Scared To Death

Man, I hardly got in any posts last month. The records have still been coming in thick and fast too so as you can imagine I'm waaaay behind. I've changed jobs in the last few weeks and as you know that tends to knock your spare time and life in general out of whack etc. I'll get back on track at some point though. I picked this record up a while ago now...

King Nine - Scared To Death

I'd heard King Nine before picking this record up on the Extermination Comp that Flatspot Records put out, honestly though, despite liking their track I'd forgotten all about them. I think the 'featuring ex-members of Backtrack' was enough to arouse my interest when I saw this in a distro though. Because of that I guess I kinda expected this to sound like Backtrack in some way, it doesn't. King Nine are a very different beast, they are far more traditionally New York Hardcore sounding and stripped down than Backtrack. Not that I mind, I'm a fan of that sound so this was a nice surprise for me. There's some seriously monster bang your head riffs on display here.

I believe this is the second press of the record and the yellow version of 300 copies.

The Extermination Finally!!

I didn't know if I'd ever be writing this blog post but thankfully I am. It's a long and complicated story but basically I've been waiting for this record since June. The Extermination Compilation on Flatspot Records.

This record initially went up for pre-order in I believe April and despite it featuring four bands I really like I didn't order it straight away. I'd had a problem with an order from Flatspot before and I decided I just couldn't be bothered to order from them again. So it's probably my own fault that two months later the desire to own the Backtrack song in particular got the better of me and I thought 'everyone deserves a second chance' and placed my order.
Two months later and with no sign of it I mailed Flatspot with a polite 'has this record been sent out of interest?'. 'Yeah dude it's been sent, should be with you soon' was the response. A few weeks later and still nothing so I sent another email, 'not sure what happened but I've sent it now' came another response...hmmmm. A week or so later I saw a post from Flatspot on their Twitter account saying 'sending more records out' and a picture of said mail out, and there was my address staring back at me, so ok fair enough it hadn't been sent yet like I'd been told but it was now on it's way...phew...all I had to do was wait. Then this arrived:

I know what you're thinking, that's not The Extermination Comp, nope it's not, this is the cart filler record I added to my order to make the postage worthwhile and I didn't have this Police and Thieves 7" already. Great record of course but where the fuckity fuck is my comp?
So I emailed again and again got the standard 'dunno what happened' etc. Anyway to cut the rest of this short, twice more I've emailed and been told it had been sent, the last time apparently it had been sent with some free records, well it arrived on it's own so god only knows what that was all about.
Now to make matters worse I've really gotta echo my mate Marios comments about the state of the packaging too, theres a great picture on his blog here that shows exactly the way Flatspot pack records. It leads to this happening -

The side of the record sleeve is split and scuffed to shit. Typical.
Look, on a positive this record looks great and is a ripper of a compilation. The Backtrack song is awesome (this band can do no wrong at the moment) and the Suburban Scum track might be the best track I've heard from them too. The blue vinyl and packaging also look great. It's just a shame I had to be obviously lied to before recieving it. Fuck I've been in bands and into hardcore long enough to know running a label is a difficult and mostly thankless task and I really have no problem having to wait for months for a record to drop through my letter box but some honesty and decent mail packaging is really all I ask for.