Tag Archives: punk

987. the dream

Posted on by
1

You had to love the cover of Tupelo Chain Sex’s Spot the Difference. Little punk kid sporting a Ronald Reagan Adolph Hitler t-shirt, getting pulled two ways at once. But the real treasure was the music. Not just another hardcore band from LA, these guys had former Frank Zappa alumni Sugarcane Harris in their midst (not to mention a guy named Stumuk blowing a monster sax) and thus were brilliantly all over the place. Reggae, dub, ska, jazz, rockabilly, hardcore – everything, with lead off track The Dream (an extrapolation on an old Cab Calloway hit) serving as a whip smart intro to what remains one of the great (mostly) forgotten albums of any era.

Tupelo Chain Sex - Spot the Difference

1013. themselves

Posted on by
Reply

Second of two in a row from the Minutemen‘s Double Nickels on the Dime, a double album featuring forty-three mostly hard, mostly fast, mostly abrupt nuggets that manage to be unerringly smart, angry, political, and damned good. Themselves, at one-minute-eighteen seconds, doesn’t even feel rushed, just urgent, because all the men who work the land need to wake the f*** up and see beyond the rhetoric. True in 1984. True in 2016.

Minutemen-doubleNICKELS

1014. maybe partying will help

Posted on by
Reply

First of two in a row from the Minutemen‘s Double Nickels on the Dime, arguably the best double album of the 1980s. Because 1984 was supposed to be the year that we all finally found ourselves in George Orwell’s living hell, betrayers of love, loving only Big Brother. But if you were digging deep, steering clear of the sewage that was flooding the mainstream, you had punk-rock-hardcore-whatever-you-want-to-call-it getting ambitious (progressive even), swinging hard for the fences in all kinds of cool ways. And the Minutemen were leading that charge.

Minutemen-1984

1016. Moving to Florida

Posted on by
1

“The special beauty underlying all the willful ugliness of the Butthole Surfers comes from the fact that they were the manifestation of everything any good, god fearing parent ever feared about rock and roll. They were impossibly loud, and ugly, and committed unspeakable crimes onstage and off. In other words, they were exactly what the mid-1980s needed. Moving To Florida gets the nod here because it’s the first song of theirs I ever heard. And I smiled.” (Philip Random)

1055. there’s a planet in my kitchen

Posted on by
Reply

Wherein original punk Siouxsie Sioux (and her loyal Banshees), get carried away in the recording studio to great and delirious effect as this b-side to an okay Beatles cover attests. There was a lot of this kind of stuff in those weird days, old school punks re-reinventing themselves, being fearlessly strange where before they’d just been fearless.

(image source)

1065. wish you were here

Posted on by
Reply

Curious George were one of many solid (if messy) punk-hardcore-whatever bands slamming around Vancouver in those curious years of perpetual struggle (otherwise known as the 1980s), their cover of this rather tired Pink Floyd original driving home the point that it’s seldom the song that’s wrong, only the performance. There is nothing wrong with this performance.