Against The Grain

When the True Vision demo came out in 2015 I really enjoyed listening to it. The songs on their first 7" don't leave anything to be desired. Perfect mix between old Boston straight edge bands and the youth crew wave of the late 80's. The UK has really been on a roll as far as hardcore is concerned. 300 copies on blue vinyl with blue sleeve.

A Detour And A Happy End

When Green Day and The Offspring became huge in the mid 90's, both bands were sort of my gateway bands to punk and hardcore. Well, they could have been, if I had shown a little more commitment and had been a little less influenced by my friends and classmates back then. That could have been sort of a cool introduction to my hardcore CV. However, I took a teeny tiny detour of about 4-5 years during which I listened to all kinds of (in hindsight mostly crappy) music. Some bands I still like, most of them are best kept under a cloak of silence, haha. 

The band that re-ignited everything for me was Rage Against The Machine. In 2000 I was at a huge festival in Germany and I caught their set more or less by chance. I was there to see a lot of other bands and a buddy and I just went to the main stage because there was nothing interesting going on at the other stages. When I heard the music and saw Zack going wild on the stage and pouring out so much energy, I was hooked immediately. All of a sudden I didn't really know why I'd wanted to see all these other bands. I think I bought Battle Of Los Angeles, which had just come out, the day after I was home from the festival. And from there everything unraveled. Never mind it took me a few more years to find out Zach had also been in one of the best hardcore bands ever and only close to 17 years to finally pick up something by RATM on vinyl. 

Spirits Strike Again

New year, same old records by the same old bands. Well, almost. A few weeks ago a picture by Useless Pride Record popped up in my Instgram feed. They advertised a repress of Spirits' Discontent LP. The records are supposed to be from the 2nd US press, just with blank labels and another sleeve. I'm not convinced this is true though, because my 2nd press copy looks different colourwise. Then again, I don't think the label pressed only 50 copies. Weird. The records are supposed to be yellow, but this looks more like orange to me. To make things more complicated, a friend of mine bought two copies, one for herself and one for a friend, and when she sent me a picture, one did look like mine, but the other one looked like yellow indeed. The three copies I have sitting here (friends help friends) all look like mine though. However, the label told my friend that the majority was yellow, not orange.  Oh, the joy of record collecting and nerding out about things like that...

Screaming For Repress

Well, not really, seeing that Screaming For Change was repressed only a few years ago. But then again Southern Lord did such a great job with this repress, the repress is definitely justified.

What makes this repress really special are the pictures you get as a glued-in booklet in the gatefold sleeve.

Southern Lord repressed this on six colours I believe and there's a special colour for Rev as well. Not really something I can get behind, which is why I bought only one colour. You can't really make out the colour in the first picture, but I got purple vinyl, which is limited to 100 copies. I kind of had hoped it was marbled purple like the one from the original coloured pressings, but it turns out it's translucent with some swirls. Still looks good though.