MARTY PLAYS MARKY - "Pt II: Marty Bites Back" - Tape - 2015

   I want to preface this entry with the knowledge that I know good and well that it is privileged and babyshit bananas to sit here and talk shit about a huge, awesome event that takes place a few short miles from where I live. I know that there are people who read this blog and live in the middle of nowhere, wishing that they could go to some big stupid ass event rather than skate in the Wal-Mart parking lot again on a Friday night (No shame. That was my teenage years, except it was Piggly Wiggly, not Wal-Mart). With that said, here we go:
   The Anarchist Book Fair took place this past weekend in Oakland and I mostly went to socialize with people who I rarely see. There were good workshops and talks about Ferguson, Mexico, eviction issues, labor practices and women's leadership in anti-capitalist movements. I didn't go to any of them. I walked around through the aisles in what feels more and more like a mall. There's not a lot of trading, haggling or barter happening. It feels like capitalism at work because it is capitalism at work. I found myself talking down V Vale on the price of his full set of Search and Destroy...his legendary newspaper / zine that started in 1977. Issue #1 was newly photocopied and I couldn't bring myself to pay what he was asking. He told me that he would autograph it and I said "I don't want your autograph." I saw his face fall a little bit, but we're fucking punks. We don't have idols. I don't want anyone's fucking autograph. It means nothing to me. I walked away with my money and he kept his zines so I could come back next year and we could try this dance again...like we've been doing for the last five years.
    As I was biking away, I was getting upset about pining for a past that I never passed through. Sure, those zines contain amazing history lessons and photos of things that still inspire me, but I didn't need it at that price...and that condition. Instead, I went home and spent a bunch of money on bands, distros and zines who are creating their music and art now....at much cheaper prices.
   Today, I got 6 tapes in my P.O. box with more on the way. All of 'em were created in the past year by people who would not offer me an autograph, but might offer me a place to sleep if I needed it. This one is called Marty plays Marky....It's a murky back story. Two bands. You're probably familiar with them...THE CONEHEADS and LUMPY AND THE DUMPERS. Mark from the CONES covered a LUMPY and a CAL AND THE CALORIES song on a tape (which you can find here). So, Martin from LUMPY responded to it with a tape of his own, covering THE CONEHEADS, HOT BEEF and some other weird shit. It's good. The sound quality is like a garbage fart. I'm glad I'm listening to this instead of reading Search and Destroy right now.

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Order stuff from small distros. Start bands. Support what's happening in your town if it's worth supporting. If it's not, make something that is worth supporting. Respect the history of what you love but don't live in it. 

Rüz - Demo - Tape - 2014

   Sometimes you drink coffee...sometimes you don't....maybe you get that feeling in your head that you want to listen to something short, fast and loud. No pretense. No bullshit. You might wish that every song would be over in less than a minute because your attention span starts wandering after 40 seconds. Maybe you want to hear a singer who sounds just as pissed as you feel every day when you walk down the street and you see another fucking condo being built where your friend's beautiful warehouse used to stand (and then you get more pissed as you think about how you and your friends are just as complicit in the act of gentrification in your neighborhood anyway). Maybe you want to rip your teeth out and throw them at people wearing Google Glass. Maybe you wanna press a cop's fucking nose directly into your asshole as you shit out a giant turd into his stupid fucking nostrils. Maybe you just wanna listen to hardcore. Here it is. 3 songs in less than 3 minutes.

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This tape was put out by Lumpy Rex, I think. The tape is gone, but if you're dumb enough to buy a flexi, you can get a one by this band from Spotted Race. 

You can hear the songs from the flexi here. It rules.

"I got a grudge against society, so I started stealing everything"

VIOLATIONS - Demo - Tape - 2013

    Look at that tape cover. No, really. Just look at it. What kind of music do you think would greet you on a tape like this? The color of that paper looks like a tea-dyed white shirt that some punk wore on 8 cross-country freight train trips. A finger on a hairy hand is jabbing itself into a urethra. It's the kind of drawing you'd find on the kitchen table the morning after your roommates kept you up all night while they were blacked out on Four Loko.
   VIOLATIONS are just simply punk. No sub-genres. Just six ugly blasts of music that clock in around 10 minutes with one of those singers who sounds like a wild ox. Like, he probably couldn't carry a tune to save his life, but he could throw me through a plate glass window for pointing that out. You know what I mean?

