Gray Kiser's Flyer Collection - Part Two

August 2, 1996: Man is the Bastard, The VSS, Men's Recovery Project, The Thrones, Jenny Piccolo at the Huntington Beach Library.

Back in the late 90's/early 00's, Gray Kiser (Line Drive, Regicide, Hands of an Angry God, Black Venus, Sonn Av Krusher) lived out in San Diego and went to a bunch of great shows, mostly at the Che Cafe which was kind of like the UCSD equivalent to Under the Couch. This is the second part of his flyer collection, focusing on shows that were going on out on the left coast while we were doing our thing over here. The last installment of his flyer collection will focus on some classic North Carolina shows, so stay tuned.


June 27, 1996: Rye Coalition, Thumbnail, The Republic of Freedom Fighters, The Button Men at the Huntington Beach Library. This was a great place to see a show. The hal al Shedad played there with Long Hind Legs and the Thrones once.


June 27, 1996: Sparkmarker, Kill Holiday, Action League, Will Haven at the Impala Cafe, Los Angeles.


June 28, 1996: Eleven Thirty-Four, Spawn, Kill Holiday, The Suppression Swing, Stick Figure Carousel at the Showcase Theatre in Corona.

June 29, 1996: Eleven Thirty-Four, Blackspot, Spawn, Collateral Damage, Triceratops at the Huntington Beach Library.

August 9-11, 1996: Final Conflict, The Red Aunts, FYP, Hickey, All You Can Eat, etc. at the Showcase Theatre in Redondo Beach.

September 6, 1996: Gauze, Spazz, Assfort, Dead and Gone, El Dopa at 924 Gilman in Berkeley.

February 14, 1997: Refused, The Locust, Frodus, The Truth Movement, The Dusters at the Che Cafe. That is a classic lineup.

November 28, 1998: Unbroken, Outspoken, The Crimson Curse, The Setup, Palpatine at the Masterdome in San Bernadino.

December 3, 1999: Cattle Decapitation, Volume 11, A Possible Link to Klaus, Colostomy Bag, The Adding Machine at the Che Cafe.

December 6, 1999: Severed Head of State, Run For Your Fucking Life, Ex-Fork, and some band I can't read at the Che Cafe.

January 16, 2000: Cave In, Secret Fun Club, Durga at the Che Cafe.

January 21, 2000: The Locust, The Straight A's, Casiotone for the Painfully Alone, The Free Stars at the Che Cafe. I never saw this documentary about US Latino/Chicano hardcore, but then again, I can't name any US Latino/Chicano hardcore bands other than Los Crudos.

Upcoming shows in January 2000 at the Che Cafe. These overviews from way back when are always cool to check out.

February 10, 2000: Bongzilla, Cattle Decapitation, God Stomper, Molehill, Slow Death (plus one more fucking band) at the Che Cafe.

February 14, 2000: The Locust, Murder City Devils, Anasazi, Catheders (Catheters?) at the Che Cafe. A lot of these shows were on Mondays and Tuesdays, quite different from the weekend life we lead today.

February 23, 2000: Two Dollar Guitar, The Get Hustle, The Straight A's at the Che Cafe.

February 29, 2000: Dillinger Escape Plan, Upsilon Acrux, Drowningman, Time In Malta at the Che Cafe. Never heard of Upsilon Acrux, but I like the name.

March 12, 2000: Special Goodness, The And/Ors, Six Foot Sloth, Moon and Sixpence at the Che Cafe. Remember when bills were this long? And when shows started at 8PM?

March 17, 2000: Built to Last, Palpatine, Run For Your Fucking Life, American Tragedy, Frontline at the Empire Club.

March 26, 2000: Botch, Harkonnen, Palpatine, Durga at the Che Cafe. I guess we were a little bit obsessed about science fiction back then.

April 10, 2000: Good Clean Fun, Taken, Built to Last, No Reply at the Che Cafe. Finally GCF makes an appearance! Another Monday night show, but I'm sure it was good.

May 2000 at the Che Cafe, including The Black Heart Procession, Pinback, Black Dice, !!!, and many others.

June 30, 2000: Bluetip, Bluebird, Dura Mater at the Mira Mesa Epicenter.

