Descendents “Milo Goes To College”

sfilzen — Wed, 10 Jan 2018 17:21:39 +0000

Descendents “Milo Goes To College” 1982. New Alliance Records/SST. Their first full-length LP, famously titled for singer’s Milo Aukerman’s leaving the group to go to college for biochemistry and decorated with his nerdy iconic cartoon likeness. Milo Goes to College is cited as an inspiration for the development of the melodic hardcore sound of 80′s California punk with its “super clean, super tight, super poppy hardcore about hating your parents, riding bikes” and girls. (It was also perfect for Midwestern punks in the 80′s: The Descendents, and then All, played A LOT in the mid-to-late 80′s in Appleton/Green Bay area of Wisconsin; it seemed there was a show every other month or so, and several of my friends got to know the band members and/or helped organize shows at various VFW clubs, bars and bowling alleys, the typical venues for all-ages punk shows.)

Though Milo Goes to College is youthful and snotty, my favorite aspect of the album is Tony Lombardo’s bass playing, which provides both rhythm and melody; Lombardo was already in his 30′s when the Descendents formed in ‘79 and the rest of the band were in their teens. Lombardo wrote a significant number of tracks for the album and they tend to be my favorites (though I particularly love the killer bass line Bill Stevenson’s “Myage”): “I’m Not a Punk” about his impatience with the punk scene (damn kids!), “I Wanna Be a Bear” (co-written with Frank Navetta) and the classic “Suburban Home.”

I want to be stereotyped
I want to be classified

I want to be a clone
I want a suburban home
Suburban home
Suburban home
Suburban home

I want to be masochistic
I want to be a statistic

I want to be a clone
I want a suburban home
Suburban home
Suburban home
Suburban home

I don’t want no hippie pad
I want a house just like mom and dad

I want to be stereotyped
I want to be classified
I want to be masochistic
I want to be a statistic

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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.

The post Hüsker Dü “Land Speed Record” appeared first on Vinyl From The Vault.

new alliance records Archives - Vinyl From The Vault

Descendents “Milo Goes To College”

Hüsker Dü “Land Speed Record”