I loved «Savages» and Phillip Seymour Hoffmann once again kicks butt. Wonderful movie!
Reading:
Friedrich Glauser: Writer, social outcast, morphinist and creator of some of the finest detective stories. «Schlumpf Erwin Mord» (Schlumpf Erwin Murder) was the introduction to Wachtmeister Studer, a swiss version of George Simenon's Maigret - a cop with a sense of justice and sympathy for the beaten down. If this (or any other of Glauser's books) is available in your language, go get it.
The ferocious years of “marxism” didn’t last long with the DILS. They fell in love and eventually moved to Canada, releasing one last 7″ - or better 1.5 of that. Nice, calm laid back, much in the vein of (Impatient) Youth. Not as good though. Still, there’s something about the three songs that makes me like them.
This is part of a bulk auction on eBay in order to help a friend out by selling off part of his collection. You will find more of this here.
This comp is basically bollocks - except for DISCOLOKOSST, a notorious band of Geneva. The three songs you have here are some of the hardest hitting shit you’d find in Switzerland of 81 (the year, I bought Venom’s “Welcome to Hell” LP). The bands rips through a very original mixture of Hardcore riffing and computer drumming and noises, much in the vein of Metal Urbain. Total killer! A posthumous LP is in the making, I read somewhere. The band was rumored to be a “fascist band”. Well, after a long long time I learned, that “fascist” bands are normally those who wouldn’t wanna follow the post-hippie shit of the 80s. PALLADIUM features a whole bunch of crap bands, with the further exceptions of CRY BABY (half assed female fronted Punk) and YODLER KILLERS (quarter ass Punk, totally overestimated Swiss Punk). Find out yourself:
More Texas-insanity! Legendary comp with all your heroes of yesterday when they thought they were too late. VOMIT PIGS are okay but PLASTIC IDOLS deliver the first hit, followed by “Solid Ground” from THE TELEFONES which definately has “it”. THE INFANTS, BARRY KOODA, BLINDATE and E=MC2 are good, but hell breaks loose when you flip the disk over. THE SKUDS do “Dead Dogs” which is the highlight so far and “Nightmare in my Closet” from CONTROL is in the same league - great!! But then, lads and lassies, get ready for Punk’s answer to both Judas Priest and 50’s Sci-Fi soundtracks - “Whips and Midgets” by SMEGMA. THE killer song here, up there in halls of eternal glory!! SUPERMAN’S GIRLFRIEND’s song is amazing too, always makes me laugh. The remaining two, NERVEBREAKERS and SNAKES are very good and there you are - begging for more and indeed, Ryan Richardson released a 7″ comp with additional material on his label “Existential Vacuum” a while back. My advise to you would be to buy them both when you run across ‘em.
Definately the most beautiful “Picture Disc” I’ve ever seen and a legendary early L.A. compilation everybody has at least heard of. YES L.A. was issued as a sarcastic skit on “No New York”, the disk indeed starts off quite chauvinist with “We don’t the English” by BAGS. The best nationalistic garbage put into music I’ve ever heard! The EYES deliver “Disneyland”, a song that comes directly from the hymn-book of Punk. ALLEY CAT’s “Too much Junk” hasn’t aged that good and I’d prefer the 7″ over this any time. “Los Angeles” by X is just fantastic, unbeatable! BLACK RANDY does his usual crap and GERMS start off with a killer riff on “No God” but don’t manage to hold it up.
The disc is one-sided, pressed on clear vinyl, in order to be able to silkscreen the blank b-side with artwork. Thus and with the addition of arrows pointing to the tracks, you wouldn’t need to do anything else than to simply put the disk into a pvc bag and voilà! How great is that?! Superb!!
cover scans up again soon Recorded on Dec 5 1981 and released in early 1982, this is the debut of Sweden’s ANTI-CIMEX!
I’m totally pissed (I meant drunk) at the moment cuz I felt this would be appropriate, so I can tell you even less than I could tell you soberly. I’m sure Peter KBD will tell us more! I know it would be cooler to say that this is the band’s best effort, but I’m afraid it isn’t so (the best is the follow-up, “Raped Ass”). And another thing: sometimes you’d get this record with the cover cut into two pieces - that’s because the two sides were printed not like they were odered to be (one was 90 degress turned compared to the otrher). Well, if you have a copy at all and if it the sleeve is in one piece, call yourself lucky cuz these are very rare. Had like 10 copies of it in my life, the first one I sold for 10$, the last one for about 60 times as much. Only in it for the muuuuuuusic. Yeah, that’s true. And I eat meat. And I treat objects as women.
I have a friend who swears to hear “We are Anti-Cimex and we have a hard life” sung in swiss german in “Anti-Cimex”. Magic? You tell me.