August 1, 2000: Dillinger Escape Plan, Isis, Candira, Durga at the Che Cafe.

September 24, 2000: Eyehategod, 16, Suplex at the Che Cafe.

October 8, 2000: Botch, Volume 11, Time in Malta, Under a Dying Sun, Good Day Gone Bad at the Che Cafe.

December 10, 2000: Good Clean Fun, Run For Your Fucking Life, Over My Dead Body, Fields Of Fire at the Che Cafe.

January 22, 2001: Tragedy, Bumdklaat, Sasha, Detrimental Greed at the Che Cafe.

BOB - The Complete Live at WREK Session

Here is the download - BOB Live at WREK

This is the complete recording of the Live at WREK session BOB did on November 23rd, 1993. Several of these songs appeared later on the Complex Organism Blues album. This session was recorded off The Underground Recordings show, which airs on Tuesday nights at 7:00 PM on WREK 91.1 FM and re-broadcasts some of the great Live at WREK sessions from years past. If you look at their archive, you can see what they have re-broadcast since 2003, and it is quite a list. However, you have to be diligent as they only keep the content available for one week, and I have missed several sessions because I wasn't checking the archive often enough.

Phantom 309 - A Sinister Alphabet and Split LP

Here is the download: Phantom 309

1-4: from the Split LP with The Sun Also Rises
5-13: from the “A Sinister Alphabet” LP

I have been looking for some Phantom 309 records ever since I started doing this blog, as writing about these bands every week really makes you get into the history and interconnectedness of a scene that existed when you were listening to Def Jam records and skating at the local Futurestore. So naturally I got all geeked up when this full length LP and split LP appeared at Full Moon Records the other day, and I snatched them up before the clerk could get them for himself. Record store employees get everything good that comes through there anyhow, sometimes I wonder if I should get a part time job at one of these places just so I could put myself in a better pecking order when people come in to sell their collections.

Phantom 309 consists of a pre-Dirt, pre-Mount Shasta John Forbes playing guitar and singing, and a post-86, pre-Jesus Lizard Mac McNeilly playing bass, which is interesting because Mac was the drummer for those other bands. The drummer was Gary Held, whose history is not known to me at the moment, but maybe some of our wiser readers can help me out. Phantom 309 puts forth noise rock of the Dirt variety, but a bit more bluesy and maybe not as demented/damaged as the later stuff, but still excellent. I believe these are their only releases, although I saw there was a release called “Duh” around 1992, but I’m not sure if I’ll ever find that one. Maybe Scott Wishart can help me get it, although I’ll probably have to drive to Charlotte to pick it up. I am not sure of the band’s complete history, but after this band was finished, John started Dirt, probably one of the five best bands to ever come from this town, and Mac McNeilly moved to Chicago and joined The Jesus Lizard, probably one of the best five bands of its kind ever.


So Trouser Press indicated in a review of the Sinister Alphabet album that Mac McNeilly was the nephew of Edward Gorey, and this is presumably how they were able to use his artwork for the album cover. Gary Held commented recently that this was not true, and that they paid Gorey $400 to use the artwork, which was sent in its original form to them in the mail, to be returned when they were finished. Still a great story, but why did Trouser Press start the rumour?

Here is the back cover of "A Sinister Alphabet" as well as the Split LP cover.

A Compatibility Of Dissonance Compilation

Here is the album for download: A Compatibility Of Dissonance

Here are the tracks:

1. Bughummer - Process No. 2

2. Bughummer - Hank Champion

3. Galanas:Cerdd - Some Are Foaming At The Mouth

4. Galanas: Cerdd - OK To Forget

5. BOB - Ants

6. BOB - China Mo Nichi Sa

7. Barrel - My Sundays Are Filled With Confusion

8. Barrel - Carbon/Lake Missoula

9. Soli Deo Gloria - Degobah System

10. Hell Mach 4 - Beg

11. Estrada - Tumor Song

12. Estrada - That's How They Get You ... Sucker

13. Spackle - Blues Baby

14. Spackle - Dominoes

This is a great mid-nineties Atlanta/Athens compilation put out by Shawn Moseley under the label Lakeside Records. It is a quality release, representing some of the best bands in Atlanta around in the 1996 period. As I have said before on the Fuel and Refuel comps, it's great to have a compilation with several songs from each band included, so you get more of a picture of the band and more overall value for the comp.

