A Trip to the Acid Mothers Temple

From the heavy guitar freak-outs of the Cosmic Inferno to the disorienting raga-folk of Floating Flower, the bizarrely hypnotic solo guitar work of the collective’s leader Kawabata Makoto to the constantly morphing sound of the collective’s primary project, the Melting Paraiso U.F.O. (along solo projects, collaborations with legendary psych bands like Gong, and random one-offs), Acid Mothers Temple has one of the most intimidating and overwhelming discographies in music history. The only true way in is to throw yourself right into the deep end where I am currently struggling to keep my head above water.

So, after a two and a half year hiatus from No Exchange, expect periodic capsule reviews and other commentary on various Acid Mothers Temple projects and offshoots in the coming weeks. I am trying to make a point of listening to one Acid Mothers Temple album every day. Since attempting to work through their catalog in chronological order is an almost impossible task, what with the sheer number of projects and offshoots, I’ll be picking them basically at random. Get ready.

Operation: Doomsday 33 1/3 Proposal

In late February, I submitted a proposal for Bloomsbury’s generally excellent 33 1/3 series. Unfortunately, my proposal for MF Doom’s classic Operation: Doomsday was not accepted, but I am still proud of the work I put in and think it would have made a great book. The process of conceptualizing and putting together a book proposal burned me out, so I took a break from this blog for a few months. I’m starting to have a few irons in the fire again for No Exchange, and I thought it only fitting to kick things off again with the draft introduction and full chapter breakdown from my rejected proposal for Operation: Doomsday. Regular No Exchange content will be resuming in the days to come.

When I'm Gone: The End of the Vivian Girls

Around the middle of the 2000s, there were a few years when it seemed like a ton of indie rock kids rediscovered the pleasures of vintage Guided by Voices and Exile in Guyville all at once. As a result of this (or because all of these kids were broke), lo-fi briefly became a viable trend again. After all of the initial lo-fi excitement subsided, most of these bands were promptly forgotten, but a few left us with records that still stand up to their initial hype. Wavves’ second album Wavvves remains a delightfully cracked collection of surf rock tunes. The Thermals’ first few records, and especially its first album More Parts Per Million, are packed with songs that are still as catchy as they were a decade ago. Times New Viking and No Age ripped apart pop and punk with the kind of noise that only the cheapest recording technology can provide. And a few psychedelic garage punks, including Ty Segall and Thee Oh Sees, moved past their lo-fi beginnings to create some of the most exciting catalogs in 21^st century rock.

While they were never quite the best of their class of lo-fi rockers, the Vivian Girls possessed an easygoing charm that, paired with their impressive songcraft, pushed them through one of the most consistently satisfying careers of any of their contemporaries. They broke up last week, putting a fitting cap on a final phase of their run that saw the band’s members being pulled in different directions by new ambitions.

BYG Actuel 14: Acting Trio - Acting Trio

The European free improvisation scene has produced a handful of genuine iconoclasts. While that term tends to get thrown around a lot, especially when talking about free jazz and free improvisation, the greatest of the European free improvisers truly reoriented music permanently. They managed to break free from the bonds of the jazz tradition that ran through the music of their American contemporaries and create something wholly European. Peter Brötzmann, Han Bennink, and Alexander von Schlippenbach from Germany and Evan Parker and Derek Bailey from the UK stand as possibly the most recognized of the titanic iconoclasts of European improvisation. These five are not only representative of the scene as a whole in terms of their musical advancements but in their countries of origin. Germany and Britain have served as the binary stars around which European improvisation has orbited for the last 45 years.

Yet this does a disservice to the other countries that have produced great, innovative players who haven’t reached the level of recognition as their German and British peers. While BYG Actuel primarily released records by expatriate American musicians, it wasn’t totally blind to the advancements occurring in its own country. Michel Puig, Jacques Coursil, and the ever-present Claude Delcloo all led albums for the label, but these artists (with the exception of Coursil) are eclipsed by the mysterious Acting Trio, whose self-titled album was the fourteenth that Actuel put out.

I've Had It: The Sorry State of Black Flag

This is certainly up for debate, but in most fans’ estimation hardcore punk’s ground zero can be found in October of 1978. That month, an inauspicious Southern California electronics company called Solid State Transmitters morphed into SST Records and released the first salvo from what would make up one of the best runs of any record label in any genre ever: Black Flag’s debut EP Nervous Breakdown. With SST founder Greg Ginn on guitar and Chuck Dukowski and Brian Migdol filling out the rhythm section, the young band proved themselves an immediate and exciting force in the world of punk. Frontman Keith Morris found the perfect balance of snotty and intimidating, fashioning his own gritty style out of the remains of Johnny Rotten.[1] It isn’t too surprising that his charisma and amazing voice have allowed him to sustain the most satisfying post-Black Flag career of any member.

