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For a good swath of the '90s Hagfish were the gift that kept on giving.  Four monkey-suited Dallas denizens dropped three, rock 'em sock 'em albums all bearing a modus operandi that registered somewhere between the Dickies and Descendents (with plenty more caffeine than the latter) and a buzzbomb guitar frenzy that would have run circles around Johnny Ramone.  The band's unremittingly vigorous cavalcade of power chords and melody made an utterly visceral impression on me, and their titillating, in-your-face themes of sexuality ensured their was nary a dull moment to be had. In between the full lengths came a pair of independently released 7" eps, which I'm making available right at this very spot.  The first (to your slightly above right) pre-dated their major label stint on London Records, and contained early takes of soon-to-be signature tunes "Minit Made" and "Stamp (Eat it While I Work).  I believe all four songs overlapped with debut LP Bui...

Remember when I took to task Sorry's '86 platter The Way it Is and blabbed something about their earlier "rough and tumble" hardcore years?  Well, you're about to hear what Sorry's nascent era was all about it, by way of Imaginary Friend .  In the form of eighteen cuts to be exact, many of which clock in at under ninety seconds, but if you're expecting fearsome, symmetrical slammers all cut from the same cloth think again.  Boston born and bred, this quartet weren't really along the lines of their hometown's more renown SS Decontrol or Gang Green.  Even back in '84, Sorry were picking up on the vibes of relative newcomers Mission of Burma, Volcano Suns, and early Husker Du - albeit not as effective, and definitely not as consistent.  They had a penchant for sloppiness and spouted an array of dissonant affectations that were a hell of lot more chaotic than calculated.  Most of IF's more notable moments reside on side one, entailing "...

From 1990.  Believe it or not these guys once had integrity...and songs to die for.  **Please do not reveal artist in comments!** Hear

The little spoken of Adrian's Childhood were from said to hail from Seattle, but amazingly don't emanate a shred o' grunge.  More like turn of the decade alt-rock with nods to the likes of the Connells, Ocean Blue, and for better or worse Live (the band).  There's some tastefully executed jangle sprouting now and again, really benefiting some of AC's most potent offerings like "Ellensberg" and the deliciously sprite and spry "POP."   I'm not in possession of a physical copy of this one, but whomever converted it to digital, I thank them for going to the effort, and furthermore for attaching four extra cuts that were independent of the Sometimes LP itself.  Given their rawer (and sometimes untitled) nature I have to assume these are demos, which just so happen to rival the album's finest moments. 01. Ellensberg 02. Tang a Tang 03. Joe's Ice Cream 04. POP 05. Til the Morning Comes 06. Chunk 07. Rena 08. AD 09. Lucy 10. Peppermills 11....

This Rochester, NY quartet spent the second half of their lifespan as Jet Black Berries , but they wasted nary a second of their arguably more rewarding nascent years as New Math .  I dedicated an entry to JBB's Sundown on Venus a good five years ago, wherein I went into their background in slightly more detail.  Under the New Math incarnation, frontman Kevin Patrick and his cohorts were responsible for a couple of memorable punk singles, but they achieved full on righteousness on the subsequent They Walk Among You ep (1981, courtesy of 415 Records) and in three years time on Gardens .  Wake the Dead is a gently tweaked consolidation of those recordings.  The arguably cheesy sleeve art to your right is a bit of a disservice to the caliber of the tunes housed within.  Yes, there was a discernible b-movie undercurrent to New Math, but luckily for anyone within earshot the emphasis was squarely on the songs, not so much the shtick.   Their sonic aplom...