So let's get started with the bands. Bughummer were technically from Savannah, but they were just as accomplished as anyone out there and really should have been more a part of the Atlanta scene. It is a 3.5 hour drive, so I guess Atlanta should have closer ties to Birmingham if you look at it that way. Keeley the bassplayer later went into Engine Down, a monumental band of the late 90's, early 00's. Galanas:Cerdd (pronounced Kaerth - it's Welsh) was composed of the non-singing members of Freemasonry (i.e. Kip, Marcus and Bruce) playing non-singing songs, and later adding Rick Moore from Barrel to make it a true supergroup. The songs on this release are pre-Rick, and the song "OK To Forget" was actually played under Freemasonry and appears on one of their Live at WREK sessions. More on Galanas:Cerdd later. BOB has appeared on this blog before, and will be more in the future, so keep checking in. These are some great songs of theirs from their prime era. Also from their prime era are these songs by Barrel. It's really a shame when a band gets better and better with each release, and then breaks up. If they were on such a great upward slope, what would their next songs have been like? Soli Deo Gloria according to Scott Wilson was Tenth Muted Capper under a different name, who were heavily in the house show scene in the mid-nineties. Travis Cartowski the guitarist recently played in Mistaken for Them, and now is starting a new band. Classic Stockbridge postpunk from these Soli Deo Gloria/Tenth Muted Capper/etc. Hell Mach Four was a really underrated band during this chapter of Atlanta music. Transplants from Richmond, VA, they worked their asses off in the trenches for years and made some great albums. Estrada features Christian who played guitar later in The Black Mollies and now in Whores. He has made noise rock better than anyone out there for years in Atlanta, and their addition to the compilation includes their hit single "Tumor Song", a classic for that place and time. Finally, Spackle was originally from Blacksburg, Virginia, but then relocated down to Athens to be part of the great scene that was happening there in 1996. I'm not sure how they ended up on this compilation, maybe they were friends with Shawn. It's quite a shock to the system to hear these songs after all the postpunk noise from the previous bands.

Here is the information on each band, along with some liner notes by Shawn.

Band Genome - August 2009

Here it is, finally, in all its glory. This image above is just a picture of the genome, it is actually an interactive tool which you can access here:

Beyond Failure Band Genome

Thanks a bunch to Mark Walters from Quadiliacha for setting this up. I programmed in 285 bands that are currently included, but there is much more work to be done, so please send me comments on new linkages and mistakes in the file, and I will be continuously updating the document. Also, we are working on different forms of displaying the data, so I will send out updates when they become available.

Enjoy, and I apologize in advance for the headache this will induce.

Car vs. Driver - Live at the Somber Reptile

Here are the downloads:

Car vs. Driver - Fall 1993 at Somber Reptile

Car vs. Driver - 1993-11-07 at Somber Reptile

Car vs. Driver - 1993-12-12 at Somber Reptile

Car vs. Driver - 1994-09-24 at Somber Reptile

Car vs. Driver - 1994-12-30 at Somber Reptile

These are all soundboard recordings transferred from cassette by Steve Wishart (Such As, Car vs. Driver, Scout, Fields Lay Fallow, To The Mean). Some of these are pretty rough, in both sound quality and performance, but we didn't have the greatest in recording technologies at our disposal, or musical ability for that matter. People seem to like our Live at WREK shows as the best representation of the live Car vs. Driver sound, but I'm posting everything for completeness' sake. For your information, I'm not sure what the lineup of the Fall 1993 show was, but the 11/7/93 show was with Freemasonry and Bite, the 12/12/93 show was with Spiney Norman and Drive Pipe, the 9/24/94 show was with Act of Faith and Levelhead, and the 12/30/94 show was with Scout, Inkwell and Lowboy.

By the way, Steve is moving to Guatemala in a few weeks with the AFLCIO, and plans on being there for several years, so I would like to wish him all the best on his new life in Central America.