63 EYES

Far removed from most of the fodder that worms its way onto Terminal Escape, this tape slowly wormed its way into my ears and I can't seem to shake it. Late '80s college rock from West Virginia, this falls somewhere in between MOVING TARGETS and VIOLENT FEMMES. If you want to get even further away from typical Escape posts, apparent 63 EYES frontman Todd Burge is still active and making music (he even worked with some dude that won a grammy), but I'm guessing that his current output won't be to most of your liking. This tape, however, is a perfect blend of not quite commercial guitar rock and Homestead/SST influenced post-punk/pre-alternative sounds - a poor quality and well worn cassette enhances the washed out 25 year old warble that somehow gives this music a legitimacy that it would not have if I managed to uncover a long forgotten self released CD. No artwork, no song titles, very little information...and I'll get to work tomorrow earning back the punk points I have just squandered.

63 EYES

After a pleasant email from Mr. Burge this afternoon, I request that you visit the up-to-date 63 EYES bandcamp here, or peep his current solo efforts here. The demo I unearthed was a poor reproduction of the first 63 EYES cassette release, which you can still get directly from the band. 

LIMBS BIN

A trying aural assault, LIMBS BIN blast through 24 tracks of purely digital hardcore in under a quarter hour. Chicago's BLOODY MINDED are the closest musical comparison, bursts of harsh electronic noise delivered in the style of (and with all of the fury of) primitive nihilistic powerviolence. A painful test to see how far you really want to push that Noise Not Music envelope. Courtesy of Tickled Meat, this tape compiles tracks recorded and released from 2008-2010, but you could probably figure that out from the cover, huh?

FAMILIAR COMBATANTS

BLISS THE POCKET OPERA

Listening in the future, these songs could have easily been from any number of second tier late '80s goth bands - vocals wailing like a banshee over morose indulgent music. There is an attempt to highlight the guitar in a couple of tracks, which helps them come off with more of an edge than they probably intended, but the star on 1988's Tribal Dance is "Paradise Island" with it's COCTEAU TWINS meets Jimmy Sommerville on quaaludes vocal delivery. Go ahead, we won't tell the punks.

TRIBAL DANCE

SICK FUCK

Super heavy, super pissed, super good. If the first two numbers don't beat you into submission, the title track will spend the next few minutes letting you contemplate your next assault - one that will commence five minutes and 13 seconds into "Storytellers" after some anxiety ridden buildups. Seriously personal hardcore that might have been born in the wrong decade, but it has fallen on the right ears. The band broke up in 2010, but if this is your legacy then you could do a lot worse.

STORYTELLERS

WE DON'T WANT YOUR FUCKING LAW! // WE DON'T WANT YOUR FUCKING WAR!

Terminal Escape turns 900 today. 900 cassettes lovingly converted into a soulless barrage of 00s and 01s just so you can enjoy the music on the tapes that fill the stairs, shelves, nooks and floors of my tiny flat and drive my wife batshit crazy. Seems appropriate to return to the UK punk that kicked my ass into starting this thing in the first place, and I happen to be sitting on a package mailed to me by a F.O.T.E. a while back containing two essential Mortarhate comps, 1983's We Don't Want Your Fucking War! and We Don't Want Your Fucking Law! released two years later. No introductions required, and yeah, I know the UPRIGHT CITIZENS song is missing...we can only work with the tools we are given, you know?

WE DON'T WANT YOUR FUCKING WAR!

STRESS

Last November when the CONQUEST FOR DEATH tour ended in Belém, Brasil, we had a few days to explore the city (the tourist books say it's a dump, punks in São Paulo told us not to bother, and of course our time there was fukkn great). On one of those days we cruised the open air markets that surrounded out hostel with a few local punks who hosted us, and came upon a record stall. Nothing interesting looking, but it was a nice day and the stall butted up to a park so it was a good place to hang out for a while...and then the dude pulled out the metal records. Fortunately Devon had already given up (he would be my only real competition in this department) so I got first crack, and pulled out a few sick looking Brasilian gems, including a double LP comp with a sinister title like Death Noise Assault Party or something like that. Well, the comp was full of really shitty pop punk (I can only imagine how sad the teenage death metal skulls on the cover must be having to spend their entire existence with third rate NOFX clones) and the metal records were all crap - I lose. But one of our hosts suggested I blast this STRESS album, claiming that not only were they the first Heavy Metal band from Brasil, but that they hailed from Belém, the town we were busy touristing the shit out of. The needle dropped, and I was sold. Pure, primal and primitive Heavy Metal with '70s prog undertones hiding beneath DEEP PURPLE meets MOTORHEAD riffs. The keyboards that kick in on "2031" are essential to the driving fury of the record, as much as the ALICE COOPER rip off "Oraculo Do Judas" makes me wish that my favorite right wing Arizonan spoke Portuguese. The price was a little steep, so I passed on this slab, but then the stall steward flipped this self titled debut and I reached into my pocket for what was likely the last of my cut of our meager earnings. I had no choice, STRESS is that good. Listen to "Stressencefalodrama" and tell me you would have done different. 

I came home and shared this gem with Aesop (I had to tape it and rip it - a little backwards, but it allows for inclusion on The Escape), who is kinda the reason I started sharing music here in the first place and who liked it as much as I thought he would, and he disseminated it on Cosmic Hearse a couple of weeks back, which seemed appropriate considering the make-up of our two blogs and their respective followers. Now, I share it with you. Apparently, this was the first speed metal record from Brasil, and somehow Pepsi appears to have been involved in it's release...not really sure how that worked out, but I'm glad that it did.

STRESS

MASAKARI

Hardcore/crust in the two thousand teens is a tough one...the subgenre has been distilled and watered down through generations of punks trying to recreate either the magic of SACRILEGE, the power of MISERY or the soul baring aggression of HIS HERO IS GONE, and the modern result is often an insipid limp dicked shadow of music that used to go straight for the throat and move people. There are exceptions. Ohio's MASAKARI is one of them. Clearly reared on Japanese HC and the third band in the the immensely influential trilogy mentioned in that earlier sentence, they dish out absolutely essential jams, trumped only by the power of their live performance. Allergic To Fun put The Prophet Feeds LP to cassette, and so I share it here.

THE PROPHET FEEDS