Discharge – first two 7″s

Thanx Mike for reminding me about another Kaos.  The show (not the movie) Get Smart was right up there with the Three Stooges, the Little Rascals, the Bowery Boys, HR Puffenstuff and Land of the Lost, as far as TV for me in the 70’s.  A part of me always wanted Kaos to get the best of old Maxwell Smart.  Used to spend a fair amount of time with my Cuban godparents (padrinos) and they didn’t really care what I watched.  Actually the old man, Reynaldo, would watch boxing or baseball if they were on.  We watched a shit load of that and I told him once that I wanted to be a boxer.  In an unflatering way he told me that only blacks and Mexicans did that.  His thing was baseball and when we’d go to Dodger games it seemed like he personally knew every Dominican and Cuban in the game no matter which teams were playing.  I wish I still had all the autographed baseballs I got back then.  The old lady, Romelia, was the old school type of housewife that always had something cooking on the stove, so when ever you came by for a visit or to stay, she would offer you food.  God what I wouldn’t do for a plate of her black beans (frijoles negros), fried plantain (platano) and some hot flan pudding.  I’m glad she didn’t live to see me go through my hard times, would have broken her heart, but I would have liked to have seen her on the other side of it all.  I’d like to think that there is another side where we can meet as souls with those people that we cared about that are no longer with us.  More and more every day.  Ha, ha, from Kaos to life after death, can’t beat that.

Tis the season, but I don’t feel it.  I don’t know why that is.  Just another tooth on a gear in this system.  I like to think that for those I care about, I’m always hoping for the best for them all year round.  I guess it’s a good time to get together and feast, but it always starts badly for me when they start showing Christmas commercials before Thanksgiving is even over.  A capitalist’s wet dream, like the idea that every woman must have a diamond.  So much to be said about this holiday and what it’s supposed to mean versus what it is taken to mean, but I don’t want to bring down the well wishers.  Lets not leave you with the thought that Mustard Relics is solely a home for grumpy old grinches and instead sing along with Ren and Stimpy, “Happy Happy Joy Joy“.

Was listening to that classic rock station again and had to finally look it up after 30 years.  It’s “Revved up like a deuce, another runner in the night blinded by the light”, not “wrapped up like a douche, show no the runner in the night, blinded by the light”.  What do you know, actually a Springsteen tune.  Does anyone know the Manfred Mann tune I’m talking about?

Along those classic rock lines, just to show you how much of a sap I can be, I give you the live version of the Scorpions, Still Loving You.  If you can honestly say that you listened to all 5 minutes 49 seconds of that, I will let you pick my next post.

Discharge!?!?  Yeah, yeah, I know, these guys can be found any and every place, and posting them may seem like beating a dead horse.  This shit just had to be posted.  If I was in the habit of making punk/hardcore mix tapes for you and I never put these guys on at least one of them, I would be doing both of us, along with the band, a diservice.  How could these guys not be on this site?  Can they ever get old, like day after day, seeing your house, after a long day at work?  Second, this is not an mp3 collectors site, this is a place to share Mustard (me), Relics (that which is left after the rest has rotted away).  You can get both these 7″s on the Clay Punk Singles collection and pretty much the entire Discharge discography in one blog or another.  These are just an early sample but I like how within a year there is a difference in the sound between these two 7″s recorded in 1980.  Check that, a little mellower on the first and thumped up on the second.  While reading up on whatever I could find about these guys, I found something very interesting in the form of Pushead’s Unofficial Top 100 of the 80’s (check #1).  I think I like these guys better than I did back in the early 80’s but for some reason I lumped them with GBH and the Exploited.  Anyway, blah blah blah, these guys at this point were tearing shit up and there’s nothing I can say (except let me know if the rips I did were okay).  Later

 

