. . . get this one. The live songs sound like they were recorded with a hand-held cassette player, the early stuff is clever, punky, and short, and there's hardly a chorus to be found. In other words, it encapsulates everything great about early AmerIndie.
One of the treasures of American punk rock, Mike Watt has been pounding the bass since he played with Minutemen in the '80s. He's still touring and recording nonstop, with a seemingly infinite succession of bands and projects. He's also a great natural talker — or spieler, as he puts it in his one-man argot — and his idea of the relationship between recordings and performances is a bit different from a lot of rock… more »
It used to be easier to pretend that an album was its own perfectly self-contained artifact. The great records certainly feel that way. But albums are more permeable than solid, their motivations, executions and inspirations informed by, and often stolen from, their peers and forbearers. It all sounds awfully formal, but it's not. It's the very nature of music — of art, even. The Six Degrees features examine the relationships between classic records and five… more »
When put into the perspective of the history of American hardcore, the Los Angeles-based label BYO didn't make a "popular" impact: You don't hear historians referring to Mark and Shawn Stern's imprint with the same kind of reverence routinely bestowed upon such labels as Dischord and SST. But to dismiss the label as a mere footnote would be way off mark: Since BYO's 1982 launch, the Stern brothers - in their roles as founders of… more »
The third and final volume of Post-Mersh crams an extraordinary amount of music on one disc, compiling the EPs Paranoid Time (1980), Bean-Spill (1982), and Tour-Spiel (1985), the 1981 “Joy” single, and the 1984 rarities and outtakes collection The Politics of Time. – Stephen Thomas Erlewine