March Column: Top Five
Posted in column, EPs, lps, reviews on March 31st, 2009
Yes, the March column is sneaking in at the beginning of April. It should probably just be the April column but who knows, I may actually write something in the next month. Oh well, at least this has some downloads for you all.
Inspired by the stupid Facebook “Top Five” thing, I’m going to post my five favorite punk releases, at least as they are currently. I couldn’t really find most of what I wanted to list in whatever database it was that Facebook was using (no real surprise there) so I decided I should just do it here instead.
So with no further ado….
1. WARSAW - s/t LP (1978)
You all know this one, the first real JOY DIVISION album, when they were still known as WARSAW. It was only available as a bootleg until sometime in the mid 90’s, unbelievable enough. I have always been a JOY DIVISION fan. I think the first song I had ever heard of theirs was “Love Will Tear Us Apart” (I actually think I heard the SWANS cover first) and bought the Substance tape when it came out that same year. Yet it was the first two songs on that tape that really floored me, “Warsaw” and “Leaders Of Men”. One or both were staples of my mixtapes for years to come, and I remember ranting endlessly about “why weren’t there more songs like those two”, because, little did I know back in the pre-internet dark ages that there was an entire album waiting for me. The later version of “Transmission” and “She’s Lost Control” are great, and I love how so perfectly aesthetically coherent Unknown Pleasures is, but I can honestly say that I hardly ever choose to listen to Closer. The WARSAW songs (and yes I now know that those songs on the Substance tape were from the JOY DIVISION release An Ideal For Living) just spoke to me more, having the absolute perfect amount of “post” while still keeping a huge part of the “punk”. I probably never heard the entirety of the WARSAW album until sometime in the late 90’s and while it is not perfect (much of it being demo quality and all) it is probably my longest running favorite.
2. THE VIOLATORS - Die With Dignity 12″ (1983)
I was tempted to list THE VIOLATORS collection The No Future Years but decided that collections should not be allowed, so this is the obvious choice, even though it itself is a bit of a collection, compiling tracks from two previous EPs and their songs off the A Country Fit For Heroes comp. They are an interesting band and definitely one of my most listened to. This 12″ show their early range, from the absolute raging UK82 style punk of “Government Stinks” to the much slower, moodier and absolutely singular “Gangland” and “Fugitive” songs (essentially the same song differentiated mostly by male or female vocals) that prompted a UK music critic at the time to term them “a street level JOY DIVISION”. The world needs more post-street-punk. They didn’t record nearly enough but of that small output I don’t think they ever recorded a bad song, maybe one or two mediocre ones, but even the later material, in which they shared a weird parallel evolution with BLITZ (though avoiding the NEW ORDER keyboard cheese) and went New Romantic, they produced the absolutely amazing “Crossing Of Sangsara”. If WARSAW didn’t exist, this would be my number one choice.
3. THE UNDERDOGS - East Of Dachau EP (1983)
Some of you may be accusing me of being purposefully obscurist with the one, listing the sole EP by a largely forgotten band in my top five, but those of you that have followed my show and blog will know this to be an all time favorite. In fact it is in the top five on the strength of the title song alone, which I think really says something. “Johnny Go Home” and “Dead Soldiers” (the latter being so generic that it may as well be a punk standard, along with songs named “War Hero”) are perfectly serviceable 80’s britpunk but “East Of Dachau” is transcendent. Transcendent being a weird word to use for what is essentially a plodding downer of the song, when it is normally used describe things like the cathedrals of guitars built on “Marquee Moon” for example, but to me this is the perfect example of a certain strain of 80’s punk. It’s a slower and somber number (are you sensing a theme here?) but one that probably has more in common with CHRON GEN songs such as “Puppets Of War” than with THE VIOLATORS. I have said this many times before, but I swear one of my favorite modern bands, NO HOPE FOR THE KIDS, lifted their sound almost straight from “East Of Dachau”, down to the WWII/cold war themes. Well maybe not all of their material. Going back and listening to the NO HOPE FOR THE KIDS album I found a lot of it pretty awkward and wanting, but the singles! Ah the singles! Anyway I digress. I blogged about THE UNDERDOGS before, but I didn’t discover this band until I heard a CROPKNOX cover a few years back. All of THE UNDERDOGS recorded (and until then unreleased) material was collected on something called Riot In Rothwell, which may or may not be a boot. It contains a number of great songs, the other stand out being “Private Wars”, but, as I said before, I am not listing collections.
4. THE FUN THINGS - When The Birdmen Fly EP (1980)
Yet another sole EP by a band that should have done much more, and, unlike THE UNDERDOGS, this, to the best of my knowledge, is the only material THE FUN THINGS ever recorded. Australia really took the Detroit-style STOOGES garage proto-punk and ran with it, releasing quite a number of classics, THE SAINTS first album being the most well known. Here though, in this EP, the style is perfected, all four songs are absolute killers and recorded when the band was still in their teens supposedly. I first heard two of the songs “Time Enough For Love” and “When The Birdmen Fly”was on the Year Of The Rat comp (that also contains such other greats as SATAN’S RATS, CRIME and THE URINALS) that was taped for me back somewhere around 1997.
5. CRESS - Monuments LP (1997)
This is probably my oddest choice, being much more recent and not subject to the scrutiny of history (and largely ignored in my opinion) but CRESS is definitely one of my favorite bands. No one seems to listen to CRESS and I honestly can’t remember when I first heard them. They had been on my radar since the 90’s but I don’t think I began actively listening to them until this decade. Monuments is full of samples, long intros, outros and bridges (though not as much as some of their other releases) and is what was at the time an extremely unfashionable style of anarcho-crust which has since made somewhat of a comeback. CRESS were carrying on the tradition of some of my other favorite bands, such as ANTISECT (In Darkness There Is No Choice not Out From The Void) or ANTHRAX (the punk one you Philistines) for example, with less of the AMEBIX style metal normally associated with the scene. There are also hints of the proto-industrial leanings of bands like KILLING JOKE. Some songs, such as “Progress” are lyrically and dogmatically clumsy in that endearing anarcho way but songs like “Earth” and “TV Screen”, the two standouts, more than make up for that.