14 August 2020

PLEADING FOR PEACE


Guessing the sole release from Bloody Monkers Tapes came out in 1982? Seven UK rippers and a poem about killers, all delivered with dubious fidelity. Pleading For Peace is clearly the product of a fan - the cover is colored in by hand and I'm sure they were dubbed one at a time, hopefully in a teenager's bedroom. LAST RITES and BROKEN BONES each offer four snappy UK82 bangers, live versions of SUBHUMANS' "Pisshead" and "Apathy" from a raucous set previously available on an earlier Bluurg release. The mercurial (and prolific) anarcho solo project STATEMENT makes an appearance, and the tape rounds out with MUTED EXISTENCE, THE DISTURBED and AWOL (speaking of low fidelity - yeesh!). The AWOL tracks are perhaps the most interesting - one of the members ran Bloody Monkers Tapes and three of their songs are unlistenable to all but the most curious, top notch mid-paced UK punk buried in 40p cheap cassette bliss, but then the studio cut "Someone In Control" throws off the blanket of hiss to expose a should-be-classic-but-totally-unknown banger that inspired me to go back and check "Died In Action" and yearn for a clean versions of all of their material (also inspired me to drop a postcard in the mail to the label address because...well, I like a nice fruitless adventure). An hour of sound curated nearly 40 years ago, hopefully by an eager teenager who used their creation to network with other enthusiastic and disenfranchised kids. Quality definitely suffers generally (and particularly with the aforementioned replication fidelity for AWOL and some tape speed issues during a couple of LAST RITES tunes), but it settles in pretty nicely and takes you back to a completely different time - a new dawn in a small company town in southern England. 


2 comments:

SLAUGHTER OF INNOCENTS said...

try replacing the the felt i have had issues with old tapes that tends to fix it great to hear more from muted existence had this tape years ago never thought i would hear it again.

the wizard said...

Thanks for the tip.