Sir Admiral Rotting

Two records that I picked up recently here that are nothing alike in musical style but they share a common bond in that I'd to varying degrees been after both for a while.

First up, Rotting Out and their debut LP Street Prowl

I'd been after this record for ages but it just seemed to keep eluding me, every time a distro got it in I'd think 'cool, I'll grab that in a couple of days' and by the time I came back to pick it up it had all sold out. Finally I was in the right time at the right place to pick this up from Go The Distance.

Why are all the dudes in the band sporting their own merch? Who are they Iron Maiden? haha
Anyway I dig this record alot. Great paced modern hardcore that whilst nothing especially new holds up well against the other current hardcore heavyweights out there. This band should be more well known than they are.

This is the second press of the album and comes with this insert of a decent sized poster backed with the lyrics.

It comes on this glorious red with black marbling vinyl, which really changes shade when held up to the light. Good looking vinyl.

Next -

 

The wacky named Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell - Don't Hear It...Fear It. Ever since I picked up the Uncle Acid and The Deadbeats LP on a whim a few months ago I've been on the look out for something similar as I really love that record. I saw this on a couple of blogs and also on the Rise Above Records website the same label that released the Uncle Acid LP so thought it might satisfy the dirty garage rock itch that I've developed, so I made a mental note to check this out.

 



I promptly forgot all about this record of course so when I saw it staring back at me in a record shop a few weeks ago I took a blind leap of faith and picked it up. Funny story here, after I picked this record up in the store about 10 seconds later a couple came in and it quickly became apparent from their not so hushed whispers that this was the record they had come in to buy, after frantically looking for a second copy and following me down the vinyl rack they left empty handed...score!

This record is of course beautifully packaged just like the Uncle Acid one, that Rise Above sure do a nice job with their presentation. Gate fold sleeve this time and on ace thick (I presume 180 gram) green vinyl. Not sure of pressing info but I would guess this is of 500. This is a good listen too, I've only had a few listens and whilst it's not as immediate as the Uncle Acid album and doesn't quite grab me in the same way, this is good stuff that is a slightly different beast. I think with more listens I'll find more in it as it's got that sort of layered spacey sound.

Nation Of Bloggers

A record came this week that got me thinking about album covers. There's no doubt about it that album covers look at their most absolute glorious as a vinyl record cover. Tapes, Cd's and heaven forbid digital download covers just don't look anywhere near as nice. See this is my favourite album cover of all time, and if truth be told I'm not even entirely sure why!

Here it is. The Nation Of Ulysses and their 1992 album Plays Pretty For Baby. I've never owned this on record before, I bought it way back in the mid nineties on CD and have always thought it looked great as a record, I've just been waiting for the right copy and price to come along. It came along this week, super cheap and still sealed with another few records I bought off a guy.

So why that cover? Well, I've just always been drawn to it for some reason, it's something to do with those guys in their sharp as hell 2-tone suits, playing a sweaty raw punk show, there's just a real energy and class that jumps out at me. I absolutely love that cover, always have. It's not the greatest album in the world as much as I like it, Shit, it might not even be Nation Of Ulysses best album. But that cover is fantastic.

If you haven't heard Nation Of Ulysses before this album was released on Dischord and produced by Ian Mackaye and the band definitely have that DC sound but they also had other ideas that would be aped and copied years later by loads of bands, especially Refused, wanna know where most of the ideas on The Shape of Punk To Come came from? Right here! I mean N.O.U even have a track called The Shape Of Jazz To Come. The band also put themselves out there as what I can only imagine was a tongue in cheek far left political terrorist group, which I always thought was pretty cool and amusing.

The inner is pretty cool too, set out like those pages at the back of comics and what not when you were a kid and they advertised all the joke novelty items you could buy like X-Ray specs and Mr. Spock ears.

So anyway, it got me thinking and I'd love to know what other peoples favourite album covers are. Especially my fellow blog fiends. Let's see them guys. Do a post about your favourite album cover on your own blogs, that would be cool and interesting...to me at least.

MA Glory

Just a quick post before work because life is definitely getting in the way at the moment. I've got a few new things I'm itching to write about but just haven't had time, I'll get round to it though.

Anyway this is my copy of the Wolf Whistle release MA Glory. Which features members of Have Heart and Rival Mob. This is a pretty different beast to those bands though.

I like this, short sharp blasts of furious noisy hardcore. There's 11 songs on this 7" release which probably tells you just how short, but as a fan of Daughters and Curlupanddie etc I'm fine with that.

This thing has really decent packaging too and is on a good looking blue vinyl.

Red, White & Blue

You'd be forgiven for thinking you'd clicked on Mario's blog Across Your Face with this post, he's far more likely to post up some Oi style punk rock, but no it is indeed a bit of Oi I'm bringing you today.

This caught my eye whilst I was buying something else recently and the fact it features the Harrington Saints who I wrote about a while ago and Lars Frederiksens Old Firm Casuals sold it to me. It also helped that the packaging on this thing is pretty darn sweet.

So as you can probably guess from the cover this features two U.S bands the aforementioned Harrington Saints and Old Firm Casuals and also two bands from this side of the pond, Booze and Glory and Argy Bargy. Which One Are You?

The Harrington Saints track I'd heard from their album Pride and Tradition and it's a good fast and furious track. The Old Firm Casuals I'd been meaning to check out because I'm a fan of Lars' stuff but I hadn't got round to actually hearing them so this is my first exposure and I like their track on here, it was pretty much what I was expecting but Lars can do little wrong for me.