Likely my favorite album from 2002.  Hope it becomes yours as well. Hear

Here's one of the more straight-up rock and roll records I've offered in awhile.  The Leonards were a riff-pop powerhouse from L.A. who issued a spate of typically overlooked gems in the late '80s right up through the mid-90s.  You might detect shades of the Plimsouls and perhaps less so Dramarama, but I took these guys to be a bit more minimal than that.  Furthermore, if you're an aficionado of the Junk Monkeys and early Figgs the Leonards are about to roll right into your wheelhouse.  Enjoy. 01. She Said Goodbye 02. Questioning Days 03. Only the Skies are Blue 04. Out of My Mind 05. Don't Give Up 06. Consider It 07. Two Pillows https://www79.zippyshare.com/v/SZLbxTZw/file.html

I opined on Manifesto a few years ago, or more specifically one of it's members, Michael Hampton who had been in a number of Washington D.C. era punk and hardcore bands, including SOA with Henry Rollins, and one-album emo wonders Embrace alongside Ian MacKaye.  By the end of the '80s he parlayed his guitar slinging abilities in an outfit (this one) that might as well have been a full 180 from the straight-edge circuit.  Manifesto sounded quite ordinary by comparison, almost generic in fact.  Generic in the "modern rock" strata anyway.  Mid tempo with a mild commercial bent yet wielding something of a thinking-man undercurrent.  Problem is, they sounded too damn ordinary for their own good, and by the time they unleashed an album in 1992, the twin headed hydra of grunge and Britpop rendered Manifesto's shtick all but invisible. There are at least a few keepers here, especially the downright catchy "It's a Long Time," which in a different set of han...

And where will you be in 1993?    - "Never Really Been" The above lyric swiped from an acoustic ballad on Soul Asylum's Made to be Broken LP, incorporated "1993" as a simple rhyming device, yet it proved to be ironically prophetic as that happened to be the year Dave Pirner, Karl Mueller , and Dan Murphy (the band's core triumvirate) broke bad and nationwide with "Runaway Train."  Situated in this era were two of their contemporaries that hurtled on a parallel trajectory as well, Urge Overkill and the Meat Puppets.  All three boasted fairly prestigious indie rock pedigrees, and relatively rich back catalogs...that their newfound mainstream converts were sadly content to ignore.  Indeed, there was life before Grave Dancers Union, and a spirited and often uneven one at that, but Soul Asylum's finer mid '80s volleys sometimes bordered on astonishing.  Omnivore has reissued their first two Twin/Tone Records platters, Say What You Will...Eve...

A short but sublimely sweet one from '92. **Please do not reveal artist in comments!** Hear

Though not as appealing as their more effective later albums (like 2000's Somehow You Just Don't Get It ) I thought it wouldn't hurt to throw this one out there for historical perspective, especially since it's utterly impossible to find.  This indie rock to-the-core foursome seemed to be skewing in the vicinity of some of their contemporaries including, but certainly not limited to, J Church, Small 23 and even the almighty Archers of Loaf.  There's occasional glints of promise on "Call in Blue" and "Slowing Down," but Static... illustrated Sometimes Seven had miles to venture before really honing their craft. 01. Blurry 02. Slowing Down 03. Brighter Clean 04. Drama Mean 05. Zero Royal 06. Sister Destiny 07. Watching an Air Raid 08. Call in Blue 09. Blacktop 10. Real Change 11. Breaking Strings 12. Ex-Hall of Famer https://www58.zippyshare.com/v/pjQkxwZN/file.html

My apologies for the woeful amount of new content this week.  In the meantime here are some of the refreshed links you requested (and then some). Sloan - Alternates ep & Live at a Sloan Paty ( MP3 / FLAC ) Metz/Mission of Burma - split single White Flag - Thru the Trash Darkly Simple Machines 'Tool' tape series - Slack , Hated , Late! , Mommyheads , Geek , Saturnine , My New Boyfriend Other Bright Colors - Endlessly Rocks the Cradle Get Smart! - Action Reaction   Say-so - tape V/A - Alex Soria (Nils) tribute concert V/A - Listen and Learn With Vibro-phonic V/A - Goldenrod Super Mixer V/A - Shreds Vol. 1, 1993 V/A - Brouhaha 7" Kashmir - 7" Four Color Manual - Guardian for a Year fenn - spanish mandingo - ifive , badtouchbecca ep , How's My Driving 7"   Wishes and Water - s/t ep Drill Kitty -  7" ep Facts About Israel - 7" Glass Eye - Marlo & Huge Enemies - Products of the Street ep Enemies in the Grass - single a...