KaAos – Valtio Tuhoaa Ei Rakenna & Nukke 7″s

At 40, my beat up body feels like I’m 60 and my burnt out mind must be approaching that of an 80 year old. With that in my mind, there is a good posibility that I may repeat myself accidentally. On the other hand I guess if it’s important enough I may do so intentionally. It will be tough to tell, especially to me. It’s funny because when I was a kid my great grandfather would tell us kids stories about the many places he had been in life. He had actually lived in Burbank back in the 1920’s, which was a place I called home in the 80’s for about 6 years. He couldn’t believe my descriptions of how they terraced the hills, concreted the LA river and how there were almost a 90 thousand people living there. The best stories though for a young boy like myself were the ones during his time as a soldier during World War 1. War is always a brutal thing but somehow that war was particularly nasty and for him was highlighted by his time spent as a POW in Germany. He had been injured, with gang green and carried the shrapnel with him until he died at almost a 100 years old. So the funny forgetful part is that he would be telling these stories to us kids and every once in a while, from the kitchen, my great grandmother would yell, “Joe, you already told them that story”. We never cared that he repeated himself, and even though I don’t have that much exciting to tell, maybe you won’t care if I repeat myself either.

Part of forgetting that you’ve already said or posted something, is forgetting to do it in the first place. So a while back I did a Fear of God post that featured a picture of the murdered chief Spotted Elk, aka, Big Foot, and I had meant to share a tune with yall at that time.   Check out Johnny Cash – The West Big Foot.  Kinda cool because you get to hear Mr. Cash do spoken word, then the tune, which is how each song is on his 1972 album, “America”.  So on that Cash tip, my buddy Mike, in the comments of the last post, mentioned that I needed to check out some stuff with Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash doing a song together.  Pretty incredible when you consider the magnatude of these two dudes, check the tune that Mike recommended, Girl From The North Country.  Now that tune was the only one used at the time from some sessions these two did back in 1969.  It was on Dylan’s “Nashville Skyline”, but the whole series of tunes was released, maybe in some kind of a bootleg format.  Trip out on those sessions, I got the whole thing from a blog called, interestingly, Doctor Mooney’s 115th Dream.  Well worth checking out.  You can catch a video of the two of them doing that tune on Youtube, here.

With Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, the Winter Solstice and God knows what else you do or don’t celebrate, you guys might want to check out this thing a buddy of mine in England sent me called White Trash X Mas.  Offensive?  Recently had to straighten out some locals when they took offense at the holiday being called “X-Mas”.  They spewed the usual hypocritical, ignorant bullshit, about “putting Christ back into Christmas”.  I had to refer them to the facts.  Fucking people always worried about what the fuck I’m doing, when they need to be educating themselves and worrying about what they are doing.

A while back my buddy Erich sent me some records, I’ve already posted a few and mentioned it several times, so here’s another one.  Dug the first one he sent me enough to keep my eyes open and pick up another one.  KaAos.  Really don’t know much about them, everything is in Finnish on the records.  Valtio… was recorded in 1983, but wasn’t released until 1996 on Fight Records.  And then, Nukke was recorded in 1985, but wasn’t released until 1993 on Fight Records and then again in 2000 on Havoc Records (my copy).  Not too sure what the deal is with these recordings not being released until years later.  Regardless, here they are and this is some slammin shit.  I don’t know enough about Finnish hardcore to say that these guys have a typical sound for the region, but I would say there are a lot of influences here.  Discharge for sure, some Disorder, maybe some Japanese stuff.  It all works though and KaAos is a good name for what they sound like.  Go figure, with my backround, that one of the members would die recently of an alcohol related death.  Start out with the first two tunes from each EP to get a feel for what they’re about.

 

 

Albany Style Hardcore 1999 – various artists 7″

One of things I like about a few of the music sites I visit (I’m not all that crazy about calling them “blogs”, for some reason, I think the word cheapens them), is that aside from the great music, thoughts, memories and so on, the authors sometimes mention what they might be listening to, reading or watching.  Now I think in my chaotic way I do indicate some of the many things I’m listening to with each post, but I very rarely talk about books or movies.  To be honest with you, I used to read a lot, and I’m not just talking about for college, newspapers and magazines and what not.  Varied stuff, both fiction and non-fiction.  Ever since my 4th grade teacher read the entire Narnia series to the class (of course at that age I didn’t catch the symbolism or what C.S. Lewis was all about), it has been an on and off passion.  These days I don’t make a lot of time for reading and maybe that will change.  99% of the reading I do is online.  So, not too long ago I read a great book, pictured to the left.  I’m not really too proficient at hyping things, as I’m sure the regular readers can tell, or for that matter writing an interesting review.  I will say that the main character ends up isolated, surrounded by, obsessed with, and perhaps joining the ranks of “losers”.  I could identify with the character on many levels, both today and in the past.  There is also this good versus evil struggle that I think just about anyone can relate to.  Written by a guy who mostly writes science/fantasy type stuff (which I dig), but this is a nice departure.  Try it out if reading is your thing.

