i'm old: mix cd edition

Hey kids.

Way, way back, before your iTuneses and your Spotifys, if old fogies like me wanted to listen to a mix of our favorite songs, we had to make them ourselves on cassette tapes, from scratch, barefoot, in the snow, uphill both ways. This was a time consuming process, and because of that, you made sure you were creating something you could be proud of. You dwelled about which songs to include, their placement, how many you could fit on a side, and how you would fill the leftover space at the end of a side. Would you make a cover? Or just write the songs on the insert provided by TDK, Maxwell, etc?

Then, in the mid 90's, CD burners became affordable to the masses. Game changer. No you could just drag and drop some songs, hit the burn button, and viola, a mix CD. Convenience killed the art of the mixtape, at least for me.

This mix CD I made in 1996 is a perfect example. I just put whatever songs I liked at that exact moment. And I can tell it was just after the P.E.A.C.E./War CD reissue came out, as there are  five or six tracks from that. The track listing is alphabetical by band, the default setting for Nero or Easy CD Creator, or whatever I was using at the time.

Keep in mind this is a rip of burned cd from 1996, so don't expect 320. In fact the last song starts to distort big time. I added some quick cover art today. I rarely actually made covers, and when I did it was usually some clip-art gagortion. Some of these choices are highly embarrassing in retrospect, but still, it's a good stroll down memory lane.

Now, get off my lawn.

01 - Afflicted - Here Come The Cops.mp3
02 - BGK - Arms Race.mp3
03 - Blue Bird - Wrecking Ball.mp3
04 - Bracket - 2RAK005.mp3
05 - Christ On A Crutch - Off Target.mp3
06 - Condemned To Death - Gartland's Pit.mp3
07 - Contrazione - Sbarre.mp3
08 - Cringer - El Salvador.mp3
09 - DBS - Sorsha.mp3
10 - Deviators - Falling Away.mp3
11 - DRI - Snap.mp3
12 - Fiendz - No One In The World.mp3
13- Fracture - Babbling.mp3
14 - Good Riddance - United Cigar.mp3
15 - J Church - On Dying Alone.mp3
16 - Kangrena - Ataque.mp3
17 - Kill Holiday - Meant To Let You Down.mp3
18 - MDC - Missile Destroyed Civilization.mp3
19 - Moral Crux - Religious Discipline.mp3
20 - Mr T Experience - Swallow Everything.mp3
21 - New Bomb Turks - Long Gone Sister.mp3
22 - Nine Pound Hammer - Feeling Kinda Froggy.mp3
23 - Propagandhi - Homophobes Are Just Mad Cuz They Can't get Laid.mp3
24 - Shoegazer - 1.21 Jigawatts of Power.mp3
25 - Sofa Glue - I Want.mp3
26 - Speak 714 - Virus.mp3
27 - Spoke - Antihistamine.mp3
28 - Ten Foot Pole - Joy To The World [Three Dog Night].mp3
29 - Tree - Negative Hippy.mp3
30 - Two Line Filler - Mind.mp3
31 - Victim's Family - New World Hors D'Oeuvre.mp3
32 - Wingnut Supreme - Status Quo.mp3
33 - Zero Boys - Civilization's Dying.mp3

Words will never hurt me.

the best 90's album you've never heard of

Shoegazer - Intoxicated Birthday Lies, 1998, Todo O Nada Records

You thought I was going to say Hickey, huh? Nope. Enough people know and love Hickey to pull them out of the obscure category, though they'll never be mistaken for, oh, I don't know, Voodoo Glow Skulls. This album? I'd be shocked if anyone reading this has heard it.

This band is called Shoegazer. They were an L.A. band who put out a pretty good album called Two Brown Bears Boxing in the mid-90's. There was a song on that called "Belong" that I dug a whole lot and put them on my radar. Saw them play with the Nobodys at a skate park in Fresno. I was a fan. But I never expected something like their next album, "Intoxicated Birthday Lies". Completely blew me away.

If you've seen this album at all, it was likely in the dollar bin of your local record store. Which is a damn shame, because this album is totally rad.

What do Shoegazer play? Well, not shoegaze if you're wondering. They play a bit of everything. One second it's pop-punk ("Elemenopee", the next it's a hardcore, Positive State-ish ditty ("Power Converter") , mix in some math-y breakdowns ("Betty Crocker"), sometimes all in the same song, and you're getting close. In other words, it's punk, but not easily classifiable into a sub-genre. If you must know, "Moted" is my favorite song on here, though I love each and every song on the album.

I never heard anything about them afterwords. I've tried off and on to figure out whatever happened to them, but putting "shoegazer" in the google doesn't help much. And this is one case where the tried and true method of adding "band" doesn't work either. So if by chance someone could fill in the details, I'm all ears.

If you download this, chances are you're going to be underwhelmed. The title of this post sets the bar pretty high. But got dam I love this record.

Weird fact: One of the other "best albums that no one has ever heard," F96 by Wingnut Supreme, was released on the same label.

Run, Marty, Run.