Not Much In The Way

Welcome back, welcome back, True Believers!

Sit down and chew thorugh the first bit of updated release news in a while: funniest person in Chicago Maddie has finished vocals on the upcoming Tums cassette “Old Perverts and Horse Fuckers.” Just a few very stupid things to attend to and we can Christen this very stupid and ugly baby.

After receiving that bit of news yesterday, I was stricken by how little there is left to do before the end of the line, like the reality of it has fully started to sink in. Just like the first week, it's not a bad feeling, but it's something I'm sure I'll reflect on more in the coming months.

No real news on the distro front. There's some wild shit coming, so keep your peepers peeled. In the meantime, I'll be offering our three most recent LPs (American Hate, Deodorant, and Cherry Death) for the can't beat price of FIVE FUCKING DOLLARS. One week only, so hop to it while ya can.

We'll also be offering a Buy 1, Get 1 deal to anyone who heads over to this link, reads the facts surrounding the case of Rodney Reed, and sends proof of signing the petition in his defense. Please and thanks.

Let's get to shamblin' through my amblin' brainscape and I'll see ya in seven!

NNT#006 Picked Clean - Self Titled CS

It was common, especially in the era of hardcore that Picked Clean belonged to, to discuss the vintage eras of any given classic label. Dischord 1-10. Rev 1-10. You say SST 1-20, but double check and see that Ginn was dropping gold until about 30 or 31, which pretty much brings us to NNT 1-15. You know, just flawless entry after flawless entry of ripping hardcore punk committed (mostly) to raucous rectanguloids, and somehow this is the only one I ever forget about. The implication, of course, is that some paucity on behalf of the band has led to it being the only one so far that requires reexamination to figure out exactly where it fits into that early canon. Was it the first in a long line of bad decisions? Or just sorta the Jan Brady of the Bonzer Bunch? 

For any of you Indy boys that might actually read this, I can’t fully account for the mistreatment, though I do know that I lost the digital files for years and oversold the initial run of tapes, resulting in not possessing a copy myself or being able to listen to it for some time. But everything else is in line with those early days: young angry men playing fast angry music and an aesthetic handled by the future Picture Pager to the Stars. And this is, full stop, their best material, as potent as anything in the first fifteen. More raw and immediate than their more polished EP, it somehow managed to capture the live energy of mosh maniacs Aaron and Scott without squelching the incipient jazz flourishes already creeping into Skyler’s playing. There were even moments where Scott let slip there might be more going on in his head than Town of Hardcore idolatry and had some pretty on point shit to say. 

It became easy in the interim between the (second) last Picked Clean show and the time, in what would have been the shock of the tour if we hadn’t played a queer-run, feminist sex shop in fucking St. Louis, I played in an art gallery of all places, to forget that the city once propped up a corner of a true Quadrangle of Friendship formed with Chicago, NWI, and KC and that Picked Clean themselves were the driving force of that entire city, but this tape stands as testament to that otherwise forgotten moment.

 

Trivialities: As expressed above, some of the finer details of this release escape me. I know the j-card was printed at NAC, we slapped on some slick sticker labels, and crammed the whole ordeal into blue norelcos, possibly 100 or 150 times. Who’s to say? Though the recording is primo, this is one of the worst sounding of our early home dubs, due to our usage of a Mono only Telex model. Why it impacted this bad boy more severely, again, who’s to say? The “release” show of this tape was a veritable NNT showcase and a decent crowd packed into Zac and Levi’s house to groove to the extremely man-friendly lineup of Timebombs, Raw Nerve, RazorXFade, Pukeoid, and the boys from Indy themselves. 

NNT#007 Dead Possession #1 Fanzine

Oooo baby, did Australians not like this number, so much so that someone from down under paid the ever-increasing postage to America just to mail me a copy of the review. Without proper evidence, I believe said zinester was Christina, the very talented vocalist of Vanilla Poppers and proprietor of Blow Blood, who without a hint of irony, I respect very much. She made fun of me (and who hasn’t) for being overly earnest and long-winded. At the time, I wrote this off as her being Australian and having a very Screamo-sounding zine herself, but you know as well as I do that she was right.

Trivialities: Ohhhh, how the brain goes first in these flesh sacks! I wanna say there were two runs, the first of 50 with an orange cover, the second of 25 with a white one. Everything else stayed the same, including some lamentably terrible quotes that will prevent this from ever being reprinted.