A Truly Remarkable Achievement In An Otherwise Uninterested Universe

Thanks for sticking with us through what will hopefully be the only delay in programming.

Some sales, then the main event:

1. Roy bundle continues for another week. Scoop up a copy of Blackie on vinyl, get a free copy of More Roy on cassette.

2. American Hate, Cherry Death, and Deodorant all available for $5 again.

3. The Bug, Menthol, Mujercitos, and Tigress EPs available as a bundle for $10.

4. Neon and Warp LPs available in extremely limited quantities. Pair with Das Drip LP for maximum effectiveness.

Onward towards... whatever!!!

NNT#X RazorXFade - Self Titled LP/NNT#011 Pukeoid - Self Rabid EP 

i. You’ll have heard this. If you’ve talked to me or listened to one of the platforms that mistakenly gave me space to espouse, this’ll be old hat, but I make no apologies and in any case, it bears repeating.

I grew up in the suburbs, Cal City, IL, made friends just over the border in Indiana, every so often bad ass kids from Washington High School on the south side would meander down to Ridge Road and terrorize the Muse Cafe alongside us. Every weekend, 100 kids, some punks and some skins and rude boys and gals, and no small amount of goths of all stripes would run riot down Lansing’s main drag and wonder why everyone hated us. We weren’t far from the city limits but it still felt a million miles away and this isolation, spiritual, physical, or otherwise, it had an interesting impact. Certain things just make more sense when you haven’t had the infinite divisions of music drilled into your head yet, when your tastes are driven by an earnest love of discovery, sitting in the basement after kids stared at you all day for your pink Mohawk or patch pants, bathed in the blue of the big tube computer monitor, downloading history from Old School Mike at a blistering 56 kilobytes per second (or correcting for space-time: the Jimmy/Anti or Atomvinter playlists, or something comparable). It’s naive and innocent and you think that listening to the Dead Kennedys and Crass and the Exploited and the Cro Mags all at once makes sense you fucking poseur and maybe, sure, you experiment with a little bit o’ Crack Rock Steady and have a folk punk phase but hopefully you bounce on that once you hear Heresy or Nog Watt and well before you’re five years out of high school and your girlfriend’s just starting. That’s suburbia and unlike most things, it’s a pretty strict A/B dichotomy. (Ed. note: I hope it’s apparent, but I’m firmly an A.) It wasn’t until later, when dorks in dunks started dunking on losers in leather, and vice versa, that I learned I was spending a lot of time cramming the pieces to many different puzzles together. What sounded and looked and felt if not ideologically congruent, then at the very least adjacent to each other, was exposed as anything but.

ii. I’ve gotten asked about this before, but there’s no Not Normal sound. There’s no one band or style or fad that I’ve had any interest in getting caught up in. It’s always been a vibe, that age old “you know it when you see it” type thang. I’ve never felt particularly compelled to ask the members of Pukeoid and RazorXFade how they feel about this, but the two bands are inextricably linked in my brain. Both demos came out at the same time, both with a song named Choke. Both of their first and only appearances on vinyl released at the same time. They played many, many shows together, and yet, I’ve always gotten the feeling that the fan bases for the two bands outside of NWI could not have been more different. Outside of these confines, one played punk shows and one played hardcore shows and everyone sounded and looked alike and that was good enough. I remember Matt from Cretins of Distortion scoffing when I asked if he liked RxF, saying that certain elements in Indianapolis had ruined them for him, the implication being it was jock bullshit. And he’s certainly entitled to that view, but it always struck me as weird that someone who, until that final, cranky edition of an otherwise incredible rag, really championed the idea of multiple interpretations of the same idea being able to co-exist would succumb to such a narrow interpretation of hardcore punk.

iii. We were taking this online questionnaire, it was deep, an emotional excavation of sorts, but not shocking or offensive in any capacity. About twenty questions in, I was overcome by a total and palpable emptiness. I couldn’t talk and I couldn’t think, I stared off into the distance of our living room, at a point that, by virtue of its randomness, would not exist if I were not looking at it. It was nothing, but also, at that moment, the only thing.

The question in question? “What is your life’s greatest achievement?”

I’m a dramatic person from a long line of similar, prone to hyperbole and histrionics, but even in the throes of my 99th existential crisis in as many days I recognized my feelings as distinctly not that. Life is just a motherfucker sometimes and one day, aged thirty, you wonder if it’s better a) that you’ve accomplished nothing much to speak of or b) to have already peaked? Worse yet, option c) what if it’s both? The cosmos keeps spinning and takes notice of nothing and no one.

iv. It’s more likely, and I find comfort in this, that it’s d) neither. That the greatest achievement needn’t be a singular event, but an arc and that arc began here, with THESE releases. Here, where the label began in earnest, when capricious whim became nascent Vision, the guiding principle for everything that followed. We weren’t winging it anymore. The cosmos keeps spinning through the nothingness, indifferent, never judging, and you build something up in that void.

v. There’s a greater, objectively more important unifying factor binding these bonzers together. We sent the tracks to be mastered in January or February of ‘11, the lacquers got cut a month later, and we knew we’d have them by mid-summer. We got the news that Levi had passed in May of that year. It was an agonizing couple months, one where we attended an agonizing memorial service, where the Cool Christian In Cool Glasses sent our friend off to the beyond with much disrespect, offering solace to no one. I spent a month and half on the road, pining for home, wishing I could be there to comfort my loved ones and to be comforted. We held our own service when I got home, in a Gary theater not far from Levi’s basement, where we sweated, cried, and bled. Both records released that very same day, bearing dedications to the man himself, immortalizing him in a way that flaccid church service never could.

vi. Nothing exists in this life except what you force into it. My greatest achievement is guaranteeing some infinity for myself. Not Normal Forever.

See you in seven.





Trivialities:

a) RazorXFade - Self Titled LP received an initial press of 500 copies, all on black vinyl, with double sided lyric sheet, and standard stocked jacket. Front cover art provided by Morgan Brill, with additional layout work provided by the Usual Suspect. After seeing copies selling for more than their original price, we repressed it well after the band had broken up. 25 copies on limited edition splatter vinyl for NNT fan club subscribers only, plus 200 or so until the stampers broke.

b) Pukeoid - Rabid EP received an initial press of 500 copies, all on pink vinyl, with double sided, foldover style sleeve, with “PUKEOID” sticker on poly sleeve. Front and back cover provided by the Usual Suspect, inner art/lyric sheet provided by Nathan.

c) These are the only two releases I didn’t do the majority of the packing for. With me on a never-ending comedy of errors in Europe, Raven, Chris, and Zac handled putting these babies together and shipping them off to you, resulting in probably the only time in NNT history you received something in a reasonable amount of time.