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Order your own tape from Spotted Race. 

Blame them for the varying volume levels on the tape.

Learn more about the band.

Hear it without a download.

TRAUMA HARNESS - "Leechman / New Dark World" - Tape - 2012

    Whenever I see the unmistakable art of Lumpy, I pick up the release and take it without any thought because I know that the sounds contained within will be interesting, thought-provoking and/or fucking punk in the exact way that I like. I ran into this tape on an icy cold January day at a record store in Asheville, NC. It was only $1.95. The clerk looked at it and sniffed "You actually want this?" Yeah.

   TRAUMA HARNESS plays dark, noisy, fucked post-punk and the two songs on this cassingle are a stellar intro into what the band has to offer. "Leechman" is upbeat, yet dark and creepy, but "New Dark World" is what really made my $1.95 feel well spent. The song is held together by a dark, repetitive bass line while the guitar riffs away into single-note abandon. It sounds claustrophobic and tense. It also reminds me of how I wanted JOY DIVISION to sound when I was a teenage punk, rather than what they actually sound like, if that makes any sense. Download it and listen to it while walking down a cold, lonely street at 2 a.m. on a Tuesday and see if you get chills.

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To hear more by TRAUMA HARNESS, check out their Bandcamp page. You could also just download this tape from them, rather than getting my rip from the cassette. To order physical tapes and more, I urge you to click over to Spotted Race and spend your stupid cash on weird ephemera to clutter your room.

I meant to upload this yesterday, but I got terribly distracted by a text flurry...I mean, it's 2013. Deal with it. 

 

CAL AND THE CALORIES - Tape - 2013

    One of the greatest parts of doing demo reviews for MRR is that when shit comes in the mail with goofy ass and/or ridiculous band names like LUMPY AND THE DUMPERS, CUNT LICKER, BUTT PROBLEMS or LUST CATS OF THE GUTTERS, I am immediately drawn to it. I can't resist! Sometimes, I can just look at the cover and know that my life will not improve in any way by listening to it and other times, I know that I need it. When I saw the unmistakable style of Lumpy-penned art on this demo by CAL AND THE CALORIES, I already knew that the music waiting for me on the 1/4 inch analog tape would be noisy, slimy, dirty and indispensable.
   According to the vaguely threatening letter I received with this tape, CAL AND THE CALORIES was formed to play songs that were rejected by the band LUMPY AND THE DUMPERS for being "too poppy". Apparently, "too poppy" to them means playing slightly more melodic music that follows in the grand tradition of Midwestern punk along the lines of more fucked GIZMOS or THE PANICS after they've been thrown through a mud puddle. Or maybe I'm just wayyyy off base here and these are just some Midwestern punks who do their own thing in their basement. Anyway, it's really good. Listen or go on with your fucking boring life.

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"Don't tell me what I am. I know I'm ugly and I smell like Spam"

For your own tape, call Cal at 618-477-2745

NRML PPL // BLACK PANTIES - Tapes - 2013

   I'm convinced that there's something fucked up in the water supply of St Louis. I rode my bike around the banks of the river a couple of years ago, just after the Mississippi had flooded, and everything was slimy and gross. The pavement baked in the hot sun and every surface smelled like mold and rotten ass. I thought about a few years before that when I went to a diner downtown followed by a show in a big, rotting punk house. All of the locals seemed angry, wary of outsiders and very territorial. I wondered what it would be like to live there. I thought about it for a short time and even convinced a couple hundred people to all show up there on the same day for no real reason other than to hang out (All Punks Meet in St Louis, May 25th, 2006). That day was pretty fun, but I've never spent more than a day or two in the town. 

