Hüsker Dü “Land Speed Record” 1982. New Alliance Records, original pressing. The sad news today is the death of Hüsker Dü drummer Grant Hart at age 56 from kidney cancer. Land Speed Record was the band’s first release, recorded live at the 7th Street Entry in Minneapolis in August 1981. It’s fast, really really fast and messy hardcore thrash punk, complete with chugga chugga grinding guitars, mumbled scream-sing vocals and lots of 1-2-3-4, 1-2-3-4′s.  They cram 17 songs into an LP that plays less than 30 minutes. (It seems that early 80′s Midwestern bands perhaps tried to prove something: if they couldn’t get as much attention or distribution as their coast counterparts, at least they could compete for the title of fastest punk band – see Wisconsin’s Die Kreuzen, for instance.) (Another aside, like Die Kreuzen, Hüsker Dü also were influenced by and had connections to the crazy-speed Minutemen: New Alliance Records was started by D. Boon and Mike Watt; after D. Boon’s death in ‘85 it was sold to Black Flag’s Greg Ginn’s label SST, which had released Hüsker Dü’s 1984 album Zen Arcade.) Overall Land Speed Record is a relentless sonic barrage, barely a breath between tracks and it’s amazing they could keep the pace through a live show. It also contains very little of the melodic punk sound that Hüsker Dü would become lauded for in subsequent years, though there are some whispers of it in the guitar lines and vocals in tracks like “All Tensed Up” and “Data Control.” But mostly it’s chaos that bleeds from song to song with little to differentiate between.