Thorazine “Crazy Uncle Paul’s Dead Squirrel Wedding” 1996. Hell Yeah Records. Growly, tight & fast punk from Philadelphia. Crazy Uncle Paul’s Dead Squirrel Wedding was the band’s debut LP (they put out an EP in ’95) and only released one more (Vicious Cycle, 1998, which I wrote about a couple years back). Their Bandcamp page looks to still be pretty dead (says new album coming in 2017 which is the same as what it said in 2020) but fortunately it linked me to their Facebook page and hey! they’re active again! They have an 8-song EP on Spotify (SRA Records) released in 2022: In H00v3r We Trust: it seems to be a tribute to Thorazine band member (bassist from later/reunion years??? It’s fuzzy) Dan Hoover who died in 2022. I’l listen to it at some point soon. Anyway, this LP has been languishing in my stay-or-go pile for years now. I know I bought this from frontwoman/singer Jo-Ann Rogan at a Thorazine show at the Cactus Club in ’98 when they were touring for Vicious Cycle. She was great – awesome snarly punk voice and excellent stage presence (she was also very nice). It’s been over 25 years since that show so I have zero recollection of what, if any, tracks they may have played from Crazy Uncle Paul but it’s a great punk LP. My top tracks are “Riding the Train,” which has lighting fast punk guitar plus a healthy dose of hard rock/metal guitar at the bridge; the anaemic “I’m Not a Whore” (best line: “fuck you, fuck you, fuck you all!”); “Boiling Point” which is very Germs-esque (great!); and the funk-punk “Rain.” I know we are running out of space but I’m not quite ready to let this album go. It stays.

Here’s a 90′ quality video of Thorazine playing two songs live from ’97. I can’t tell what the first song is but fairly certain the second is “I’m Not a Whore.”