POISON THIRTEEN

When I started out a-bloggin' I decided to avoid posting US Hardcore, for the simple reason almost all blogs around back then already did a good job of it. But I have to post this one, because 1: it's one of my all-time faves, and 2: the currently available version (be it CD or mp3) has some songs cut off at the wrong places. Not that it's easy to determine when a particular song ends and a new one starts; from start to finish Poison Idea's Pick Your King debut EP consists of one big screech (o.k., two big screeches: side 1 and 2) without a microsecond of letting up. I guess they edited the tracks as close together as possible in order to have as much music on a 7 inch as they could. (The opposite of the Circle Jerks, who were so embarrassed by the brevity of their Group Sex LP they put extra long pauses inbetween the tracks!) The result is almost something like a hardcore opera; I can't imagine hearing the songs in any other order, or hearing one particular song isolated from the rest. "Last One"-screeee-"Pure Hate"-screeee-"Castration", etc. etc. Even though the songs are ultra-short, they're so fast-moving there's actually lots of stuff happening, lots of words, chords and breaks; it's the most condensed, fat-free record I've ever heard (insert obligatory fat joke here). The sound is also great; primitive 4-track, no overdubs, Ramones stereo (guitar to the right, bass to the left), almost nothing but mid-range (the opposite of what hardcore records sound like today). The drums sound like a toy drum set, the guitar sounds as if it's played through a transistor radio, and yet this is one of the heaviest HC records ever! How did they do that?

This was one of the HC records I held on to long enough to sell it for a "reasonable" price not too long ago. I thought my copy was a second pressing though, and said so, as a result getting not as much as I'd expected out of it. Later someone told me this pressing (black vinyl, red labels) was actually the first one pressed up, but as the pressing plant screwed up (the band wanted transparent vinyl) it was sold after the "correct" second pressing!

Seemed like pressing plants did a lot of screwing up with HC EP's, especially the ultra-short-songs variety. When Swedish band Protes Bengt wanted their 32-track EP pressed up, the plant thought "Oh, that's the one with all the short songs", and accidentally pressed up a second edition of the Mob 47 EP (which is why there's 2 versions of that, with different sleeve designs)! Over here, Larm's No One Can Be That Dumb EP was shoddily cut and pressed off-center (well, at least the copies I saw/ heard). There's Neos EP's in existence with Rudimentary Peni labels on them (or the other way around?). That just goes to show how weird and unusual it was for a band to put that many songs on a small slab o' vinyl. DRI even chickened out and made the repress of their classic 22-song Dirty Rotten EP an LP! For a while, a micro-niche of bands kept themselves busy breaking the world record over and over, putting out EP's with more than a thousand sub-one-second "songs" on them; after that came to a dead end it seemed like nobody's been interested in putting out great 13-, 22- or even 32-track EPs anymore. Anyway, here's to one of the best, in honour of Tom ("Pig Champion") Roberts:

Cult Band
Last One
Pure Hate
Castration
Reggae (I Hate)
Give It Up
Think Fast
Think Twice
It's An Action
This Thing Called Progress
In My Headache
Underage
Self Abuse
(Recorded January 1983)
I put side 2 before side 1; in my head(ache) that always seemed the right order; what better way to kick off than Jerry A. screaming "CULT!! BAND!!"