I have to say I prefer the two U.S bands on show here (damn!!) the two bands from the U.K provide a couple of fun tracks here with the Argy Bargy track starting slowly but finding it's feet with the 'there's no reason' chorus. The Booze and Glory track is annoyingly catchy too and they have some interesting elements in their sound actually, a little The Jam and even a little bit of a folk vibe. But i dunno i think my problem with UK Oi has always been it being very cockney, what can I say, I'm from the north of England!! HaHa

This is the second press of the release and this is supposed to be the 'Beer' colour out of 500. Strangest looking pint colour I've ever seen though.

Thieves Mourning

Couple of records quickly here. A few weeks ago I noticed that VRevolution had a SALE page appear on their website and on checking out what was there I noticed two records that I'd looked at in the past when buying from VR but never pulled the trigger on, but now they were sitting there at a very reasonable price I decided 'what the hell' and snapped them up. I guess the indecision and waiting paid off quite nicely here.

Firstly a band who's record I bought purely for one song. Former Thieves - The Language That We Speak.

 

I picked this up after hearing just the one track which I thought was pretty damn good. Trust Fund Kids is the track and it has a drop in it that goes into a riff that I challenge anyone to not start banging their head to. Seriously take a listen from 47 seconds in, you'll see what I mean.

Anyway, so this is on crystal clear vinyl limited to 500 copies.

Unfortunately, the rest of this album isn't quite as strong as that track for me. I mean there's nothing bad here, it's pretty decent screamy metal-core type stuff, but there's just a lot of other bands doing it better. But it will probably get some spins still now and again.

I included the picture below as it shows more clearly what colour the cover actually is. It looks really washed out in the photos above due to the lighting and the plastic still being on the record.

The second record I picked up is this. Day Of Mourning - Your Future's End on A389 Records.

Glorious album cover, that artwork absolutely pops and although it's hard to tell with my photography skills it is really vibrant colours.

I admit I know little about this band other than they were around few years ago in the late 90's and featured members of Pulling Teeth and Blue Monday. In fact they are very similar in sound to Pulling Teeth. Dwid from Integrity and Human Furnace from Ring Worm also feature on this LP.

Gate fold sleeve and some of the nicest looking vinyl of any release I have. Again, my photos are not really doing it justice but the record is beautiful. No idea of pressing numbers but this is the purple splatter first pressing.

It's actually pretty good stuff.

27

I bought this maybe 5 months or so ago and I just listened to it again and realised that I haven't written about it. This is Holding On For Brighter Days by 27 and it was released on Marcus' label Endless Quest Records. You can read his blog of the same name right here

I think I was buying another release by Endless Quest in the form of Hope Defeated's 7" when I first noticed this record or at least the description of the band and their sound, described as 'melodic dark pop finds its own path, as if it’s sprouting through a cracked cement playground at night; it moves easily from lushly full to gently sparse, revolving around the alluring and captivating vocals.' That sounded pretty interesting to me and I made a mental note to check it out at some point.

 

A little while later I picked up this amber glitter version of the vinyl limited to 356 for a VERY reasonable $6. It's had maybe 15 spins since then. It's a really cracking album and sounds exactly as described above. Dark stripped down haunting pop songs i guess kinda in the vein of Jonah Matrangas acoustic One Line Drawing stuff, but not really. In fact this is actually quite hard to describe which is odd really because you wouldnt think it is until you actually come to do so. Both beautiful and painful.

 

This is the best I could do to capture the vinyl, i assure you that is glitter and not my dandruff on the record. It's a really good looking record. I love a surprise buy like this, it's had way more spins than I ever thought it would and it's a really good record to chill out to late at night. The bands cover of Crazy by Gnarles Barkley is great and well worth a listen to that track alone.

 

If Marcus has any left I highly recommend giving this a chance for those times when you want something a bit different to your usual heavy as f*ck hardcore diet. I really need to check out the bands other stuff.

 

'Part of me just wants to go,

But I keep it high to keep it low'

 

NYC Classics

First post of October? Arrrghhhh I'm busy right now.
It pains me these days that when I originally collected vinyl back in the 90's I got rid of the vast majority in favour of CD's and what not. What a doofus. Anyway, here's two compilation records from my collection that I didn't get rid of that I figured would be fun to post up here.

Revelation Records #7 New York City Hardcore, a record no hardcore collection should be without. Just look at that cover.

This is the first pressing of the record from 1988 and I'm gonna hazard a guess that I got this around 92/93 after a strict diet of metal had lead me to hardcore music. I used to love getting compilations like this back in the day as it was a good way to hear lots of bands all at once to weed out the ones you might like. I'm fairly sure this was my first exposure to Revelation Records.

 

 

Instantly bands like Gorilla Biscuits, Sick Of It All and Youth Of Today jumped out at me and I would quickly pursue their individual releases.

 

 

Made all the easier by this catalogue/trade insert that was inside. Pre-internet this sort of thing was invaluable.

 

The flip side of that insert listing all the bands. I still don't know a huge amount about Youth Defense League.

 

Also included is a rather nice lyric booklet with each band getting their own section with band logo and photo etc and a intro to the compilation from Ray Cappo.

 

 

Great tracks, great bands and like I said before a must have for any hardcore or Rev collector.

 

Standard black vinyl. I think there was a 2000's repressing of this record on blue.

 

Next up this:

 

 

Where The Wild Things Are... another New York Hardcore compilation that came out around the same time as the Rev compilation, maybe a year later.

 

 

This one features bands like Killing Time, Sheer Terror and Maximum Penalty. Interestingly Breakdown and Gorilla Biscuits are the only bands to appear on both compilations with GB contributing Buzzcocks cover Sitting Round At Home here.

 

This is on Link Records, which I always figured was the UK version of this record, especially as the insert looks badly reproduced, I'm sure the original on Blackout Records would have been clearer than this but I've never seen one so could be wrong.