Saturday, December 6, 2014

TOO LATE I'M DEAD



Here's a song for my Funeral Mix ~

To Be Played At Maximum Volume.
If I could only choose onesong to play at my funeral
then this one's good as any.  
  

This song was released in 2005 as the B-side of their 1st single without Brian "Head" Welch Twisted Transistor (from their seventh studio release SEE YOU ON THE OTHER SIDE, an underrated and overlooked sonic masterpiece from my vantage point).    I'm listening to their fifth album UNTOUCHABLES right now on my record player, and it's a pretty dope example of "Doom Pop," or some sick crossover music incorporating a strange amalgam of styles well-blended enough to defy strict categorization.  I added this Bakersfield quintet too my list of death rock bands since I saw them on that first tour in '95.  Saw them 10x w/Head 

Quintessential examples of crossover music, KoRn may in fact end up having scrabbled to the top of the heap by the time it's all over.  Who knows? Brian "Head" Squelch, Batman! 

Let's just hope these guys release a parachute soon from their jet-fueled getaway racing car. Fame will do funny and tragic things to a person, it doesn't matter who you are to begin with.  I think all the guys in the band today including their current drummer are just about the most balanced family individuals with a lifetime of rocking experience you could ask for. Give it up for KoRn still going strong after all these  years, and with only one member changed.  So what else is new.  They're  sure to keep on rocking in the new world for many years to come.  Nevermind what any one of us thinks of this band.  I've seen em nineteen times live and they delivered each time.  When they first dropped their debut I thought to myself, "This is some weird off the hook grunge hip hop skate punk hybrid kinda,"little did I know then it was five tweakers barely out of their teens on a dark mad psycho frenzy freak out.   It's a great thing that they're all alive and thriving today and (mostly) reunited. 







Friday, November 28, 2014

The Wings I Must Cut



The Mars Volta's fifth (of six) studio album, 2009's OCTAHEDRON




This magnificent album I feel lucky to possess, it comes in white die hard 
limited-edition vinyl, get yours while you still can.   A sonic experiment
which goes far beyond crossover, the eight tracks on this octahedral listen
will surely keep you spellbound for a lifetime.  


Originating from the post-punk alternative band At The Drive In, it's altogether appropriate that the Mars Volta should find their way into this blog.   

See, I decided that, even though I'm going to go through all my punk albums alphabetically here (and we haven't even gotten to Bad Brains yet) every once in a while or every so often I'll interpose with whatever I happen to be listening to at the time.  

That way it keeps the blog more varied, updated, and interesting; and also let's you die hard core punks know what sorts of stuff I'm sneakin' in and getting away with.  Just keepin' it fresh.  

This is a brilliant band who left their mark between the years 2003 and 2012,
nine years interlaced by six albums whose impact has probably only been felt
by the die hard fans because it's that far ahead of its time.  Encoded with star-
flung brilliance through and through, this music is sure to boomerang back with
a vengeance, generations after my generation's all long buried.   


p.S.

I first saw the Mars Volta perform live when they toured with A Perfect Circle.
Lucky for me I always get GA/Floor (even if stuck with a seat, ever heard of bumrushing the floor).

In any case all the unfortunate peeps stuck in the rear bleachers walked away with the (faint) impression the Mars Volta sucked live, well that's because by the time their Sound reached those ears, yeah I can imagine it would have muddied up a bit.  Well I at least can testify that right up directly in front of the band, the sound we were enveloped in was nothing short of an astonishing amalgamation of every sort of pre- and post-musical expressionism chaotically brewing together into a preliminary maelstrom of rock'n'roll fusing into what I like to think of as a 'punk blues' sort of thing.

There's really no other band out there like 'em.  I'm pretty ascertaining of myself when I suggest there will be a three-stage period of time now while we mourn their passing which, at the completion of, you may rest assured they will return in a resurrected glory for a seventh album, mark my sigils.


Saturday, November 22, 2014

Grinning Like An Undertaker


My fourth slab of Accused vinyl:   

the 1990 album  Grinning Like An Undertaker.  Some call it an EP, but even if it's short & brutal, its got fourteen cuts so I consider it a real album, like a shank into your side.  Cuts quick and deadly.  

 

This vinyl copy I scored a few years ago is also a Promo Copy.  
I still have the original cassette that this album came out on. 
I love listening to these old cassettes while driving our car. 


Side two of this killer punk record starts out with a bang on the song 
M is for Martha




I don't know the lineup on this particular album, but it was recorded , manufactured, and distributed by NASTYMIX RECORDS 800 Tower Building Seattle, WA, USA 98101.  
© 1990 Locked-up Music  


The second song -  called Room 144 -  is an instrumental.  It sounds pretty sick. 

