Review:

on 2011-05-13 CharlesMartel Said:

The circumstances surrounding my purchase of this album would provide enough plot twists to comprise a short story in themselves. In simple terms, I was looking for the rare "Submarine" by nineties Irish outfit, Whipping Boy. Amazon directed to this, and a look at the track listing on the page indicated it was the same album, re-released over a decade after the original. I am still in dispute with Amazon over this, for this is not what it seemed. The Whipping Boy on this album is in fact an early eighties north Californian hardcore-punk outfit. I did not get what I had paid for.

Now hardcore punk is something which never really appealed to me. For a start, by the time it began to emerge as a musical force, I was already drifting away from the manic excesses of punk, British seventies style, and into post-punk. Second, it always seemed to me very much an American genre and I was not really able to relate on a personal level to the issues which bands raised, even though some of them would have found ready counterparts in the socio-political make up of the UK around the same time. Above all, I was never really one to find appeal in two guitars thrashing across a frenetic drum beat accompanied by near-incomprehensible vocals, all delivered at a hundred miles an hour in packages of, on average, between one and two minutes each. Nonetheless, for whatever reason, I have ended up with a copy in my possession, so it warrants a review as a consequence.

The album is a compilation, comprising thirty-nine tracks, two of which at least are short vocalised insults or rants - one about Miller beer and the other about what an arsehole the band's vocalist is. That last rant comes immediately after a song where the vocalist sang a different song to the one the rest of the band were playing. There is also a combination of studio tracks culled from albums, demos and live performances. The less said about the latter the better. At times they are positively painful. The awful mangling of Jim Croce's "Time in a Bottle" is akin to a twelve year old kid who has just managed to learn a few chords playing his new electric guitar to his family three days after he got it, without realising he is completely unable to sing. The demos are of greater interest, not the least because of the raw sound. Yet these too are fraught with problems - on one the vocalist announces it is going to be played without a bass because the bassist has just stormed out.

The rest of the songs are fairly typical of the genre - short songs belted out as fast as humanly possible. They are riddled with power chords seemingly borrowed direct from the repertoire of Black Sabbath in attempted mimicry of the Dead Kennedys. Whether this appeals to you is a matter of individual taste. It offers nothing to me and only serves to confirm what I had previously thought about much hardcore. I had never heard of this band before the ill-directed purpose and really dont care to seek out and discover any more. Much ado about nothing, and I still want Amazon to send the album I had ordered instead of the one they had sent me.

EDIT: in the end I got what I wanted, but it was a long haul.
Rating: 3/10