What Is This Record I Don't Even XIX: Indestructible Noise Command - Razorback

Yeah, the cover sucks. Still, it's not as bad as the sub-Erol-Otus original cover of Attacker's Battle At Helm's Deep, or the legendarily half-assed painting that delayed Iced Earth's second record while Century Media found something less vomitous. This is the downside of the big canvas; bigger expectations, and the lower technology level meant that you couldn't really kludge something together in Photoshop. Musically, this is average mid-'80s thrash of the kind that shows up on underground labels with bad cover paintings and eventually gets a $1 sticker slapped on it; not revolutionary or particularly influential, but fun to listen to all the same.

What Is This Record I Don't Even XVIII: From Ashes Rise - Nightmares

I must've got this one fairly recently, likely at Armageddon Shop, because it still had the plastic sleeve around it, and I tend to toss those as I have limited interest in keeping stuff pristine. These aren't investments, this is music to listen to. This music is fairly straight-up hardcore, out of my normal line a little but still good enough to justify keeping it around.

What Is This Record I Don't Even XVII: Angkor Wat - When Obscenity Becomes the Norm...Awake!

I played a lot of vinyl in college from New Renaissance, but never encountered anything from Death Records. This slab of formative thrash/death is the other half of my '80s-underground bona fides -- and as far as the music goes, it's pretty damn cool.

What Is This Record I Don't Even XVI: Dead End - Ghost of Romance

This is why I did this project: to find out that random records I own for no reason are sung almost completely in Japanese. With no band credits on the sleeve and no lyric sheet, the hope was obviously that metalheads 25 years ago would buy random records and put it on the stereo after they got drunk, jam out to the mix of Megadeth, Metal Church, and Loudness and not realize that utae wa senbun nihongo, dakara imi ga sensen wakaranakutte. Discovering cool stuff by accident -- isn't that why we buy discount records in the first place?

What Is This Record I Don't Even XV: W.A.S.P. - Animal (Fuck Like A Beast)

The picture and the controversy is iconic, which makes owning this 12" single worthwhile. Doing the single as a 12" rather than a 7" is still a huge waste of vinyl, and the song, in 2011, is nothing to write home about. At least it's better than the B-side.

What Is This Record I Don't Even XIV: Ramming Speed - Full Speed Ahead

Four punk thrashblasts on a colored-vinyl 7" 33. What's not to like? For some in the Boston scene, that would be the part of the lyrics sheet shown. Stuff like "I love pizza more than my mom" was taking the piss out of pizza thrash at a time when people weren't sure that pizza thrash itself wasn't itself an ironic pisstake. Later events have vindicated the band more than their detractors -- and anyway, if you haven't thrown a pizza around in a moshpit in someone's basement listening to a band like this, what the hell did you do with your years of immaturity exactly?

What Is This Record I Don't Even XIII: Laibach - Sympathy For The Devil

As the packaging should indicate, this record has pretty much fuck all to do with the Rolling Stones song that's supposed to be covered six times on it, and a lot to do with Laibach (and technically-independent Laibach permutations Dreihundert Tausende Verschiedene Krawalle and Germania, in descending order of contribution) taking some lyrics and a few samples and running with it. The result is really cool, and it will take a very hardcore Stones fan to argue that it's not also immensely better than listening to the same song six times straight down.

What Is This Record I Don't Even XII: Coctopus - Twelve Inches Of...

This record only has one side; the flip side, as shown, has some cool diecut artwork instead of music. The music does the presentation justice, too, as the band demonstrated back when I picked this one up, which is always good.

What Is This Record I Don't Even XI: Aus-Rotten - Fuck Nazi Sympathy

Straight-ahead, dirty, shot-from-the-hip antifa punk single. Good yes, groundbreaking no, still cool yes.

What Is This Record I Don't Even X: Doctors' Mob - Headache Machine

As close as I can remember, I got this disc around the time that I was spending periodic amounts of time in Austin, and an Austin band with a clever name was worth picking up for cheap. The music is decent mid-80s alternative, from before Seattle and the mainstream destroyed the idea of alternative. Probably not worth anything, and not as historic as the last one (from my perspective at least), but cool enough to keep around.

What Is This Record I Don't Even IX: Metal-Rock v.1

This is the sort of record that gives this series a point. A comp that looks barely out of bootleg status, issued in France in the early '80s, this is an original example of how the NWOBHM spread to other territories. If I could remember where I got it from, I'd point others to more copies there. And the music is pretty good as well, but if you put this much Saxon and Demon on, that's kind of expected.

