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Here it is, true believers! The eighth day hail mary, the avatars of that great universal energy rock 'n' roll: Menthol. Six hot tracks sure to bump that needle and melt your brain.
Our take: After two separate cassette pressings (including one by Sorry State), the best recording to emerge so far from the fertile Greensboro, North Carolina punk scene is finally committed to vinyl, and I can't think of a better label than Not Normal to have done it (envious though I may be of them!). If you've been listening to this on cassette or digital for a while now (as I have), it sounds a little bit thicker and less clean on vinyl, but still has the same impact. If you haven't heard this... well, what are you waiting for? The more I listen to it the less I feel capable of describing this. The riffs are really rock and roll, but overall the music isn't really very rock and roll at all. You can tell these guys are into the whole "slime punk" / Northwest Indiana thing as this works with a similar mixture of traditional punk/hardcore and psychedelic elements, but it really doesn't bite anyone's style. In fact, I'd be surprised if I didn't see people biting this band's style before too long. As great as the music is, though, the vocals and lyrics are just as important. I don't know what it is about these words, but I just love them... bordering on nonsense but still gesturing toward profundity, I keeping reading them over and over like I'm staring at a Rubik's cube or a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle for which I've lost one of the pieces. A simply perfect record, and now that I've been able to spend a little time with the vinyl I think it has a firm place in the pantheon of greatest records ever to come out of the state of North Carolina. Highest possible recommendation.