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viewing 1 To 5 of 5 items
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CD
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MSS 107CD
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"'Messthetics returns to London - mostly to a handful of Tube-stops along the Central and Northern Lines. #107 also includes a special 7-band, 6-page feature on the legendary Dining Out label. Rough-edged new wave wonders, scrappy D.I.Y.-punk, ear-boggling home experiments - and the usual quota of accidental pop from fifth-form teens, art-school grads and committed hippies. Some recorded in actual studios, others on stand-alone cassette-decks placed just so on the squat- or church-hall floor. With ex-members of Spitfire Boys, Tax Exiles and Flying Lizards; others went on to Weekend, Alien Sex Fiend, A Certain Ratio, 400 Blows, Alabama 3, Celestial, Afro Celt Sound System, Fraff, Late Night Poker, and ..and the Native Hipsters. Plus 5 bands that got their start at Raynes Park High School for Boys, Morden. Messthetics #107 features obscure vinyl sides from Disco Zombies, Demon Preacher, Jelly Babies, Six Minute War, Stepping Talk, Occult Chemistry, The Patterns, 49 Americans, Avocados, Methodishca Tune, Jangletties, Stolen Power, Flags, The Steppes, The Insex, The Milkmen, Design for Living, Twilight Zoners, and Club Tango. Unreleased material from Disco Zombies, Buddy Hernia & the Rickets, Twilight Zoners, Milkmen, and the White Brothers. 23 songs on the CD plus 7 bonus MP3 tracks: 90+ minutes of music. 24-page booklet, extensively documented with histories, photos and artifacts."
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CD
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MSS 218CD
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"From 1979 to 1984 other bands on the Manchester scene played larger roles, but sooner or later almost everyone who was there mentions Gods Gift -- in tones of awe or amazement. Here's where the rest of the world finds out what all the racket was about. The early Manchester scene was anchored by The Fall, Joy Division, a few straightahead punks, and the more idiosyncratic denizens of the Manchester Musicians Collective. And Gods Gift out-did them all -- in diffidence, darkness, pure feral energy and gleeful musical anarchy. Their successes were epic, but their failures, too, left indelible impressions. Guitarist Steve Murphy: 'If things were going wrong, we'd make them go more wrong...' Singer Steven Edwards once shouted out to a baffled London crowd, 'Wotcha dancing for? -- it's tuneless, you pillock!' This was no pose. As much as can be said of any band in rock history, Gods Gift were the product of their day jobs: Murphy, Edwards, and at least five others who played in GG all worked 'inside' at Prestwich Asylum -- then the largest psychiatric hospital in the U.K. The hospital's grayness, hopelessness, and constant menace permeated not just GG's tunes and lyrics, but their very stage-presence -- Edwards in work-clothes, and Murphy playing (always!) with his back turned to some of the U.K.'s least cuddly audiences. GG recorded a fight onstage and used it in place of lyrics for their self-released first 45, 'People.' Gods Gift found a champion in New Hormones' owner, Richard Boon, who booked the band and put out the 12" Gods Gift EP and their landmark 'Discipline' single, but unfortunately, as New Hormones' finances crumbled, Boon's favorite track, 'Clamour Club,' remained unreleased. Messthetics' 17-song CD, Pathology, spans GG's career from 1979 to 1984, drawing material from their records, a Manchester Musicians Collective compilation, several demos and two full-length cassette albums. 12-page booklet with photos and extensive bio; 75 minutes of pounding, insistent, magnificent noise."
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MSS 213CD
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"D.I.Y. with a guitar-genius/nonsense poet only begins to explain Dry Rib and the projects that followed, but they were one of a tiny handful of D.I.Y./post-punk-era groups who'd probably have sounded the same whether punk had happened or not. And things only got cooler, odder, and more idiosyncratic as Rob Vasey's audio insurgency progressed. Ed Ball of O Level (and later the Times and Teenage Film Stars) saw Dry Rib first in late 1978 and promptly signed them to his new Clockwork label. He writes, 'Dry Rib were a late '70s three piece group of some indefinable power -- not Powerful in the obvious sense, as in everyone slugging out the same riff... More the power of musical and lyrical imagination ... 'Rob Vasey's guitar style of blurred chord stylings coupled with continuous tremolo arm preempted My Bloody Valentine (or anyone else) by the best part of a decade. [He] wasn't like Eric Clapton or Paul Weller in way/shape/form ... Which could only be a good thing because, he superseded these fellows for sheer guitar innovation and songscapes that neither could even conceive of. Rob was ably supported by two equally intelligent musicians -- Andrew Goodwin (one of the best two drummers I've ever played with -- and that includes the so-called shit-hot session guys) and Mike Mullholland (who could make a Fender Precision sound like Entwistle, Matlock or a distressed horsefly!)' Dry Rib's EP received heavy airplay from John Peel, who featured all three tracks: 'Quail Seed,' 'Cruelty of the Victim' and their epic 'Alaska' (the latter and a demo of 'Quail Seed' appear on Messthetics #102) and briskly sold through a thousand-odd copies at the beginning of D.I.Y.'s golden age. They made several further trips to the studio, with no loss of intensity or inventiveness. Rob's career next took a more fluid and improvisational turn in a series of collaborations with various members of the Times' extended family, mostly under the flag of 'as, hem syrup' (the name taken from a nonsense prose piece of Rob's) and the lyrics grew even more fanciful. As with Dry Rib, there's no mistaking any of the material for anyone else's. There's much more of Ed Ball's account in his liner notes (including diary entries from the time) along with every surviving Dry Rib photo, lyrics, the usual daunting ephemera, and 20 songs and 75 minutes of music on the CD."
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MSS 208CD
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"Classic, noisy D.I.Y. from Leicestershire 1980-1983. Loughborough's Midnight Circus thrilled a handful of fanatics who bought the scarce Angst In My Pants compilation EP, but they put most of their energy into the cassette-only wing of the D.I.Y. movement. Where they churned out vinyl-worthy D.I.Y. punk tunes by the score, and unlike most bands that did make it to vinyl -- who necessarily spent much of their money on pressing and printing -- the 'Circus were free to blow it all on recording. Here's 21 of their favorite tracks from 1980-1983. 10-page insert with their complete history (they went to the same school as the Pretty Things and named themselves after one of their songs), song-by-song commentary, photos, artwork... and a tipped-in-color-plate of the Midnight Circus 'Character'... whose handsome mug adorned most of their original cassettes as well." "Primitive shit-rock to the Nth... classic obscuro English D.I.Y.... the best thing I've heard yet from the '80s cassette culture." --Agony Shorthand.
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3CD
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MSS 204CD
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"The Homosexuals created a musical world of their own. Holed up in no-rent studios and squats, they mined every genre from psych-folk and Afrobeat to punk and dub, added killer hooks, then exuberantly tore it all apart. They wrote and recorded for five years, but they never took out an advert, sent out a promotional record, or got paid for a gig. The legend has grown, and today the Homosexuals are arguably the most acclaimed-and-least-heard band of the postpunk era. After more than a year of research and restoration, a hundred hours of conversations with band-members, and endless surprises, the story of The Homosexuals can now be told. Astral Glamour gathers 81 songs and three-plus hours of legendary 1977-1983 artpunk -- every Homosexuals song from their records and the C-60, plus a dozen other tracks never released anywhere before. Astral Glamour also features a full-colour 32-page booklet with scores of unpublished photographs, posters, lyrics, song-by-song comments and an extensive history of their early years."
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