What Is This Record I Don't Even VIII: Covenance - Ravaging the Pristine

I got this single off the band for super cheapfree a while back, and it delivers. Crunchy brutal death with hardcore elements, and the vinyl's thick enough to almost stop bullets. I haven't tried dropping it off anything, because I, like, want to listen to it going forward, but you don't get the feeling that you do with some of the mainstream stuff that it's going to snap in your hands taking it off the spindle.

What Is This Record I Don't Even VII: Judas Priest - Point of Entry

Content-wise, this is a Judas Priest album, which means that there's a side's worth of classic songs and a side's worth of phoned-in filler, unevenly distributed. Design-wise, though, this is wicked awesome. Not overdone, and probably pretty cheap to set up and photograph, but that sleeve is fucking art, man. The willingness to do stuff like this, more than the actual artwork, is what people are bitching about when they bemoan the end of the large canvas afforded by the LP sleeve.

What Is This Record I Don't Even VI: Melt Banana - 666

In Which I Continue To Own No Melt Banana In Standard Gauges. This is a 6" 45 of three fast, shrieky, grooving noise-punk songs; good to listen to, maybe not so good to sit down while it's on the record player.

What Is This Record I Don't Even V: Wishbone Ash - Live Dates

This is still a good band, there's still good music on here, and "The Pilgrim" is still awesome live, but there's more of a sense of 'generic '70s band' here -- probably abetted by the double-live format, where you play three songs a side and ramble on and on and on and on. It's cool in places, but you reach the saturation point for that coolness pretty quick.

What Is This Record I Don't Even IV: Wishbone Ash - Pilgrimage

Wow. If I'd known that this record was so classic, I wouldn't've fucked around without a turntable working for so long. The Harris-roots are a little more prominent than seven years later, but the point is really that this album is straight killer. Proto-metal in some parts, thickly prog in others, this immediately reverses the impression I had from No Smoke of these guys as Just Another 70s Band. There are parts of "The Pilgrim" that sound like nothing so much as old Atheist with the distortion turned off -- definitely one to keep for me, and one for the rest of yous to hunt up.

What Is This Record I Don't Even III: Hellhunter / Unholy Goatfucker split

Picked up off the Nachzehrer table a couple weeks back, this got into the stack because it's UGF's only label recording -- and it's going to stay that way, due to the mix of unfortunate and tragic circumstances surrounding the lineup that will probably prevent any iteration of the band from coming back together. The A side, from Cali's Hellhunter, is pretty standard dirty black metal, good if not groundbreaking. The Goatfucker side is the standout: underground black metal fused with expansive atmospheres out of '70s Spanish horror movies, and the real kicker is that this is not studio trickery. The band had the personnel to do all the sounds on this track live, and did so when they played out. There's a lot of good black metal in New England, but nothing precisely like this any more.

What Is This Record I Don't Even II: Melt Banana / Fantomas 5" split

When you actually buy a turntable in the modern era, you have a choice to make about what kind of weirdo you actually are. You can either become an audiophile and spend thousands of dollars kitting out The Most Badass Stereo Setup In The World and waste money buying $200 rubber mats with triangular cutouts on them to "stabilize" your CDs, or you can become a vinyl geek and buy 5" cybergrind singles because it's Melt Banana in a non-standard gauge so obviously. That being said, this is a decent but tremendously short split; the Melt Banana side almost hits two minutes, but the Fantomas track comes in short of 45 seconds. MB is more noisy and has more of a groove, the Fantomas side has more of a grind structure to the percussion and a trumpet doing a horse laugh. Pretty much what you'd expect coming in. Oh, and it's a 33, because good luck getting even two minutes of music onto a 5" at 45 rpm.

What Is This Record I Don't Even

I recently fixed up my A/V setup and got my turntable hooked up again after 18 months off. Then I went through my record collection for stuff to listen to on it, and found a bunch of records that I didn't even remember buying, much less what they sound like. Hence, this project; listen to records and figure out what the hell I have.




Wishbone Ash - No Smoke Without Fire

I think I got this one because a) it was cheap and b) I'd heard that Wishbone Ash was a formative influence on Steve Harris. This probably explains all three or so Wishbone Ash records that are going to be covered. I'm not sure that I ever really listened to this one, though. The music is pretty standard-form '70s prog-ish rock; the bass pops nicely, but the disc doesn't really stand out in any way that grabs me as opposed to a lot of other bands from that time. I think I may have heard "You see red" on the radio at one point, but I listened to a LOT of WBLM in college (4 hours x 4 nights x 30 weeks x 4 years, do the math) working in the cafeteria, so that's not only a lot of exposure to a lot of '70s rock, but the suspicion that there's a lot of '70s rock that sounds like this for me to get easily confused about.