A Post-Punk Post.

It's no secret that I'm quite fond of 70s/80s post-punk in general, so I feel that it is my duty to draw your attention to a swell little album that was just relased & that you should make it your business to check out (and no, I'm not talking about the new Moving Units album, asshole).



The Fire Engines were a Scottish post-punk band in the 1980s who exisited for a staggering eighteen months before calling it quits. We can also blame them for inspiring & unleashing Franz Ferdinand into the world, but that's a different story. The complete collected works of the Fire Engines are now available on one convenient digital package (the anthology Hungry Beat) thanks to Acute Records, who have been consistently reissuing a number of essential & excellent long out-of-print no-wave/post-punk records on CD (I'd particularly suggest checking out their reissue of Glenn Branca & Wharton Tiers amazing 70s no-wave project, Theoretical Girls). Why should you care? For starters, the material on Hungry Beat has never been released on CD in the United States & you'd still be hard pressed to easily find it on any other format elsewhere. But the real reason that this is even worth mentioning is because this band was in-fucking-credible. A mathematical formula would look something like this: The abrasive skronk of James Chance & the Contortions + (the frenetic minimalism of Television x the dark pop sensibilities of the Velvet Underground) + the jagged punk off Richard Hell & the Voidoids = the Fire Engines, roughly. Or you could think of them as the Scottish condensation of every band mentioned in Legs McNeil's 70s punk chronicle Please Kill Me. Either way, they're good enough to overlook the fact that if it weren't for these guys & fellow Scottish 80s post-punk band Josef K, we wouldn't have had to hear Franz Ferdinand's damn "Take Me Out" song a million times over a few years ago. Highly recommended!

Reissue Mania.

It seems like every album of any remote significance is getting the reissue treatment lately, some more deservedly than others (the second Foo Fighters album? Alright, whatever). Yeah, there's the new tricked-out versions of Sonic Youth's Daydream Nation or a good chunk of the early Sebadoh discography, but there's also been some other reissues popping up that that aren't Western Mass-centric & are also not nearly as overhyped.



Mint Records has just re-released two albums by the wonderful early/mid-90s Canadian all-girl twee pop band Cub, Betti-Cola (a collection of early singles alongside a batch of new songs) & the proper 1995 album Come Out Come Out. If you're at all interested in the old school K Records/Kill Rock Stars cuddlecore scene (Beat Happening, Tiger Trap, Go Sailor, The Softies, All Girl Summer Fun Band, et al), this is pretty much essential listening. Pure jangly, melodic pop-punk goodness. Bonus points for the awesome Archie Comics-style cover art on Betti-Cola.



The Young Marble Giants' excellent 1980 album Colossal Youth has just be reissued as well, this time by Domino Records, bursting with extra tracks & even a Peel Sessions disc. Cold, detached, almost Nico-esque female vocals backed by minimal post-punk styled guitar, bass, organ & drum machine (vaguely like a less dramatic Joy Division, but not really) leads to a recipe for greatness. You could even trace the art-damaged pop minimalism of this record to the kind of stuff K Records (see above) would be putting out a few years later, but regardless, these folks were one of the weirdest & most original bands to get slapped with the unfortunate "post-punk" tag.


Be a good consumer & pick up these jams instead of further pumping up Lou Barlow's ego.