Progress Report

The following things are happening:

• I got a really long stapler for Xmas to enable the binding of the zine
• Essentially finished my interview with Pink Eyes
• Confirmation that I will be releasing copies of the new Germ Attak 7", Death to Cops, with the zine.

So yes, as I have been mentioning for the past 3 posts, blog activity has been scarce, but the zine is still thriving. I wanted to do a post about Christmas punk, not sure if its too late.

In my personal record life, I got a copy of Iron Maiden - Powerslave and Sleep - Dopesmoker for Xmas, along with a couple other records I already owned (I suck at keeping lists organized apparently). I have a bunch of records coming in the mail (from Forcefield, Free Cake, 1234 Go), and the anticipation/anxiety will be the death of me.

From the Pink Eyes interview:

Q: Are there any records that scared you somehow the first time you heard them or perhaps you just found them strange or intolerable, but are now an essential part of your collection?

A: Oh yeah! I hated Integrity the first time I heard them and now they are one of my favorite bands. I remember going over to this dude in Toronto house to buy the Turning Point 7" and seeing a poster of Poison Idea on the wall and laughing at the fact that they had a guy called Pig in the band. I used to just ignore any record with a synth on it when I was digging for obscure records and now I kick myself for doing that.  G.I.S.M. was another band I didn't get at first.

A Quick Update

Posts have been sparse, mostly because this is the worst time of the year for school work. Anyway, update on the zine portion. I was aiming at having this out in  January. This is still totally doable, but I'm  going to push it back to sometime in February, because this zine will be released with a 7", and it just takes a while to get those in.

In the mean time, rather than reading my ramblings about records, check out the new post on Looking For Gold about Fucked Up's new singles collection, Couple Tracks. It's pretty entertaining. You'll see in the photo below the sleeves for the singles included, but some of these don't actually exist... it's all explained in the post.

Chris Colohan (Cursed) Collects

Chris Colohan has a great blog, many great bands past and new, and what must be an expansive record collection.

One of his bands, Burning Love, just completed a UK tour about a month ago. Here's a quick rundown of the BL discography. They recorded a demo tape which was released through Nervehold Records. That sold relatively quickly, and on a Canadian East Coast tour (sold out when they played Ottawa), they dubbed more copies in Montreal. For their UK tour it was pressed to a 7" by 30 Days of Night (Black/Grey/White ltd to 300 and Red/White ltd to 200). That brings us to the present, but the future will be prosperous. They're in cahoots with Deranged to bring a domestic copy of that demo 7", a single for "Don't Ever Change" with a Nick Cave cover on the B-side, and an LP. There's also a potential split 5" in the works with Rot In Hell (haven't heard them but they look like a Holy Terror band, so could be cool), but it's a little unclear who is releasing that.

Anyways, the point of this post was to point out that Chris just updated his blog, where he talks about his record scores from the UK tour. An eclectic mix for sure.

Post Nazi Germany is Great

When imports are brought up, I think most people would think of two things. Crazily expensive (it must be because of the shipping...) Japanese imports with those weird cardboard panels with all the Japanese letters, and the mandatory 3 B Sides that no one in any other hemisphere got. And then there's boring UK imports, which are generally CDs of dumb bands that people buy in malls. Rather than a cool panel like the Japanese have with cool writing, some bald sticker with some Helvetica ripoff typeface proclaims: UK Import. Boring.


I don't know about other music, but it seems like in the underground scene, there's a lot of cool German pressings of stuff. I guess they're not imports, but I import them through the power of eBay I guess. Here's a select few.


Minor Threat's Out of Step EP or LP, I don't even know what to classify it, was pressed in the UK (not all UK stuff is boring I guess) as well as Germany. The trademark blue/turquoise stripe gets a green treatment, and recommended price is a very fair 12 DM (Deutsch Marks). The UK has similar changes; red stripe and £2.50 . What makes the German pressing superior to the others is the song titles are listed in German. Ex: Betray becomes Verraten. How bad ass is that? Despite being a German pressing, this remains on Dischord.

Black Flag had a few albums pressed in Germany on what is possibly the coolest label name ever: Aggressive Rockproduktionen. Everything Went Black is pretty cool for a few reasons. First of all, one thing that pisses me off about this album, is that most versions say Everything Went Black on the cover, and then the spine says Everything Went to Black. SST has got to get their shit together like Aggressive Rockproduktionen, who got it right both times. This is also a double LP, but it's a gatefold, with lyrics and pictures of other Aggressive Rockproduktionen releases. The back is similar to the normal one, with a Black Flag bio, but this one is in German. I wonder if the translation is decent or not.




This last one is something I saw on eBay that I don't own, but would like to. The Gorilla Biscuits self titled 7" was apparently pressed on a 12" in Germany. Has the original pressing's lighter blue lettering, and a full size insert, that looks different from the 7" version. Maybe I'll bid hard and include a better writeup for the zine. Speaking of the zine, it will feature other cool German pressings, so you can't always rely on this online garbage as being complete. These photos were garbage, so expect much better photos in the zine that won't result in way too much flash.

Shout out to Soural