Top 13 Non-2013 Albums of the Year

I have regular segment called Fresh Produce on the MusicVox on Vocalo Public Radio in Chicago every Tuesday. I highlight three to five new albums that are out that week. As such, I listen to at least five and usually closer to ten new releases each week, most of which I never listen to a second time. Even with all of this time I spend keeping up with the torrent of new releases, I still find time to listen to great older albums. To honor some of these older albums that dominated my year, I put together this list of my top non-2013 albums of the year in no particular order. Some are albums I’ve been listening to for years, and others are ones I discovered for the first time in the last twelve months. All of them are excellent.

 #1: Mr. Lif - I Phantom (2002)

Mr. Lif was one of my first favorite rappers. Mo’ Mega and the Emergency Rations EP were so important to me in high school, and Mr. Lif was more instrumental than almost any other rapper in getting me to really plunge into the world of hip-hop, but I didn’t hear I Phantom until a couple of years into college. Spurred on by El-P’s phenomenal work last year, 2013 has found me listening to a ton of Def Jux stuff again, and I Phantom has gotten the most plays from me this year out of that crop of exceptional albums. It’s a great album that follows a loose multi-part concept, and Mr. Lif proves that he is a remarkably talented rapper, especially on tracks like the second half of “Return of the B-Boy.” More than anything, revisiting I Phantom reminded me why I got into hip-hop in the first place. And “Live from the Plantation” helped me get through a lot of drives to a shitty job.

Top Albums of 2013: #10-1

#10: Ty Segall - SLEEPER

Throughout his insanely prolific career, Ty Segall had certainly given the impression that his strengths came from fuzz and noise and general garage rock abandon. So when word came that his first album after his trifecta of amazing albums from 2012 would be largely acoustic, it was cause for some minor concern. Sure, his knack for songwriting could be expected to remain intact when it was ported into an acoustic setting, but what about that power? SLEEPER dashed those fears, finding the power in quietude. Even the most pleasant of dreams often come with a feeling that something isn’t quite right, and the prettiest songs on here are the most unsettling. Songs like “She Don’t Care” are gorgeous, but the lyrics signal the deterioration of an important relationship. It’s a dark, sad, beautiful, catchy record, and it’s possibly the best of his career so far.

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#9: DJ Rashad - Double Cup

Electronic music has spawned so many distinct subgenres over the last forty years that it’s hard for a relative outsider such as myself to find a good place to start with most of them. Outside of the recent L.A. beat scene which I have listened to a lot of, my explorations of other vibrant electronic forms, such as house, techno, jungle, drum and bass, dubstep, minimalist/ambient, and others is unfortunately been very limited. As a Chicago native, the sound that I am most disappointed in myself for ignoring is footwork, which was built by local producers from pieces of house, juke, hip-hop, and R&B. It’s a sound that’s gained increasing traction over the past few years, and it’s pushed into prominence through the Bangs & Works compilations, exciting live performances by Traxman and others, and Chance the Rapper’s Acid Rap, which counts footwork as an important influence. DJ Rashad’s debut album Double Cup proves that the community of footwork artists is ready for and deserving of more attention. It’s about as funky and soulful as electronic music, even sample-based electronic music, gets, and it makes the most of footwork’s sonic parameters. Rashad’s canny use of vocal samples and guest features, which he chops up and uses in the same way he uses the instrumental, is the best part of this record, which situates him as the man to beat among footwork producers in Chicago.

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Top Albums of 2013: #20-11

#20: The Delfonics - Adrian Younge Presents the Delfonics

Due to his prominence as the bandleader of the Roots, Questlove is in the rare position where he can try to make a record with Bill Withers and end up with Al Green as a consolation prize. With his work revitalizing the Delfonics, Adrian Younge deserves to jump up to that level, allowing him to work with some of the greatest and most prominent artists in the history of soul. Younge absorbs old music with the ear of a great sampler, flipping old film soundtracks and obscure break-filled R&B nuggets into his own compositions. When this instinctive method is paired with an unfairly forgotten soul legend like William Hart, the resulting album sounds like it was made in a world where seventies soul and nineties hip-hop somehow developed simultaneously. Adrian Younge Presents the Delfonics sounds completely out of time, a record some future crate digger will be mystified by.

