After Done With Mirrors dug its way straight into the cheapy bins, Run-DMC revived the career of these "Toxic Twins" by doing a cover of "Walk This Way" with special guest appearances by Steve and Joe. Then the whole band went through drug rehab, got clean, and went back into the studio to prove themselves worthy. And did they? Hah?
Strangely, yes!!! Permanent Vacation was not a return to the gritty street rock of old, but an extremely marketable embracing of late-eighties ... read more

Poor Jimmy Crespo was fired and back comed the old guitar boys for a reunion. A sort of overloud, bland reunion. The first song, a re-recording of Joe Perry's solo track "Let The Music Do The Talking," is fast, volumous and full of rocking mumunia, but after that the album slowly unravels into simplistic chord sequences and three-note hooks played over and over and over and over and over again as big huge inseperable blocks of sound. The guitars sound like walls, not like the ... read more

With not one, not three, but BOTH guitarists having quit the band between the last album and this one (Joe actually quit before Night in the Ruts was completed!), this album should have been a disaster made of shit. However, it somehow kicks all sorts of holy ass! Well, some of it does anyway. Jimmy Crespo's guitars sound as rude, raw, blistery and full of dirt as those of Night In The Ruts, and the first few tracks just tear your ASS apart! The high-speed guitar/voice "Black ... read more

I originally gave this album a 7 and I've never really understood why. Yes, the mix is tinny and the songs seem a little messy and underdeveloped in places, but it has some KILLER songs on it and really only two pieces of shit ("Remember" and "Reefer Head Woman"). I've always really liked it. So why a 7? Difficult to say. Maybe inflation was bad that week. Don't ask me to up the grade of Get Your Wings though. I've never loved that one!

Back to hitmaking. Or at least ... read more

Excess starts to overcome them (as evidenced by the completely self-indulgent Live Bootleg album they released around this time), but boy what a fun record! I'd call this Aerosmith's Exile On Main Street (as blasphemous as that may sound) because it's clearly less an album of individual possible hits than a flowing groove mood record. It's a fuzzy, funky, hypnotic record that may seem boring and generic until you've let loose and allowed it to become a part of your central nervous system. But ... read more

Basically Toys In The Attic with cooler vocals. If you wanted to, in fact, you could correspond every one of these songs with a matching song from the last album ("Back In The Saddle" is "Sweet Emotion," "Rats In The Cellar" is "Toys In The Attic," "Sick As A Dog" is "No More No More," etc.). However, both fortunately and surprisingly, the songs aren't retreads; they're just more great melodies that happen to fit the moods presented on ... read more

This is the ellpee that made 'em superstars. Why? Oh, like you don't know...."BIG TEN INCH RECORD," OF COURSE!!!!! WHAT HOUSEWIFE WASN'T SINGIN' IT??? WHAT NIGHT GUARD WASN'T HUMMIN' IT???? WHAT.....eh....
No, no. Let's forget about "Big Ten Inch Record" for a moment and return to the much duller reality that the funky metal classics "Walk This Way" and "Sweet Emotion" came to define mid-'70s FM rock and roll. Zeppelin was gettin' old, and this stuff ... read more

Good-bye, slum rock. Hello, evil! Look at that scary black album cover with those scowling young long-hairs all in black, with sharp fingernails and leather trousers - scary! The guitar tones are much more normal, too - still distorted, but not as filthy and raw.
And the songs? Well, aside from "Pandora's Box," by far the worst song they wrote before 1981, they're all either pretty good (the droney but dumb "Lord Of The Thighs," the catchy but forgettable "Woman Of The ... read more

Young long-haired potheads from Boston record album. Fantastic gritty street sound of filthy dirt-encrusted distorted guitars wins heart of Prindle. Side one - mean rocker "Make It," happy fuzz rocker "Somebody," classic anthem "Dream On" and blistering urban epic "One Way Street" - out-Stones Stones. Side two, though made up of songs in similar vein, including radio standard "Mama Kin" and great cover of old blues song "Walkin' The ... read more

Here's something hilarious you can do the next time you're out purchasing a handkerchief. When the salesperson comes by to show you the store collection, excitedly proclaim, "I'm flabbergasteried by your haberdashery!"

