Hüsker Dü “Candy Apple Grey”

sfilzen — Thu, 18 Mar 2021 13:25:51 +0000

Hüsker Dü “Candy Apple Grey” released 35 years ago this month, March 1986. Today, March 18th, would have been Hüsker Dü’s drummer and co-songwriter Grant Hart’s 60th birthday (b. 1961). Candy Apple Grey was Hüsker Dü’s fifth album and their first on a major label (Warner Bros.), kind of officially marking their final break from punk to power pop/alternative rock. It’s still hard-rocking and a bit thrashy but way more melodic and poppy; even the acoustic guitar and orchestral forest sounds (“Too Far Down” written by Bob Mould) make an appearance. The album went to #140, though despite its poor showing on the charts, singles like “Sorry Somehow” and “Don’t Want to Know If You Are Lonely” (both written by Hart) got play on college radio, the video for “Don’t Want to Know…” even aired on MTV. Those two tracks are some of my favorites on the album, plus I also like the Hart-penned “Dead Set on Destruction” and Mould’s “Eiffel Tower High.” But, not to speak ill of the dead, I really do not like Hart’s “No Promise Have I Made” – it’s super-whiney-goes-screamy and overblown with emotionality.

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Hüsker Dü “Land Speed Record”

sfilzen — Thu, 14 Sep 2017 19:58:34 +0000

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.

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Hüsker Dü “Candy Apple Grey”

Hüsker Dü “Land Speed Record”