Now movies are a passion that both my wife and I share.  Mostly ones that are filled with violence, horror, fear, brutality and gore.  Action and well done special effects is a plus as well.  I suppose that makes me insensitive.  Maybe if I had grown up in some place like Iraq where people were getting blown up all the time I might think differently. Plus, let’s face it, it’s fiction.  We are big fans of the “Saw” movies, although they are starting to stretch it with these sequels.  Excellent gore, intricate story and a sophisticated killer (although he never actually kills anyone, they end up killing themselves).  What makes that series interesting as well, is that it isn’t a bunch of innocent college kids getting knocked of, rather it’s people that have something to answer for. This would be place to discuss the truly dispicable nature of Hollywood, from the producers, to the directors to the actors, the whole rotten industry really. Gluttonous hordes, the whole lot of them. Just off the top of my head, is the practice of taming down movies to go from an R to a PG-13 rating, so they can sell more tickets. In my opinion, creatvity and consumerism don’t mix well. Speaking of gore, probably one of the best gore movies I’ve seen is not in the horror genre at all and that’s (in the same way as Saving Private Ryan, but much more so) the last Rambo.  But what I wanted to recommend, that I had recently seen, was two French horror movies.   The first, and in my opinion, the better of the two is Martyrs.  They are both pretty bloody, violent and tragic, but Martyrs has a very serious story, with one of the best ending twists in these kinds of movies I have ever seen.  Now Inside or A l’interieur, really blew me away and for the first time my wife said that she didn’t want to watch the movie again, because of the level of brutality.  I’m not into some of the more extreme, previously banned, underground, carnage for the sake of carnage type movies (there is a fine line), but these two are more than that and are well worth it.

The other day I was in a Johnny Cash mood and I have a stack of singles I picked up by him at an antique store a while back. They were dirt cheap and some of them I hadn’t listened to yet. These days when I put something on the turntable I usually digitize it.  This one kind of has that mid 70’s country sound (go figure, it was released in 1974), but it’s in a way, that only Cash could do.  On top of that, the first tune was written by Kris Kristofferson, and that dude has a way with words, plus the title is just something I am familiar with.  Saw Kris in concert up in Humboldt at the place that used to be next to the Brewery in the early 90’s and he puts on a mean show. Brave man too, he had some of the more right wing drunk rednecks booing with his rants in between songs.

The Junkie And The Juicehead (Minus Me)
Crystal Chandeliers And Burgundy

Just got in from having a smoke outside.  This not smoking in the house thing was mandated by the landlord and for odor reasons, even though she smokes as well, applauded by the old lady, but for a die hard smoker like myself, (and yes I know that smoking will lead to a hard death, you don’t need to tax the shit out of my tobacco to pay for commercials informing me of that) it’s the pits.  -4 degrees outside, without the wind chill and breathing in tobacco smoke along with frigid air, makes me cough so hard, I think I cracked a rib it hurts so bad, seriously.  Isn’t it charming to hear a recovering alcoholic talk about his pathetic addiction to smoking?  Anyway…

Got this one not too long ago because I recognized two of the bands on the comp, Monster X and Devoid Of Faith.  By the way, you can catch Devoid of Faith’s guitar player Nate, on his awesome site, True Punk Metal.  Always something good going on over there.  There was another comp 7″ by the same name (what do you know?), Albany Style Hardcore that this must certainly be a follow up to, at least in theme, released 11 years earlier.  What tripped me out a little bit on this one was that it wasn’t those two bands that were the highlight for me, even though those tracks are well worth listening to, it was the stuff by Police Line and By The Throat that had me on the edge of my seat.  No pussy New Wave, Mod, Art Fag, Techno, Dance stuff here  🙂 (like the stuff I have been sharing), this shit is in your face pounding hard.  If I had to pick one tune for you to listen to, it would be Police Line’s, “Elite Few”.