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 #19: Inspectah Deck and 7L & Esoteric - Czarface

Insepctah Deck’s verse on Gang Starr’s “Above the Clouds” remains one of his career best. It was also a tantalizing view into what a member of the Wu-Tang Clan could sound like over more traditionalist New York boom bap as opposed to the groundbreaking RZA sound that the Wu generals mostly stuck to during the group’s best years in the ‘90s. Czarface, Deck’s full length collaboration with 7L & Esoteric, shows how great it could have been if any of the generals had made a more straightforward boom bap record back then. Deck sounds revitalized here, turning in the second best album of his career (for all its detractors and its couple of weaker songs, his first album Uncontrolled Substance remains the most underrated Wu album of the ‘90s). Esoteric remains a very good emcee in spite of his general lack of personality, but the stars here are Deck and 7L’s head-knocking beats. Czarface manages to be both an enticing alternate history and a strong revitalization for one of the best rappers who never quite managed to pull off a satisfying solo career.

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Top Albums of 2013: #32-21

In his piece on his own top 10 albums of the year over at Grantland, Steven Hyden made the important distinction between the notion of best albums and of favorite albums. Trying to claim that your own list consists of the best albums of the year (as I did last year) is inherently dishonest, since no one has heard every album that came out in a given year, so every listener or critic’s personal scope is too limited to declare unequivocally that anything is the best. As such, Hyden appropriately labeled his article “My Top 10 Best (Favorite) Albums of 2013.” I’ve tried to take the same approach here. Forcing myself to ignore the impact, buzz, controversy, or acclaim that albums got this year and focusing just on the albums that I liked the most has really helped me put this list together. I’m still constantly reordering the albums on this list, and I’m sure I’ll regret almost everything about how I ranked these the second I put them up (which begs the question of why I bothered ranking them at all, but whatever). So before I keep changing my mind, without further ado here are my top 32 albums of the year.

20 Years of Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)

At this point, twenty years to the day after Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) came out, using the word ‘grimy’ to describe that album or anything that the Wu-Tang Clan has done since has become the hoariest of clichés. Yet watching the video for “Protect Ya Neck,” the group’s first single, it’s clear that no other word so perfectly encapsulates what they were doing. Anything resembling professionalism, like proper lighting or good cameras, is nonexistent, everything looks like a first take, and they apparently couldn’t be bothered to remove the camcorder time stamp from most of the color shots. A bunch of the group members’ names are misspelled (Inspektah Deck, Ghost Face Killer, the Jizah). It’s impossible to really tell, but my guess that there are about forty people in the video seems like a conservative estimate, and all but a few of them are completely unrecognizable.[1] Just how many of them are actually in the group? It isn’t clear from the video. A bunch of them have swords, and there are scary-looking guys lurking in project hallways and alleys in the back of most of the shots. The video is five minutes of menace and a dizzying array of lyrical styles over an intoxicated, haphazardly mixed beat the likes of which had not been heard before.

A few months before the “Protect Ya Neck” video started gaining traction on Rap City, the Wu-Tang Clan got their first break in a way that fits the menace that they projected in that first video perfectly. During an episode of the Stretch & Bobbito Show, which aired every Thursday night on WKCR 89.9FM from one to five in the morning, a few members and affiliates of the Clan either snuck or broke into the WKCR offices, unmarked white label 12” in hand.[2] If threats were made they were no more than implied, but the message was clear: it was in Stretch & Bobbito’s best interest to play the song. “Protect Ya Neck” got its first radio play that night, and it earned the group’s members spots as semi-regular presences on the show until 1998 when it went off the air.

BYG Actuel 13: Paul Bley - Ramblin'

There have already been a few anomalies in the BYG Actuel catalog so far: the avant classical of Michel Puig, the psychedelic proto-prog of Gong, and the never-issued blues rock of Alan Jack Civilization. Number 13 in the Actuel catalog is also an anomaly, although not primarily on stylistic grounds. Unlike almost all of the fifty-three albums in the label’s catalog, Paul Bley’s Ramblin’ was not recorded in the Actuel summer in 1969. It wasn’t even recorded in France. Instead, it was an unused recording that Paul Bley’s trio made in Rome in 1966 that Bley licensed to Actuel three years later. As such, it is missing that particular adventurous spirit that marks so much of the rest of that catalog.

