Pillsbury Hardcore, "Wanna Check Out My Record Collection?"

Limber archivist jabberwocky, way pre-MITB: "Got all the Dischord, almost all the Touch and Go, almost all the Dangerhouse / I got the Bags single / Yes L.A. too / My record collection, my record collection / It's rad! It's rad! It's rad! It's rad!"

"Wanna Check Out My Record Collection?"

Sissy Spacek, "Song 9"

The preamble and constitution of a "new genre" (Tano, 1999). Wiese, at his best, and Ronnau push the misanthropic agenda. Masochists only.

"Song 9"
"Song 9a"
"Song 9b"
"Song 9c"
"Song 9d"

BRUNCH: Siege

Speed trials, the Weymouth way. With Deep Wound, a heroic foil to the might-makes-right crew monkeys crowding the Common by '84. Consummate brutality, smarter and heavier, telegraphing a grave new world.

"Drop Dead"
"Conform"
"Life of Hate"
"Starvation"
"Armageddon"
"Grim Reaper"

The Cheifs, "Eddie's Revenge"

Tattered harmonies run wild in the streets. Dyslexic Southland stomp indigenous to the SST micropolis: a steady diet of Weinerschnitzel, a surfboard, a conscience. "Guns don't kill people. Songs do."

"Eddie's Revenge"

Sloppy Seconds, "The Candy Man"

Stand-and deliver Wonkavision. Queers peers quiver but don't back down: Destroyed is all this good. Unashamed, incorrigible sugar punk from the Indy City. Hungerectomy.

"The Candy Man"

Gray Matter, "Fill a Void"

So to speak.

"Fill a Void"

BRUNCH: Ampere

The state of the union, 1977–1993 passim, recalibrated, emulsified. Fire-breathing, and thus respectful, updates to a sinewy canon — dilated and routed through crossover, linking Gravity in a non-nonlinear way to established sources. Archaeologists they, and interpreters: cultural memory in the present.

"Bit Part in a Bad Movie"
"Money Stinks"
"Conspiring the Go-Go"
"The Regulator"
"Mr. Suit"

La Piovra, "Contintasca"

Fly-by-night thrash mob cut deep: "La rivoluzione non sarà in un doppio vinile ne in chat ne su Heartattack." Breathless execution, unsparing snarl, brilliant economy. Smart Cops carry it on, but delicately: you break it, you buy it.

"Contintasca"

Dir Yassin, "Spectacle"

Refusenik crust for the ages. Emo-violence flourishes drop by elsewhere, but this one is less dynamic: bass heroics progress, mixing their labor with blast beats that are tight but never rigid. Single-minded fury, really: screaming at a wall.

"Spectacle"

Poole, "Oregon"

Trans World pep pop stays the course. Dexterous bass harmonics balance hyperlinear high end; intermodal approaches tout transit and telecom ca. 1995; yes.

"Oregon"

Flin Flon, "Colgate"

Robotic balladry triangulates, medicates Teenbeat neuroses. Mark Robinson gets some rest, finally, and somehow — one night only — represses all the syncopated thistles that gird the Flin Flon oeuvre. Like its namesake, barren — horizontal but oddly intimate.

"Colgate"

Skull Kontrol, "Camouflage"

Monorchid sequel approaches supergroup status, implodes. Thomson–Thompson dualism goads the fruitful collision of everything clouding its hindsight — DC, SD, Delta 72, Universal Order of Armageddon — and overcommits to neither "chaotic" formulae nor their sassy white-belt sanitizing. Even Froberg skulks, serpentine, in the back room. Braintrust?

"Camouflage"

BRUNCH: Electric Eels

Gruff glam slop, pre-anything. Form and content, if nothing else, careen in perfect Cuyahogan communion: nuclear destructovisions, tension, and bile. Cut it, press it, distribute it.

"Cyclotron"
"Agitated"

Waifle, "Calling You Ten Nights in a Row"

Pained breakfast violence straight from the griddle. Another version graced the seven-inch that both constituted and exhausted the genre; this one will do. A study in contrasts: earnest but absurd, plenty "tight" but steadily rushing the breaking point. Cereal everywhere.

"Calling You Ten Nights in a Row"

Double Dagger, "No Allies"

Isolationist harborcore scorns strength in numbers. Four strings only, abetted by their good friend the fuzzbox: technical savvy flourishes in and around limited means, perfectly apportioned, tactically deployed. Hip-shaking in its own way: an anthem by which to slay the gentry. The name, though, is pure shop talk: they're typographers.

"No Allies"

BRUNCH: The Nutley Brass

Every schoolchild should have this one.

Fiend Club Lounge

Red Eye, "Scarlet Night"

Non-obvious soundtracking from Ulysses ex-pat. Near-motorik organization arises from dilatory intro, signals crossing and swerving. Canonically imperfect grrrl voice — Sharon Cheslow's, specifically — duels with electronics atop the glorious repetition, some 3000 miles from the embassy.

"Scarlet Night"

The Crabs, "Market Size"

K-pop surf and turf with faith in the backbeat. Wickedest Farfisa in the West, to be sure, nudging the bass guitar still further into irrelevance. Maritime twee for a summer of shellfish.

"Market Size"

Reagan SS, "Pests"

Unreconstructed. Certainly the best SS squad — Dearborn, Tampere, Black, etc. — despite, or on the strength of, their relative parsimony. Old sounds new, and somehow angrier still. Eureka.

"Pests"

BRUNCH: Sno*Boy

Lilting indie with Tullycraft ties but fewer manias: lazy, lame, but sanguine all the same. Loose, levitating ditties burn slow, drift toward casual climax. Protracted somewhat, but thoroughly pleasing, the scrappy rejoinder to what easily, bloatedly passes muster under that compromised flag.

"Mow Your Lawn"
"Parris Song"
"Glittertop"
"Bubblegum"
"Dragstrip Prizer"
"The Problem with 5"
"Stay"
"Something Special"