By The Throat – Break The Mold

Police Line – Elite Few

Police Line – Do You Get The Point

Devoid Of Faith – Science

Monster X – When I Look Back

Monster X – Your Mistake (Negative Approach tune)

 

The Jam – 4 various singles

The view across the street from the main place I work is the courthouse/county offices/ sheriffs department/jail. Not a real spectacular view or anything but we had gotten our first snow that stuck to the ground and I felt it was of the utmost importance to share that with yall. Actually the next day we got slammed with blizzard like conditions and got about 10 inches of snow. Found out too that my car will not start when it is below zero outside. Really pissed me off. Not the worst thing in the world because at my, sometimes lacking in other areas, job, we get paid leave if we can’t make it in. When your driveway’s almost 200 yards long it presents a whole host of problems when you decide you want to leave. The price you pay when you live in a place that actually has seasons.

A little while back I did a post featuring a split with The Underground Railroad to Candyland.   The first tune off of their Bird Roughs CD keeps popping in my head, so I thought maybe I’d pop it into yours.  Check it,
The Underground Railroad To Candyland – Square Ball.
So unbelievably catchy and there’s something about the vocals that draws me to the band.  I’m not very good at hyping stuff but you get the point. You can get their stuff and a shit ton of other band’s stuff over at Recess Records

I don’t remember who got me into The Jam, it must have been in the mid 80’s sometime, but off and on I’ve enjoyed giving them some of my time. I’m not a die hard fan of the band, they fit more into the pretty damn good category for me, as opposed to the fucking out of this world category. I’ve never had a Vespa scooter or gotten into wearing parkas, and to be honest with you I know very little about Mod culture except for the characters I’ve seen on the streets and the movie Quadrophenia. Always thought that scene where the guys are all together, pogoing and chanting “We are the Mods” was interesting. I did know this one guy in college, Dave Atlas, nicknamed “punk bitch” who was kind of a scooter guy, who swore that he was part of a group of guys who would modify their Vespas to be able to go 100 mph. Sketchy going that fast on those little tires I always thought. Dave was an interesting character, was head over heals with this girl, can’t remember her name (Ashley?), who always wore white. Anyway…Now The Who’s early stuff had some sweet moments, especially the tune “My Generation”, but I was just talking to a buddy of mine and he would agree that it was Kieth Moon that made that band. Now as far as The Jam what I really would like to have is their first single from 1977. Check that,
In The City.
May as well check the demo version too,
In The City (demo),
There’s something about these guys that was kinda cool. Not that I would ever choose that path. They dressed clean cut but they were anything but clean cut. I don’t know how to describe it. They did soften up a bit in their sound as time went on but I don’t necessarily dislike that. This one reviewer on Rate My Music, (where I got the scans, I’m still without a scanner), said about their later music, “I guess I’m a sucker for late-era R&B-obsessed Jam. The big fat chorus, complete with female backing vocals, ropes me in here.”(on The Bitterest Pill). Now posting these singles may seem a bit cold and pointless my lovely, as you can get one of those anthology CD box set types of things on the band from someplace like here (I did), but what the hell just call this a taste of some of my favorites among the very few I have.  If for whatever reason you only want to listen to one tune, make it Funeal Pyre.  Such an urgent tune, I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.

Eaton Rifles

See-Saw

Funeral Pyre

Disguises

Town Called Malice

Precious (edit)

The Bitterest Pill (I Ever Had To Swallow)

Pity Poor Alfie / Fever

 

 

Pass Out Kings – s/t cd

You guys ever tried Fisherman’s Friend menthol throat lozenges?  That’s the shit. Back in my screaming and hollaring to music days, that was the miracle cure when my voice was starting to go.  These days, when it gets cold outside and I get that persistently annoying smokers cough it takes the edge off a bit.  And it is getting cold here as I’m sure it is elsewhere.  Was just emailing a buddy that I don’t mind the cold at all, let it hit 0 degress, just don’t let the face scorching wind come up.  Not really any snow so far and just a little bit of the dreaded ice, but we’ll see what father winter has in store for us yet.