By the time he recorded Ramblin’, Bley had already been an important figure in boundary-pushing jazz for thirteen years. His debut album as leader, Introducing Paul Bley, was released on Debut in 1953, and he somehow managed to wrangle Charles Mingus and Art Blakey to be his sidemen. He was one of the first respected jazz musicians to really get behind what Ornette Coleman and his band were doing, and he brought Coleman, Don Cherry, Billy Higgins, and Charlie Haden to perform with him in California in 1958. After his work with Coleman, he got around quite a bit, performing with Jimmy Giuffre, Sonny Rollins, and a few prominent members of the Sun Ra Arkestra, among others. By 1964, he was firmly entrenched in the free jazz movement and he was one of the major participants in the October Revolution in Jazz. After the October Revolution he, his wife Carla Bley, and Bill Dixon spearheaded the Jazz Composers Guild, an admirable but flawed attempt to unify out jazz musicians in order to help them get stage time and fair record contracts. Infighting and the individual success of some members (most notably Archie Shepp, who violated Guild bylaws by signing with Impulse! without consulting the others) caused the JCG to splinter quickly. After the JCG ceased to be, Bley traveled to Europe with his trio, which at the time included Mark Levinson on bass and Barry Altschul on drums. While in Rome on July 1, 1966, the group convened at Studio RCA to record one Paul Bley song along with five compositions by Carla Bley, Annette Peacock, and Ornette Coleman.

Spray Cans Vol. 018: Asia Born/DJ Shadow and the Groove Robbers - "Send Them" b/w "Entropy"

 

Asia Born/DJ Shadow and the Groove Robbers - "Send Them" b/w "Entropy" (Solesides, 1993)

Latyrx’s The Second Album is due out on Tuesday. Their first album, appropriately titled Latyrx (The Album), came out a long sixteen years ago, and that length of time apart has caused expectations to rise to unmatchable levels. The Second Album will almost certainly disappoint simply because the memory of the first is so overpowering that it makes considering the second on its own merits an almost impossible task. I’m going to make things even harder for myself by taking the time to focus on Latyrx’s early years over the next few days.

First up is “Send Them” the debut single by one half of Latyrx, Asia Born, and the first release on the amazing Solesides label. Solesides, which later morphed into the Quannum Projects, was a rap collective and label that was founded in 1992 around UC Davis and the Bay Area. In many ways the weirder cousin of fellow Bay Area crew Hieroglyphics, Solesides initially comprised of Blackalicious members Gift of Gab and Chief Xcel, DJ Shadow, and Latyrx members Lateef the Truthspeaker and Lyrics Born.[1] These five used Solesides as the mouthpiece for much of their experimentation and general weirdness, finding their own unique voices in the process.

BYG Actuel 12: Alan Silva and His Celestrial Communication Orchestra - Luna Surface

I haven’t gotten a chance to see Gravity yet but from what I’ve heard, the experience of seeing it on an Imax screen in 3D can induce existential terror at the vast emptiness of space and our fragility in the face of the forces of the cosmos. Forty-four years earlier, Alan Silva and His Celestrial Communication Orchestra[1] accomplished that same thing musically with their first album for BYG Actuel, Luna Surface. Recorded less than a month after the Apollo 11 spacecraft touched down on the lunar surface, the album is both an incredibly assured debut as leader for Silva and a chaotic, relentless journey into the horrors of outer space.

Alan Silva was born in Bermuda in 1939 but he migrated with his mother to Harlem before the end of World War II. He picked up the bass at some point in this childhood and he made his first major splash on the instrument as a participant in the landmark October Revolution in Jazz, which trumpeter Bill Dixon put on at the Cellar Door in Manhattan. Around the same time he spent a brief time in Sun Ra’s Arkestra, giving him a taste for larger ensembles that he kept in the back of his mind over the next five years, which he spent in smaller bands led by Cecil Taylor, Albert Ayler, Sunny Murray, and Archie Shepp. It was with the latter that Silva travelled to Algiers in July 1969 to perform at the Pan-African Festival which put him at ground zero for the nascent Actuel summer.

