of a fucked up year… and there’s another one coming.” I’ve never stopped to think too much about that lyric until this year. While I had some great times in 2025, the latter half of the year was one of the most grueling times I’ve ever lived through. It truly was a fucked up year. And, as Ian said, there’s another one coming. No respite, no turning the clock back, just keep plowing ahead into the shit.

I was thinking the other day about how I haven’t heard the term “new year’s resolution” once this year. Admittedly, I’ve been doing my best to spend as little time as I can with both mass and social media, but I don’t think I’m that disconnected. My theory is that the world has grown so fucked up that no one has the energy to do anything but console ourselves about all the trauma we’ve endured. For the past few years, social media around the new year is a unified chorus of people exclaiming what a shit year it was, and virtually no one expressing hope the next year will be better, much less determination to make it so. I know that, in the past, I’ve dismissed most of the negativity I see about the state of the world as catastrophizing, or at the very least (foolishly) buying into the tendency in mainstream political discourse to treat every moment, every controversy, as THE MOST IMPORTANT CRISIS WE HAVE EVER FACED. But lately when I watch the news I see so much cruelty… so much evil. Our government in the United States is run by a coalition of gangsters, sadists, and people who are happy enough with whatever tiny piece of the pie they’re getting to remain complicit. I’ve always thought this was more or less true of national politics in the U.S., but there’s been a concerted effort in recent years to remove all good-hearted people from positions of power and replace them with the aforementioned gangsters, sadists, and stooges, right down to the humblest, smallest arms of local government. My mom works for the school system in the tiny town in Virginia where I grew up, and she’s told me about how a small group of right-wing activists have taken over the school board and enacted a regime that is basically the local equivalent of Stephen Miller’s wet dream. The world is getting worse, just about everywhere, for everyone but a tiny subset of people whose greed will never be satisfied.

I almost always stick to music in my pieces for the SSR newsletter, but I’ve been thinking about politics a lot lately… not Republican versus Democrat bs, but politics broadly defined, as in how we live together as humans and try to get along. Maybe I’m worried about losing my political compass without Red in my life. They were so passionate and so relentlessly empathetic, and I feel like they served as a bulwark against my natural tendency toward defeatism and apathy. But I also owe a lot of my thoughts about politics to being immersed in the world of Poison Girls for the past few weeks. Which leads me to my double staff pick for this week:

Poison Girls: Where’s the Pleasure 12” (Xntrix, 1982)

Rich Cross with Alec Dunn & Erin Yanke. This Is a Message to Persons Unknown: The Story of the Poison Girls book (PM Press, 2025)

While I’ve had Poison Girls records in my collection for many years, the band never truly clicked with me until I picked up a copy of their 1982 album Where’s the Pleasure sometime this fall. I can’t even remember where I got the record. It must have been during one of my trips out of town. Whenever I travel, and particularly when I travel alone, I tend to come home with a giant stack of vinyl, which I then spend the next few months going through. I did not know what I was in for when I dropped the needle on Where’s the Pleasure. First, it’s not what you would think of as an anarcho-punk record. Poison Girls had released several records by the time they recorded Where’s the Pleasure, and they’d long left behind any interest in catering to the middle of punk’s road. Where’s the Pleasurebuilds a world much wider than punk, taking in a range of styles across its thirteen tracks. The ones that first caught my ear—like the title track that begins the record—feature a crack rhythm section that lives deep in the pocket, and the album’s crystalline recording makes you feel like you’re plonked down in the middle of the studio as the band records. While Poison Girls’ connections to punk were fraying by this point, there’s still a punky sense of energy and directness, and I hear a lot of what I love about more “sophisticated” anarcho bands like Crisis and Zounds on Where’s the Pleasure.

The music pulled me in, but it wasn’t long before Vi Subversa’s lyrics captivated me. Subversa was 47 when Where’s the Pleasure came out, and I’m 46 now, so perhaps I’m in the right place in my life to appreciate where Vi was coming from. There are a few songs on Where’s the Pleasure that deal with “topical” issues: “Take the Toys” is, broadly, about war, while “Rio Disco Stink” is an invective against Rio Tinto, a multinational mining corporation with a long list of sins against the earth and humanity. But most of the songs on the album are about “personal” issues: love, romance, sex, aging, family… the stuff of human life rather than political broadsheets. And of course these “personal” and “political” issues intersect, which Vi has clearly thought about plenty. Take, for instance, the declamation in “Take the Toys (Reprise)”: “for all the money they spend on nuclear weapons, there is still not a safe and effective form of contraception.” Vi is an incredible lyricist, cuttingly direct one moment and oblique and evocative the next, and I am certain I’ll be pondering her words for the rest of my life.

Having been so blown away by Where’s the Pleasure, when I got an email announcing a Kickstarter / pre-order for a Poison Girls book on the long-running radical publishing imprint PM Press, I smashed that buy button without a second thought (and added in a “Take the Toys from the Boys” t-shirt for good measure). I just knew Poison Girls’ story was going to be riveting. I knew a few scattered facts that were intriguing—that Vi’s children were punks and had played in Fatal Microbes and Rubella Ballet, and that Poison Girls had frequently shared the stage with Crass—but listening to Where’s the Pleasure assured me whatever time I spent with Poison Girls, their art, and their story would be well-spent.

This Is a Message to Persons Unknown was all I could have wanted and more. As a punk rock book, it is top-notch. I love punk books, and the crisp graphic design and the reproduction of so much of the group’s paper ephemera—zines, flyers, photographs, press clippings, record sleeves and inserts, badges, and plenty more, all of it in vivid detail and full color—would have been enough to leave me a satisfied customer. But that’s only the beginning. The writing and editing are also top-notch… I try not to be an asshole about it, but as a former English teacher, the sloppy writing and copy editing on a lot of underground and small-press books really bug the shit out of me. Rich Cross’s research is exhaustive, but his writing is skillful enough not to lose the forest (the band’s story) in the trees (all those captivating details). The whole thing is executed to a much higher standard than any other book I can think of, even impressive ones like Crass: A Pictoral History.

And then there’s the story, which just blew my mind. I don’t want to summarize too much because this is already way too long, but my intuition that the Poison Girls were interesting characters was 100% accurate. And more than just being interesting, Poison Girls’ story is inspiring. The group’s key members—vocalist Vi Subversa, but also drummer Lance D’Boyle and guitarist Richard Famous—were dyed-in-the-wool radicals, people who looked at all the fucked up shit in the world and refused to take part. They didn’t just critique the world around them; they imagined how it could be better. And then they tried to make what they imagined a reality, despite an entire world working against them. They were human and had flaws and some things they tried worked out better than others, but they fucking tried. They had hope. The members of Crass found them so inspiring that, from January 1979 until early 1981, Crass refused to perform unless Poison Girls was also on the bill. Crass thought it was that important that their audience heard what Poison Girls had to say.

So yeah, Poison Girls has been my little island of hope in the sea of shit that was the latter half of 2025. I was honestly sad when I reached the last page of the book, but thankfully there are a bunch more Poison Girls records I haven’t yet spent enough time with. So at least I have something to look forward to as the world crumbles around us.