I think my friend Jay must have been the man behind the words on this sign.  I definitely don’t miss the days of city traffic, an hour to go 15 miles.  These days unless you get some farm equipment, an oil drilling rig or just some old timer who likes to mosey (to move in a leisurely, relaxed way; saunter), which you may have to shoot around to avoid head on collisions, 15 miles = 15 minutes.  At night I drive a little slower, especially since one of my headlights is out from hitting a turkey this summer, because the animals are out in full force at dusk and dawn.  Haven’t done it yet, but nothing like hitting a deer.  My buddy Chris here at work (all my friends here, are people I work with, it’s a special breed that enjoys working with people with disabilities), has hit a deer on his motorcycle which took him for what could have been a pretty nasty spill if it weren’t for the helmet and full leathers.  This year his wife hit and killed a deer, so he got a tag from the game warden and they butchered it.  I wish people would do that more often, instead of it just being a wasted life.  As it is most animals are left on the road until the guys whose job it is to clean up the carcasses come along.  I think they take all the animals they find and throw them into some kind of smorgesborg at the rendering plant where they become dog food.

So I didn’t get much of an enthusiastic response to my last post, I guess I don’t attract people into early 80’s New Wave dance music.  So how about a cover of the tune?  The Donnas – Safety Dance  Not much of a response to The Prodigy either, c’mon guys that tune Breathe rocks.

Trying to keep the music flowing into my collection, but of course I’m a broke ass MoFo so I go cheap.  The lots on Ebay are kind of fun because you can bid on them because there might be one record you’re familiar with and the rest are like a grab bag.  Got one for seriously almost nothing the other day from a guy who runs a label/ distro thing that you guys might be into.  Check out IFB Records, the guy who runs, Nevin, is really down to earth and has a sweet DIY thing going on.  Anyway, one of the 7″s I got was a four way split between Ground Monkeys, Mouthus, Dosdedos and Tan As Fuck on Heat Retention records.  Not really worth posting on it’s own as 3 of the four tunes did nothing for me but one was worth sharing, even it was just because it’s a strange avante garde saxophone kind of trip.  Check it, Dosdedos – Un Momento

I know I’m all over the place and that goes with what I’m listening to as well.  Haven’t sent you over to my bro Jason’s Lo Res Viscera in a while but he put something on my plate that I’m still in the process of digesting.  If you like rare highquality recordings and you like you metal black and without frills, or as he put it, “cold raw hypnotic”, then you’ll dig Bone Awl.  See what you think with the first tune, Bone Awl – Lifeless And Perfect.  Some serious shit right there, that for some reason made me grit my teeth and growl “fuck yeah”.  Must be Satan or something.

Well my main man in Eugene Oregon, Ed,  hooked me up again with some taste treats from out his way (actually as far as I know, Ed is the only person I know in Eugene, damn fine place to visit or so I remember from almost 20 years ago).  Got this CDR in the mail from him and been sitting on it for long enough, so here we go.  I can honestly say I don’t know shit about these guys except for the 15 tunes I’m presenting to you here.  They have a myspace that you can check out under their name, Pass Out Kings.  Other than that there is seriously no web presence for these guys, which tells me they must have been a regional thing and Ed confirmed that they were the shit for a while in the Eugene.  Straight forward no bull shit hardcore, played by older guys, in the new millenum.  The kind of band you could see at your local club/bar a hundred times and never get sick of.  I don’t know what else to say except give them a spin and let me know what you think.  Later.

Out Of The Fog

Free Love

Smashface And Halfhead

She’s Having A Baby

No more, Never Again

Fist Fight

Secret Hippy

Woodcrow

Dreamcatcher

Frustration

Me First

One Pump Chump

Intergalactic Hellathon

Arcane

Peter Panarchy