Swamp Oaf

The Bags' alter-ego band, a mythical rock-monster band along the lines of Spinal Tap, according to Trouser Press. It's meant to be a bit more more psychedelic and experimental than the normal Bags stuff, so it's a little all over the place. It's sort of a Stooges meets Sabbath mish-mash, both in good and not-so-good ways. Some tracks venture into the ridiculous "Mama Swine", noodly jazz/rock instrumental, "Brain Masseuse" and others into straightforward heavy-duty-rock-n-roll "Steamroller", "(Howl at) The Moon".
 
Extremely rare, I've been looking for this album for years, and bought myself a copy online for my birthday last month. Had to buy it from someone in Denmark, so I'm happy to welcome the album home to the Boston area.

Definitely worth a listen. Most of these tracks are great, and this lends some credence to my earlier statement that this band could have and should have been big, or at least much bigger than they were.

While I'm on this Bags kick, I may just have to rip "Rock Starve" even though I already have it in digital format.

Enjoy!

Carnival Of Souls - Soul Train

Another album bought on a whim. It was cheap (like $2 or $3 at the most), and the cover was just too cheesy not to pick it up. And they were obviously named for a great cult film, so that's cool, right?

They were from Columbus, OH, but definitely inspired by Seattle, and their label, Aroma Records, was based there. Both faded rapidly into obscurity. Not awful, but not particularly good. Very  unpolished.

There's a sticker on the back cover that says "Due to legal reasons and lineup changes, Carnival Of Souls are now Barbed Wire Dolls" I tried to google the Barbed Wire Dolls, but came up with very little, so they rapidly sank into obscurity yet again. 

A: Soul Train
B: Morphina
Enjoy!

Tad - Loser

Tad is back! And yes, long before Beck, there was someone singing about being a loser, but this song isn't quite so anthemic-sing-a-long-ish. Neither is the B-side, which mostly consists of Tad shouting "We're cookin' with gas!" It's all delivered in the usual heavy, stomping Tad-style.

Inscribed in the vinyl around the label is "The show ain't over..." and on the B-side "...until the Fat Man sings"

Mystery Train was kind enough to leave their price tag right on the sleeve. One of the few with that, actually, most are on a plastic outer sleeve, but at least I know I paid $3.50 for this in Amherst.

A: Loser
B: Cooking With Gas
Enjoy!

Dinosaur Jr. - Just Like Heaven

The end of 2010. I'm kind of sad to see it go. It was a good year. Everyone was healthy, at least until the last few weeks. Got back out there and started running again, getting some decent mileage in, especially in September. Work was engaging and finally seemed to have a future. Started this whole blog thing up. I really expanded my collection of MP3s, both from way back when, and I finally started listening to new stuff again.
Anyway, it certainly beat 2009, which pretty much sucked ass except for May 1. By comparison, 2010 was divine. Just like heaven? OK, maybe it's a stretch, but it seemed to fit, and I want to end the year on a high note.

Great cover of the Cure song. It ends abruptly as they ran out of tape on one of the tracks and just stopped it there. The B-sides are good too.

Happy New Year to everyone!

A: Just Like Heaven
B: Throw Down, Chunks
Enjoy!

Holy Rollers - Origami Sessions

Another post-hardcore DC Dischord band. These guys (and gal - Maria Jones on drums) were on the melodic end of the spectrum.  They incorporated vocal harmonies, taking advantage of Jones' voice, which really set them apart from their peers in DC. Her drumming style is also quite distinctive. It sounds like she's belting an empty can a lot of the time (and even a cowbell at one point), but it works. Her drumming seems to be a centerpiece of this band's sound, as the bass isn't featured prominently, and the guitars sound like typical DC sound stuff.

The second half (or at least I think it is, the sleeve shows the opposite, but inscription in the vinyl says it's so...) of this EP really picks up steam after a bit of an uneven start with "Dahlia" and "Machine" "Eleventy" starts slow, but builds, and the energy and pace carries straight into "Freedom Asking". These were all re-recorded for their first LP, As Is, and they pared down the first tracks, and lengthened the last two.

This was an early purchase, straight from Dischord, entirely on a whim. I'd never heard them or even of them before. I liked it enough to pick up As Is, and the CD of  Fabuley which contains all of the As Is material on it, so I won't be ripping that. I haven't listened to this stuff in ages, I'll have to check those out again.

A: Dahlia, Machine
B: Eleventy, Freedom Asking
Enjoy!

Lungfish - Necklace Of Heads LP

More LP Sunday. The band that ruined my left ear at the Hampshire College Red Barn as part of that triple-bill. There's no stage at the Red Barn, and I was maybe 30-40' from the guitarist. He turned to change a setting on his amp in between songs, and this blast of feedback punched me right in the left ear. There was a rumbling noise, and then nothing. I lost all hearing in that ear for days. I couldn't drive with the window open as the sound of rushing air hurt like hell. Funny thing, no one else reacted to the feedback at all. I think I just happened to have one ear in the exact spot where all of these stray sound waves just converged.

As for the show, these guys were great. Daniel Higgs is all sweaty manic intensity behind a massive beard.  The band behind him was rock-solid and played with a lot of energy despite standing completely still for the whole show. I grabbed this right afterward, hearing loss be damned. Stylistically, they're hard to categorize. Sure, they're a DC area post-hardcore act, but they're not like the rest of them. They're definitely more inventive than the rest, and you can tell they're still experimenting with their sound quite a bit on this little 8 song LP. They bounce back and forth between clean sounding guitar and distortion, throw in an anthemy sort of song in "Nothing Is Easy". There's even a little reggae inspired break in the song Fambly. They eventually settled on this repetitive rhythmic hypnotic sound with their later stuff, and you can hear the beginnings of that in "Not Only Long..." and the beginning of "Fambly".

Yet another band I lost track of, and I'm pretty sure I missed out. They've released nine more albums over the last 20 years. I've just started to pick through this huge back catalog of their work while ripping this.These songs were lumped in with their second album's CD as bonus tracks. As a standalone album, it was only released on vinyl, and it's long out of print. The Simple Machines label seems to have died some time ago.

1. Come Clean
2. Put Your Halo On
3. Ain't No Colr
4. Not Only Long Ride Too High
5. Parthenogenesis
6. Devilhead
7. Nothing Is Easy
8. Fambly

Enjoy!

Soul Side - Bass/103

Comcast went down for a while last night right in the middle of working on this post, so a later than usual update today.

More DC post-hardcore. I swear I don't have that much of this stuff. I've got to mix the collection up a bit or something before picking. This was an early addition to the collection. I was really into Fugazi in 1990 or so, having seen them that March at The Channel. That was a great show, and I figured I'd see who else was on Dischord. You could mail order stuff direct from them really cheap. A 7" was $3 including postage, CDs and LPs were $7-8. So I sent out for this, figuring $3 isn't much, and maybe I'll find some new cool band.

For some reason, I remember being disappointed with this, and I don't think I listened to it too many times after I got it. Which is too bad, really. It's certainly better than I remember it being. Most of this band went on to form Girls Against Boys, and the other member started Seven League Boots, who played a Bad Brains style of reggae influenced punk. I'm almost certain that I saw them somewhere, though the details escape me.

A: Bass
B: 103, Other Side
Enjoy!