The Accused are awesome.   These are essential punk albums for me.  So I'm glad they start off my collection, even though they appear alphabetically before ACID BATH.   I always consider When The Kite String Pops to be the ultimate crossover album.   Any good A to Z comp could just as easily begin with Acid Bath rather than the Accused.   The question remains, which band should end it?


Telling the Maddest Stories









You can see the album cover above for Martha Splatterhead's Maddest Stories Ever Told, and Psychomania is the opening track.  This album was released in 1988, I've got the original pressed vinyl right here with lyrics printed on the inner sleeve.  I got a Promo Copy of this album, "Not For Sale," that were given out to radio DJs and which ended up in the Cutout bins of used record stores years ago.  Well guess what, they still do.  It turns out record buying and collecting never went away, it was just our perceptions giving us the run around.   

Here's the second track, a mean ittle ditty called The Bag Lady Song: 





So now we move on to the tracks 'Deception' and 'Molly's X-mas '72', tracks 4 & 5 respectively on Side One of Martha Splatterhead's Maddest Stories Ever Told.  Crank it up loud.


More Fun


We begin Side 1 of the Accused's third album MORE FUN THAN AN OPEN CASKET FUNERAL, with their sterling cover of Alice Cooper's Halo of Flies.  Here's a curious fanvid from Evil Dead:


Note:  my blog Crossover Vinyl will never, ever post a video from YT that has an advertisement clip at the beginning.  It goes against the whole spirit of being a punk the way I see it. So if it ever happens, it's clearly a mistake, I've gone completely out of my mind, or the sub-automated drones have finally taken complete possession of me.   




This is the sort of crossover punk metal hybrid that I can really get into.  As we delve deeper alphabetically into my stack o' punk and associated albums on wax, we'll find ourselves on a dizzying journey of what good old fashioned underground music used to be.  I grew up in the late 70s on hard rock bands like Aerosmith and Sabbath and Maiden and Led Zeppelin.  Pink Floyd was my favorite because their music was such a head trip.  

I got into all those bands super young, but my first live show wasn't until I turned seventeen.  That was at Barton Coliseum, in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1982.  The band was RUSH and they were on their second leg of the Moving Pictures tour, the Spring Training leg.  I've seen the legendary Canadian rockers sixteen times since then, and consider them the appropriate receptors of the wand & crown passed on down from Jimmy Page himself, but I digress.   

We're on the topic of crossover vinyl, which as we progress further should reveal the much wider variety of possibilities of musical exploration, since far-reaching forms of underground experimentation extend tendrils out to each other, forming layer upon layer a newly constructed form of musical entity borne of this cross pollination.   I'm sure I'll insert variants and offshoot posts suggested from my core punk collection.  

If I go off the beaten path here and start posting non - punk entries or go on a tangent, well that's just to be expected.  Rest assured, we'll return to the spinal cord of my punk vinyl collection to keep it all tied together.   You have stumbled upon a brand new Saturday vinyl punk blog where I'll be listening to my entire underground punk vinyl collection, and going off on it with random rants and YT videos posted.   



Performing an autopsy



We begin Side 2 with the song Autopsy, and thus descend deeper into my vinyl collection of punk albums.  I've decided the best way to accomplish the documentation of all the punk albums I managed to hang onto over the years, many of which I happened to re-acquire during the past eight years of my vinyl revival.   That began in 2006, when I was living in Black House, our usbm headquarters here in slc.  

Next song is She's The Killer



Youtube's got the song as "She's a Killer", which is wrong according to this UK vinyl release.  It's spelled out in individually cut-out magazine letters of differing fonts and sizes clearly, "She's The Killer."   The third song, In a Death Bed is good


You can't go wrong with the Accused on the turntable 

punks on vinyl

I guess that describes me well enough.  So if I put together my tidy stack of punk records I've managed to re-collect over the past eight years or so, the first ten would cover, if you went alphabetically, both my accused and bad brains albums.   So I put on the first one in the stack, Seattle's own crossover legends the Accused and their second album, the UK pressing of the Return of Martha Splatterhead, from 1986:



Here's the final track from this outstanding early album of the crossover progenitors:



This should get us kick-started on my vinyl punk record documentation blog.

The album is Made in England for COR RECORDS Box 333 37 STOKES CROFT BRISTOL BS2 3PY ENGLAND a division of Earache Records P.O. Box 144 Nottingham, NG3 4GE U.K. 1986