When it comes to screaming, lo-fi vocals or just plain unintelligible singing, the situation only gets worse with arguments flung around by those who like to hear the lyrics not necessarily loud, but clear:

“Screaming is for those with no talent who can’t sing.”

“They only use lo-fi to hide their inadequacies.”

“I’d probably like it if I could tell what they were saying.”

If you can’t hear the words of what’s being sung, does that stop you from enjoying the music? I can’t understand Italian, yet I listen to a lot of Italian music. It’s the intent behind the delivery that makes it for me and I’d say the same about pretty much everything I listen to by choice, whether it’s in English, Italian or morse code. I just have to know that there’s some form of expression there whether it’s screamed anger, whispered anguish or gleeful gang vocals.

What if your ears are met with a sad and sombre track about troubles and strife sung by a guy grinning away like an idiot with a jovial spring in his voice? Is that a betrayal of the song’s meaning? I need some conviction in the what I hear. Half-laughing your way through a restrained song about the civil rights movement isn’t appropriate or true to the music regardless of how good the singer is.

Vocals are one of those feisty battle lines played out within genres, friends, families and other groups when we discuss music and what we like about it. There is a definite divide between those who like to hear the words first and foremost, and those who place the emotion behind them as a greater focus.

Ironically, one of my main problems with the current crop of post-hardcore, pop-punk and emo bands is the amount of apparent sincerity in their vocals. It is so contrived to the point that they’re no longer adding weight to their words, and are instead trying to outdo each other in how much they can whine and make girls want to mother them. It’s awful. Go back and listen to Embrace, Rites of Spring, Circles Takes the Square and so on and see what a bit of feeling in your delivery sounds like. It’s not about competing to make the most pre-teenagers’ heavily caked-on eyeliner run.

But this, as many meandering quests for vague answers does, opens up more questions. Where does your image start and end? Does it destroy any emotional authenticity your band’s music is trying to express when it’s tied up to your image branding?

The lyrics themselves are massively important to me and I’ll read through the lyrics sheets regardless of whether I can decipher what’s going on in the music or not. Bad lyrics make me cringe and cringing is not what you want when you sit down to enjoy an album; that awkward contorted feeling in the pit of your stomach that feels like your taste and opinions want to vomit up the bad experience it’s suffering.

In a similar way, good lyrics and passionate, heartfelt or generally emotional vocals really do pang me and make the hairs on my neck stand on end like NASA is ready to send them to infinity and beyond. Watching Stevie Wonder play at Michael Jackson’s memorial service choked me up, Animal Collective have given me butterflies that tickle my lungs, a good number of bands have taken my breath away and I’ve been left gobsmacked, defeated and hollowed out by the scale and feeling of everything from La Quiete to My Bloody Valentine.

Ultimately, as with anything to do with music, this is all subjective and not everyone is going to like the idea of someone screaming so hard they give themselves an aneurysm or worse, whilst I don’t like vocals that sound like they’ve been copied and pasted as a genre standard with all their gleaming clarity and uniform accessibility. Give me chaos with an original face any day!
http://machinegunfunk.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/circletakessquare500311.jpg
http://machinegunfunk.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/screaminghardcore120311.jpg

Like some benevolent pop overlord, Animal Collective dominated 2009 with a synth-drenched fist of genius, so it’s unsurprising that their sound has begun to seep into the diets and DNA of those who you might consider downwind of them in the musical food chain.

Merriweather Post Pavilion is Librarians’ biggest problem with their latest release, Present Passed. The considerable influence and sway that hangs over every moment clouds whatever the band are trying to create here and you’re just left thinking you’re listening to a collection of Animal Collective demos and cuts with the occasional brief foray into a mundane indie-rock vein.

The vocal and synth sounds feel like a running sprint to catch up to the flatbed psychedelic pop bandwagon of 2009 as it speeds by and, just when you think the band may have stumbled upon pastures new, they revert to their Merriweather aping in an attempt to forge a build-up, chorus or climax.

It’s as if you’re on the hijacked plane ride of someone else’s sound, with the impostor pilots choosing to fly straight back to where you started from. A mid-air mutiny should be dramatic, intense and perhaps a little exciting; not formulaic, derivative and predictable.

Whilst searching for some holy slipstream catapult to success, Librarians have forgotten to pack any of their own twists, turns or new ideas into their travel bags. Maybe they dropped them to the wayside to try and catch that speeding bandwagon? Either way, after landing, you’ll see them down at the arrivals baggage carousel, where everyone comes to claim their luggage, and they’ll be traveling light with their empty, hollow suitcases.

You may think the cases look pretty with their nice designs and fashionable colors, but you’ll be left sorely disappointed when you end up at your destination airport and find the contents bare.

There are a few good points: the arrangements of the songs that allow the Animal Collective sound model to be executed so successfully are nice and balanced, the aforementioned cloned synth and vocal parts are well realised and the album as a whole is pleasant enough if devoid of originality and ideas. Stand out tracks are “Hard to Unwind”, “Island Jam” and “Kid Stuff”, although all three suffer from the same faults as the rest of the album.

If you do pick this one up, don’t expect anything other than the hollowed out shell of another band. This album is, after all, an empty suitcase.

Rating:
http://machinegunfunk.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/librarians5003101.jpg
http://machinegunfunk.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/librarians120310.jpg

The debut album by Close Your Eyes has been tagged under the sound-alike banners of Rise Against, New Found Glory and A Day to Remember, and you can hear why from the offset.