Remembering Lou Reed

Lou Reed died yesterday. He was 71. I first consciously heard his music not so long ago, when he was 64. A coworker had turned me on to the Velvet Underground near the end of my senior year of high school, and the burned copy of The Velvet Underground & Nico that he gave me became one of my go to CDs for my many aimless drives around town chain smoking. Before I heard “Heroin” for the first time, I’m not sure I knew just how powerful, how beautiful, and how hypnotic noise could be when used in music. There was one night during the summer after high school when I listened to that song on a loop for several hours, and it never got even a little bit old.

I stopped buying CDs when I was eighteen and left for college. I suddenly found myself without an income for the first time since I was old enough to have a job. To make matters worse, I had blown most of my savings on comics and self-medication, and buying CDs, especially when I could get almost any music I wanted for free on the internet, became financially unfeasible so I never ended up getting around to buying any other Velvets CDs. A little over a year later I started picking up LPs so that I could have at least a small collection ready to go when I finally saved up the money for a turntable. When I went to buy my first record Oak Park Records in Oak Park, Illinois didn’t have The Velvet Underground & Nico in stock, so I left with White Light/White Heat tucked under my arm. I got a chance to listen to it for the first time on a friend’s turntable later that day. 

Julian Malone Drops a Letter from a King

Outside of all of the name dropping and the resulting furor, the most exciting thing Kendrick’s “Control” verse was his delivery, which was ragged in a way that he hadn’t really reached before. Since the verse got so much attention, it seemed only a matter of time before rappers stopped recording weak comebacks and started adopting similar deliveries instead.

Julian Malone, the young BRKF$T Club member and former Stones Throw rapper, is one of the first to do this with his soulful “Letter from a King.” The beat, built around a gorgeous a guitar sample and a few choice vocal samples, is easily one of the best beats that Malone has ever made. He uses the almost always effective strategy of rapping angrily over a quiet soul beat, and his grittier than normal vocals don’t sound at all like an ill-fitting affectation as Kendrick’s occasionally did on “Control.”

Ju’s career has taken some tough turns over the last year, with his quick rise to prominence above his fellow 2008ighties crew members to his frustrating departure and mini-feud with Stones Throw on through the delays of his upcoming Diff.rnt mixtape. His frustration is palpable throughout the song, confessing that he’s “tired of niggas thinking just cause I keep it low pro that somebody losing the floor/ I’m scared that I ain’t gon’ blow.” It’s a powerful statement of vulnerability, and it shows that he’s poised to do just fine on his own.

Spray Cans Vol. 017: L*Roneous Da'Versifier - "L'Chemy" b/w "Implosion"

 

L*Roneous Da'Versifier - "L'Chemy" b/w "Implosion" (Ocean Floor Records, 1997)

Endtroducing… was never a big seller in the United States—it peaked at number 37 on the Billboard Top Heatseekers chart well after its November 1996 release—but it and the singles that led up to it had a seismic impact on hip-hop that is still being felt today. Its greatest effect was kicking off instrumental hip-hop, a subgenre that brewed for a decade before exploding in the wake of J Dilla’s death, but it also set the stage for a production methodology that hadn’t really existed much before DJ Shadow started releasing singles. All of the songs leading up to and on Endtroducing… were not simply loops in the style of the great DJ Premier or Pete Rock. DJ Shadow structured his beats like songs, building and transforming throughout their runtimes and constructed from countless samples from different songs. This production approach can be heard in El-P’s work on The Cold Vein and Fantastic Damage, in Dan the Automator’s work on Deltron 3030 and Dr. Octagonecologyst, and in countless other underground rap classics from the late nineties to the present.

DJ Zeph is one of the great unsung producers to take DJ Shadow’s lessons to heart. On L*Roneous Da’Versifier’s first single “L’Chemy” b/w “Implosion,” Zeph worked very much in the lane that DJ Shadow carved out with Endtroducing… Zeph is a master at suggesting mood and environment in his beats. These two songs, and indeed the whole of Imaginarium, L*Roneous’ debut album that Zeph produced, simulate the feel of urban nights, with a bit of futurism thrown in for good measure. If Paul Pope’s 100% is ever adapted into a movie, Zeph should do the score.

Schoolboy Q - "Banger (MOSHPIT)"

Habits & Contradictions was one of the best rap albums of last year, and its replay value hasn’t diminished at all in the twenty-one months since it came out. This is all the more impressive since high-concept introspective songs are almost entirely absent on the album. Unlike fellow Black Hippies Kendrick Lamar and Ab-Soul, Q doesn’t have much interest in making those kinds of songs. He’s gone on record saying that he only made “Blessed” to keep listeners from thinking that he only rapped about parties and drugs and guns and stealing your girl and being cooler than you. It’s a great song, but it’s far from the best on the album because it finds him straying from his greatest strengths, which are rapping about all of the things I just listed.