BLOODSTAR like few other bands I ever heard managed to create a sound of their own. Definately not for people with a musical attention span of 1:34, but if you’re looking for a good slow enduring headfuck, BLOODSTAR’s mayhemic soundscapes will most likely amaze you as much as they amazed me for the past 18 years! I can’t think of an other LP from a swiss band that impressed me as much as this.
I wrote 3 different long drafts for this post, trying to find words for the effect BLOODSTAR’s debut has on me, some historical background and all. But now I think, I’ll just leave it up to you - get yourself some booze, smokes and subdue the lights. “L’Alba dei Morti viventi” is actually a cover version of GOBLIN’s contribution to George A. Romero’s “Dawn of the Dead” soundtrack. I can post the original too, if anybody wants - but I’ve learned that Metal has a hard-as-steel time on this blog ….. (except for Eric from Something I learned today and Malfeitor who used to run Dressed for the H-Bomb, who seem to enjoy truely good bad music from time to time).
Another rather unknown and obscured band from Zurich was THE MONO who released this great 7″ and a year later a full length LP “Sisch doch nur äs Märli”. Until a few years ago, you could find the LP quite easily so I never cared to buy it - until I realised that it wasn’t seeen no longer. Too bad, would love to hear it! The 7″ seems a bit tougher to come by and features three songs of which two are essential for an example of existentialist Punk (now that was aliteration!). I don’t know, maybe it’s not that spectacular musically but of course music is always more than what meets the ear. “Bahnhof” and “Schtop”, both sung in swiss german with a heavy zurich accent, are hard hitting, depressive numbers which always drag me down. “Life” is a bit daft with it’s cliched lyrics and the english vocals. There was this guy I knew (he suddenly turned away from me for reasons I still don’t understand) who used to tell me how he spent many nights in the so called “Shopville”, a subterrestrial shopping passage underneath zurich main station, when he missed the last train back home. The cops wouldn’t let you sleep there, it was the time of the 80s riots and Zurich was one helluva depressive place to go. As it happens, his memories amalgamated with mine of when I was a pubertal little freak trying to find his way back to the train station after Motörhead, Iron Maiden or AC/DC gigs and usually ended up at the very same Shopville place, frightened of the junkies, the coppers, the punks and whatever was lurking around in the bellies of bank-city. the song “Bahnhof” (”Train station”) expresses this very accurately. THE MONO don’t seem to have beeen part of “the scene”. There’s little you’ll find about them iin fanzines and they didn’t get much recognition, as it would seem to me. That’s what makes them even dearer to behold. Enjoy!
This is a part of the inside of the foldout picture sleeve.
Läck Jimmy, läck Bobby! What a monster!! MANISCH DEPRESSIV hailed from Zurich and little seems to be known about them. I’ll first tell you the little I know: When I had the 2nd issue of my fanzine “Megawimp” printed in 1987, it was at Soilant’s, a self-taught printer and the man who used to run the label of the same name. He was one of those friendly but very distant old punkers from Zurich who must have looked down on us kids in some way, I believe. Couldn’t blame him for that. One day, when I was helping with the production of the fanzine at his shop, he grabbed a ladder and led me to a small platform he built underneath the roof, just above our heads. It was, to my surprise, filled with boxes over boxes full of - you guessed it, records! I remember very well how he pulled out handful after handful randomly and threw them around saying “see, I used to have a label and put out all that stuff nobody cared to buy!”. When I asked him to sell me the lot or at least parts of it, he refused, saying he wouldn’t want to sell those records either, he rather have them rot up there. Some of the records he threw around were Manisch Depressiv’s 7″ in the very rare cardoard sleeve (only a handful made of these), others included “Rough Mixes from Switzerland” etc. A short while later, I found me one of these MD 7″s, but unfortunately without the cardboard.
In the german “Pogographie”, a quite extensive discography book, I learned that there must have been some kind of insert too with song titles cause my copy had none.
The label was called Soilant in referrence to the movie “Soilent Green”, btw.
So this is what you get here: Deconstructing Punk! The great sound of this 7″ at first makes you forget that in fact it lacks drumming completely! Instead, the songs are all hacked and reassambled in a bizzare, crude and ultra-hectic manner. Great guitar work, great singing (the ex-TNT singer) and if there’s anything one might want to critically mention, it would be that this 7″ only has two sides full of this poststructuralistic glory! This definately needs to be re-released!
Some friendly bloke sent me this link and I thought I had to share it. Isn’t it wonderful to see the handful of people performing bad New Wave dancing and the rather static band whereas I, at least, would have imagined some wild, out of control live situation? Check out the man’s other videos - some nice stuff there and more Bobby Soxx! Now I only would love to see the microphone scene.
The ferocious years of “marxism” didn’t last long with the DILS. They fell in love and eventually moved to Canada, releasing one last 7″ - or better 1.5 of that. Nice, calm laid back, much in the vein of (Impatient) Youth. Not as good though. Still, there’s something about the three songs that makes me like them.