   Fast forward to 2013 and the St Louis punk scene seems to be as moldy, rotten and greasy as the river that flows by the Arch every day. Let's start with the BLACK PANTIES tape. They blast out simple, stupid, rotten punk that sounds like a 3rd generation blown-out FREESTONE demo on pills....any pills...just as long as there's a lot of them. Their singer alternates between not giving a fuck and giving all that he's got while drowning in a pool of reverb. Their outro at the end of the tape will tell you everything you need to know about everything you ever needed to know. 

  The other tape in this download is NRML PPL, who seem to love the shit outta simple, repetitive song structures and trashy, fucked up sounds, not unlike ACTION SWINGERS. They throw out one upbeat, dirty punk rager and one stoned ass sounding instrumental. They released this tape in a small quantity for this year's record store day. Both tapes were released on the always interesting Lumpy Records, who seem to be putting out short run cassettes by stupid, slimy bands at an almost alarming rate. I think I have tapes by 9 different bands released in the past year. If you'd like to start your own collection, click over to Spotted Race and order a few tapes. They're cheap as shit and you too can question the purity of their water supply just like me. 

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RAT'S REST - Demo - Tape - 2013

   An age old argument in punk is the constant bickering about what is and what is not punk. Some people think that upholding male dominance and huffing glue is the way to go. Others think that being vegan, playing acoustic music and riding bikes are what punk is all about. Still others believe that you can't have punk without strong anarchist politics. Some people even think that rape jokes and being an anti-intellectual bonehead is punk. I'm not here to tell you that any of this is wrong because you can decide for yourself (but if you're a fan of rape jokes, please don't ever, ever, ever try to talk to me). I will tell you what my world of punk consists of:
   In my reality, bands go on tour even though they only have a demo tape available....not a Bandcamp page or a Facebook page...just a plain old tape with their songs on it that they recorded in someone's basement. The band will sell this tape to you for a little bit of money or just give it to you if you buy them a drink....or just give it to you because you're a nice person. Their van breaks down because it's a piece of shit that can barely even make it across town, but somehow the band thinks it'll make it 3000 miles around the country. When the van does break down, the band becomes despondent and hopeless because they're not gonna make to their show in New Orleans to play in front of 35 fucked up oogles in a trash pile in the 9th ward. At the last minute, a friend with another crappy van decides to just take the band there while another friend agrees to drive the original van to the band when it gets fixed. Meanwhile, the band members have been surviving on a diet of cheap whiskey, cheaper beer and bad pasta, so of course they all contract the rabid anthrax that has been plaguing normal society and proceed to release all kinds of bile, vomit and shit from any orifice on their bodies that will provide them the sweet release they so desire. When they find themselves broke, starving, insane and stuck in the middle of nowhere, they don't start a Kickstarter or plead to their online fans for monetary support. This is their lives and they made their own choice to put themselves in this desperate situation. So, they take out their instruments and busk at the gas station in order to hustle up enough money to fill the tank and make it to the show. When they do make it to the show, they have been through all of these ridiculous trials and tribulations that cause them to play with heart and vigor. You can tell they fucking mean it. It comes from pure desperation. They look tired and smell bad, but they give everything they've got for the 15-20 minutes they've been allotted at the basement show. Amps break, Someone drew something on your face. An annoying punk dude in plaid pants is swinging around a headless, life-sized Santa Claus in the pit. Somebody's walking around with a cup, asking you to put money into it so this band will leave your town. Sometimes it's annoying as fuck and stressful as hell, but I love it. This is what punk is to me.
   This could be a story from 1995 or yesterday, but it's actually from today. This has all happened to RAT'S REST in the past couple of weeks. I just saw them play their hearts out to 50 maniacs in a basement in Oakland.  They're on tour right now and they'll be in Eureka, CA tonight. They're not on the internet (well, they are now). Look for fliers on poles, find the basement they're playing in and buy this tape from them because it's so good. Members of the band have probably been in bands you like, if you like stuff on this blog. They live in Kansas City in huge, dilapidated houses and run community gardens for people in their neighborhoods. They're good people and play the kind of punk that I love. That is all.

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