The First Days

Alright alright alright, thanks for returning for the second Not Normal Thursday. If you think hogging a whole day for ourselves on a weekly basis is a bold move, consider that we once claimed a whole year belonged to us. That’s 365 days, not the paltry 52 counting us down to the last one very last one, so I dunno, be thankful there’s not more of us to ignore.

You know the boy can talk, but after last week, I’m spent. I’ll save the greater ruminations and expressions of gratitude for subsequent entries, so I’ll just say that the inpouring of well wishes and support is noted and appreciated. If the label couldn’t run without the True Believers, it certainly couldn’t end without you either, so thank you.

I have a few goals that I’d like to accomplish before next October and I believe enumerating them on the World Wide Web will hold me accountable towards their completion. There are a few things I’m keeping close to my chest for once, holding off until their completion is within reach, but Number 1 is uploading each release to our YouTube channel and to that end I’ve updated it with two new entries: the Mike Jones x Spoken Thought collab and the Accela demo from early last year. Number two the completion of a project that has fully stalled in recent months: uploading full scans of the artwork and accoutrements for all the digital TB’s out there. Finally, I’ll be starting at, well, the starting point for my tertiary objective, which is to reflect on each release, so here’s me chewing cud on some real NWI crud: the Cold Shoulder demo collection.

NNT#001 Cold Shoulder - Same Fucking Excuses CS

It wouldn’t do to get all poetic or prosaic or bop around non-linear like for these here purposes, we’ll start at the beginning and meander over to the now as it may come. But the big First Ish sprang forth from everyone’s Mama, necessity; after a whopping three or four people asked over a period of months why Cold Shoulder’s demos were sold out and whether they would ever see reissue, we got to compiling and came up with Same Fucking Excuses just in time for our first and only show outside of the Midwest.

When a project wraps up, there’s something intrinsic to punk(s), that first comes the moving on and then comes the implicit embarrassment, a 1-2 step we’ll witness next week. You see this frequently in groups of thirty year old men who suddenly begin “exploring their creative side” through rote experimentations with post punk or dry-humping guitar pedals or what-the-fuck-ever other kind of chickenshit overcompensations for a receding hairline they need to fill their personalities with, or in the way post-grads pepper litanies of clarification into speech with co-workers. “Oh, I enjoyed United Mutation, but have you experienced this obscure Italian psych raga from ‘63? It’s transcendent.”

Look, I kinda blacked out through that, but I was on my way to a somewhat salient and positive declaration: Cold Shoulder was a necessary and important starting point in many ways, not just for the label, but for the entirety of my output as a musician and artist. It was blunt and dumb, because we were blunt and dumb. It was beholden to no prevailing trend in hardcore, because we were yokels from NWI with zero conception for what was what. You took two hardcore kids, two metalcore dorks, and a folk punk and Cold Shoulder’s what you got. We played my high school while our future bassist got chased by my chemistry teacher for moshing, we played Florida and covered Poison Idea to an unimpressed audience of 12, we released a seven inch before most of us left our teens, and recorded the two demos and handful of b-sides compiled here before we inevitably imploded, capping off our illustrious year and a half as a four piece with a fill-in drummer. Those are the sounds and emotions and experiences captured on this tape and I think that’s all something to be proud of and the reason, True Believer, I think you’ll find a sliver of relevancy within that diatribe is that you may have already or may hope to tread a similar trajectory within a similar timeframe, and when you do, you should be fucking proud regardless what some fucking know it all jagging off to Death In June thinks.
 

Trivialities: 100 copies on white cassette with taped on paper labels. A side: Cold Shoulder, B side: Same Fucking Excuses, in a Discharge font (or typeface, if you must) downloaded off the fucking internet. Double-sided, two panel insert with lyrics, original release info, and personnel listing of all the different Mikes in the band.

That’s it for this week! Check the webstore for some real shit. We’ve got the new Pleather single, the cyco loco nastiness of DC’s Corvo, plus much much more.

Til next time!