With “Banger (MOSHPIT),” the second single from the delayed (due to sample clearance issues) Oxymoron, Schoolboy Q is rapping about basically nothing. The hook is a bunch of boom shaka lakas and shouts of “Figg side!” while the verses aren’t really about anything. But all of this nothing amounts to an enjoyable and compulsively listenable song because Q is one of the best rappers at turning nothing into compelling fodder for songwriting (all due respect to Wale circa 2008). It certainly helps that he’s a great rapper with ever-shifting chameleonic flow and cadence.

BYG Actuel 11: Archie Shepp - Poem for Malcolm

Archie Shepp’s remarkable first full studio album Four for Trane[1] consists mostly of Coltrane covers—unsurprising considering the title—but his follow-up Fire Music, recorded in the wake the assassination of Malcolm X, counts three Shepp compositions alongside tunes by Duke Ellington and Antonio Carlos Jobim. The last of these Shepp compositions is “Malcolm Malcolm Semper Malcolm,” a brief poem reflecting on X’s passing, which happened a week before the recording, followed by an expressive, pained solo by Shepp with minimal backing by David Izenzon and J.C. Moses on bass and drums respectively.

Malcolm X is not an explicit presence on any of Shepp’s albums in the four years after Fire Music, although his legacy haunts every sonic, cultural, and personal exploration that Shepp undertook during this time. In August 1969, when Shepp recorded three studio albums for BYG Actuel over the course of five days, he decided to grapple once again with the X’s towering legacy. What’s more, he again chose to use a poem to do this on “Poem for Malcolm,” which closes out the first side of the album of the same name.[2]

Snoop Dogg Returns to His Roots with 7 Days of Funk

The twentieth anniversary of Doggystyle is about a month away, and although it isn’t listed in too many best of lists these days, it’s aged remarkably well. Unlike every album Snoop’s done since, it’s pretty filler-free and Dr. Dre’s guiding hand across the record allowed Snoop to put out a remarkably tight, focused record. The hits still go over at parties, and the deeper cuts still knock as much as they did twenty years ago.

Since Doggystyle, Snoop’s biggest problem is an overarching lack of direction. He’s always been one of those artists who really benefits from a good executive producer helping to shape his projects.[1] Not only that, but he needs to work with someone whose vision complements Snoop’s own. Snoop’s first No Limit album Da Game is to Be Sold, Not to Be Told had Beats by the Pound at the helm, but unlike Mystikal and Fiend, Snoop was never a good fit for their beats, and the bloated twenty-plus songs approach to albums that No Limit favored doesn’t allow for the kind of quality control that Snoop needs. As a result, Da Game is to Be Sold is one of the worst albums in Snoop’s catalog. Major Lazer was also a poor fit for Snoop, as the already rightfully forgotten Snoop Lion album is testament to.[2] Throughout the rest of his catalog, there are some good albums (Tha Doggfather, Paid the Cost to Be the Boss, The Blue Carpet Treatment), but even the best of his post-Doggystyle output has fallen victim to bloating and lack of both quality control and focus.

Revenge 88 Was All Alone

Dig around in the earliest issues of Maximumrocknroll, before that zine became overly dogmatic in its conception of what constitutes acceptable punk, and you’ll find international reports about vibrant punk scenes from around the world. Since those early days, the Bloodstains Over… compilation series has been the primary torchbearer for classic international punk. The first Bloodstains Over Belgium comp is one of the best in the series, with thrilling cuts by Mad Virgins, Spermicide, Onion Dolls, P.I.G.Z., and others. Best of all, tucked near the end of the record is “Neonlights,” the b-side of Revenge 88’s “Alone” 7”.

Revenge 88 started out as Stagebeast, who put out one single, “Belgium (Ain’t Fun No More)” in 1978 after winning a contest for an EMI Belgium record contract. Both “Belgium” and its b-side “Working Man” are jaunty rockabilly-indebted tunes that have just as many saxophone solos as guitar solos. The sax in “Belgium” in particular has a punk unruliness that hasn’t really been heard much on that instrument outside of the Lounge Lizards’ early albums. Both songs are essential, but Stagebeast ended up sabotaging their own career almost immediately. An incident with their record label (they trashed the label’s office) caused them to lose their contract and they broke up soon after.