I haven't shown any love for Fig Dish on here since about 2010, so apologies if I'm overdue.  What I'm sharing was relatively available a few years ago, but the original website hosting it appears to be defunct.  For those in the dark regarding who I'm even referring to, Fig Dish were an often excellent aggro pop-rock outfit from Chicago who recorded two albums for A&M in the mid '90s - That's What Love Songs Often Do (1995) and When Shove Goes Back to Push (1997).  Both disks were foisted onto a rather indifferent public, and commercially they went thud .  In fact, I don't think I ever happened across a CD of Love Songs that didn't have a promo stamp on the cover.  Pity all those uninformed kids who clung to their copies of Mellon Collie... and precious little else.  I saved the notes from the site that hosted Onanism, and they're below.  This is essentially an oversized batch of demos for material slated for Fig Dish's follow-up to S...

My first exposure to The Posies ?  On an unsuspicious morning in late 1990 I was backing my Plymouth (not so) Reliant "K" car out of my driveway to attend a full day of high school.  I was tuned into the predominant local hard/classic rock station.  DJ announced he was playing a song by a new band dubbed The Posies.  Upon hearing the name I conjured up an approximate image of this band being the stylistic heirs to the Mamas and Papas or something.  That assumption quickly dissipated upon hearing the tune, quite possibly "Golden Blunders."  In short, said DJ successfully led this horse to water, but I wasn't quite ready to imbibe another sip until roughly three years later, upon release of the band's third record, Frosting on the Beater .  'Higher learning' would in fact have to wait a spell. Essentially, I backtracked upon becoming enamored with Frosting in 1993, with the previous album, Dear 23 being something of a posthumous discovery for me. ...

Classic punk (or would that be post-punk?) album from 1980 with three bonus cuts. **Please do not reveal artist in comments!** Hear

Welcome to the soundtrack to my early college years (he emits a *sigh* in the most reluctant manner possible), for better or worse.  My reticence towards this one is less exaggerated than I'm letting on.  But before delving any further, as the title might imply, this one is a consolidation of three shorter form Self Mutilation compilations, specifically 7" eps, issued by the Aussie Hippy Knight label between 1991-93.  If it's "power pop" or anything on a remotely genteel tip you're seeking, best advised you move along. The Mutilation series was bejeweled with a cabal of the era's most effective and grating noisenik punksters and grunge-amok hopefuls, with virtually none of it's participants breaching into the mainstream.  But as an international scene snapshot, this disc exposes the gritty, subterranean muck that even labels like Amphetamine Reptile weren't wiling to approach, or at the very least make a monetary investment in.  The likes of A...

I'm not exactly sure how the all male (in fact) the Grady Sisters made it onto my auditory field (quite recently in fact - a compilation perhaps?) but better late than never.  A little disonance and just a smidge of dynamics seemed to go a long way for this Petaluma, CA-area collective.  Occasionally Pavement-like, albeit not as cryptic.  Sorta rattling about in the same tin can as the Poster Children too, but a little deficient in the warm and fuzzy department.   Things peak on "s.w. log" which rips it's resplendent array of jumpy chords straight from the Wedding Present circa 1990 - right before diving into a jarring crush of blaring fuzz and static.  A beaut. 01. boss 02. self-government 03. deville 04. s.w. log https://www45.zippyshare.com/v/ZhuuqtMy/file.html

Got a decent Canadian export for ya'll here.  Spectacular in spots, even but will get to that in a moment.  Having a mouthpiece ( John Shirreff ) who often sounded like Peter Murphy must have gotten Breeding Ground bullied with darkwave/goth accusations aplenty.  Things weren't quite that convenient however, as BG's sonic tapestry was more attuned to the likes of The Fixx, Cactus World News, and even country-mates Frozen Ghost.  And like many of the aforementioned these guys had a propensity for depth and echoing guitars, without ever getting too heady or pious (perhaps with the exception of Tales' anomalous "Happy Now I Know," which centers on Shirreff's apparent Christian leanings).  And regarding those rather spectacular songs I mention in my opening - "Turn to Dust," the title piece, and the unlisted "Reunion," all typify what was so rewarding in the often nebulous realm of 'modern rock' in the '80s.  Enjoy. 01. This T...