The best thing about being an old bag is that shit just doesn't matter anymore. What do the Adolescents have to prove? In 1986, they had to prove that they could make a worthy successor to the classic Adolescents LP (they couldn't). In 1989, they had to prove that they ... read more

When hardcore punk supposedly hit a glass ceiling in 1986 (try telling that to the Dwarves, Bad Religion, The Vandals or any of the other great speedy bands that reached creative peaks post-'86), many practitioners of this fine art attempted to remain commercially viable by converting their music into one of the following sub-genres: (A) accessible jangly college rock (ex. 7 Seconds, Youth Brigade/The Brigade), (B) high-speed 'crossover' thrash (ex. DRI, Suicidal Tendencies), (C) midtempo ... read more

Rikk is Bakk!!

But now Frankk is gone! And Casey!? What happened to Casey!? My childhood dog was named Casey. He was a good boy. And he lived til the ripe old age of 17, long after I'd grown up and left home. Remember that time his blindness prevented him from sensing a low-hanging branch, so he stabbed himself in the eye and spent the entire night crying in pain, fear and isolation (being also deaf by that point) before being euthanized the next day? My father does! Often!

Frank has been ... read more

Sometimes in life you run across an album that just nails it, from beginning to end. Even though I inexplicably failed to hear Adolescents during my Descendents/D.I./T.S.O.L./Bad Religion High School Punk Years, my first encounter with the album (in my mid-20s) instantly reminded me why I fell in love (AS A FRIEND) with punk rock in the first place. This group of children from Orange County, California may have lacked the discipline to maintain a stable line-up for more than 10 minutes, but for ... read more

As you should know if you keep up with the interview section here on MarkPrindle.communistparty, three quarters of The Accused headed out to the highway in mid-2006, leaving guitarist Tom Niemeyer high, dry and filled with lye. According to Blaine, Niemeyer couldn't be trusted; according to Niemeyer, the mass exodus came as a complete surprise to him. The former three quarters founded a new band called Toe Tag, and Tom -- if only to prove that he could -- hired new musicians to replace ... read more

Have you ever flipped a bird in life? This morning I saw a woman flip a bat and it was no jovial sight. He (I assume it was a he because he had a huge fuckin cock the size of my arm) was lying on the ground of the Central Park bridle path, half-dead, rabid or sick, just flappin' those awesome Batwings and waiting for a BatSignal, and this lady found a big branch and flipped him over with it -- actually come to think of it, it was probably the branch I was looking at and not a cock so it might ... read more

The comeback. Out of nowhere, The Accuseds burst back forth with an album that is neither thrashy nor misguidedly diverse -- instead, it's the closest the band would ever come to the genre of 'death metal.' It's one of those albums you have to listen to about six or seven times before you know how any of the songs go. But they're tight, rigid, tough, sharp and VERY mean - whether fast, slow or midtempo. Great metallic riffs that don't sound like songs you've already heard (as much as I loved ... read more

Hey, who's baked? Tapes Johnson, of course. Peace, my brother. This album is demo versions of 9 More Funs, 2 Grinnings and 1 Splatter Rock, plus four additional covers pulled from Hymns, a single, and a multiple-artist compilation. All material was recorded by Tom Neimeyer and Blaine Cook between the years of 1981 and 1986, with the assistance of two different bassists and three varied drummers. One of the drummers is nicknamed "O-Ring," which is a lot more homosexual-sounding than he ... read more

The letdown. I thought so when it came out and still do so I do think to do will. If I'm not correct, NastyMix is a rap label. Which may explain why The Accused try to incorporate some godawful funk metal and rap delivery into what should have been a straightforward thrash album (similar to their second album). But then darn it, the songs that AREN'T funky and shitty are prone to be a little slower than usual with close to nothing interesting going on. Yes, there are still some wonderfully ... read more

More SPLATTERcore! This one is a lot more out of control than the last one, due to heavy cymbal use and a different style of songwriting. Rather than the straight metal/punk riffs they used on the last one, this one relies mostly on fast as hell hardcore tunes with head-jerking drum/guitar breaks at the end of each line. Like you'll be boom-chick-boom-chicking along with great abandon when all of a sudden the line will end and "ja-bam!ja-bam!ja-bam!" - everything comes to a ... read more

The reverb is gone, but the cool riffs haren't. This is more metal-sounding than the last one, mainly due to the very tight and rigid metallic guitar tone, but the riffs will still make you snap your neck with dlite. They no longer sound like crazed corpses on a rampage, but they're still a top thrash contender, kicking the patoot out of both slow-down-speed-up mosh bores like Overkill and high-opera-singing buffoons that you make fun of behind their backs like that guy that ruined Anthrax. ... read more