Although touted as the big hardcore release of 2010 so far, stay away if you’re expecting something gritty, edgy and, well… hard. This is “hardcore” in the current trend of beat-down, stuffed, riff-infused, heavied-up pop-punk; polished to perfection and sprinkled with chart-friendly melodies and anthemic sing-a-longs.

The production is tight, bringing out the best in each track, from the crisp guitars and thumping kick to the wailing vocals and a regimentally solid sense of rhythm throughout. The guitars burst with quality, crunching and screaming through your speakers as needed, with just the right amount of overdrive tenacity and studio sheen whilst the bass and drums rifle off machine-gun beats that hold it all together whilst driving everything onwards like a rapid-fire catapult.

Unfortunately for Close Your Eyes, the singing can sometimes sound more Fall Out Boy than Comeback Kid—another band they’ve been likened to—and the band does lack originality in both the singing and screaming departments. The vocal efforts belong to that of the shelf-generic, American post-hardcore sound that New Found Glory and their disciples have wrapped up as their own. This isn’t anything new by a long shot, and it’s starting to sound very stale and old when a new act tries to muscle in on this already overcrowded party of retraced footsteps and long over-travelled ground. This is especially the case when bands such as Rise Against, Set Your Goals and The Lawrence Arms just get out there and show what can be done with even the most trace amounts of flair and individuality. You’re never going to be sitting around forming a list of who Tim McIlrath’s yelling sounds identical to as it screams into your cranium, in the same way that you’re not going to be confused as to why there are no pages to turn on the computer screen in front of you.

The screaming is used well and sparingly to add a bit of impact and punch when the song calls for it, but even here there’s a copy-and-pasted feel from the other acts in their genre and you struggle to hear much in the way of personality here. The anthemic sing-alongs are infectious, however, and although they’re hard to get wrong in the first place, here they’re used to great effect and always seem to pick you up and sweep you along with ease.

Musically the album fits the aforementioned “pop-punk with beat-downs” hardcore blueprint perfectly but, as opposed to the vocals and their problems, there’s still enough in the way of fresh ingredients to keep you interested. Thrown in with the old tried and tested hardcore clichés, the band have managed to make something that warms you up, sucks you in and makes you want to bounce around the room like you’ve just guzzled a crate of Monster Energy. (Which is surely the point of all this?)

Highlights include opening track “A Proclamation”, setting the bar high from the start, “The Body” and its harder yet melodic four-minute brawl and “Wake Up!” with its catchy, gallop through vocal harmonies and foot down choruses.

Behind both the presentation and the problems you’ll find the beating heart and energy of a band you can throw yourself into a huge crowd of people for, and this, their debut album, is probably best used as a primer before hitting one of their shows.

Yes, as an album, We Will Overcome has its problems and only just about manages to dodge and weave through the many clichés it plays up to, but for addicts of the feel-good poppy hardcore genre then this is definitely worth a shot. I can’t promise you a whole lot in the way of originality, but what’s here works and works well. It’s not quite as bad as second-hand adrenaline, but it’ll get you pumped up even if you’re left counting all the bands already out there that sound identical who do it slightly better and fresher. This is still, however, a very well-produced and accomplished collection of fired-up pop-punk/hardcore anthems.

Rating:
http://machinegunfunk.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/closeyoureyes500310.jpg
http://machinegunfunk.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/close-your-eyes120310.jpg

So, apparently, KiNDERGARTEN are the “new” sound of New York, made up of equal parts Talking Heads, Television, Elvis Costello, David Bowie and Lou Reed, with a touch of Prince.

Besides Bowie and Prince, I’m not so sure. The idea that this is the “new” sound of New York when there are bands such as Yeasayer and Vampire Weekend around is just nonsense.

If I were to write this band an ingredient list it would go as follows: Tay Zonday and his “Chocolate Rain”, Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of The War of the Worlds, the standard distorted chug of a guitar swaggering through a pop song, the vocal yaps and yelps of Ziggy Stardust and the glammed-up, fabulously operatic tendencies of Queen.

The album slides around from the obvious-for-a-good-reason single material of “The Man on the Stairs”, with its B-movie synths and made-for-beat-matched-music-video verses to the Kool & The Gang-meets-Men, Women & Children funk-up of “E’s Ok, Ah’s Ok Too”. You can almost hear an echo of “Celebration” in one of the later tracks, “Computer Callin’”, whilst third track “Mountains & Hotels” has a strange, uncanny ability to summon the lingering last moments of the piano finale ending the full fat version of “Layla”. This only endears the album to me more. These are no rip-offs, just little-knowing triggers to a pop-heritage muscle reflex buried deep within the brain somewhere that flutter on by with your musical memories in tow.

A guilty pleasure personified, this is an album full of well-crafted pop with a sickly sweet mass-marketing-friendly head on its shoulders. We’re definitely in highly polished commercial waters here, yet there are still enough ideas and twists, however tongue-in-cheek, to snag your attention, whether you like it or not.

At their best, KiNDERGARTEN take all the usual pop clichés: the R&B harpsichords, androgynous man-boy vocals and presently fashionable retro flavors of the ’80s, and mangle them up into their own odd concoction that’s as potent as it can be a bit weird.

This isn’t anything to run home screaming about but it could soon be infecting the airwaves near you like some radio-hungry variant of the swine flu. If you don’t like the idea of teeth-rotting synth-pop burrowing deep into your skull and refusing to leave until you buy the CD, you should grab a couple of those flu masks and cup your ears with them until someone gives the all-clear.

Rating:
http://machinegunfunk.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/KiNDERGARTEN120310.jpg
http://machinegunfunk.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/KiNDERGARTEN500310.jpg

I should be raving about how awesome it is to be living in the year 2007. But instead I’m lamenting one of the other purchases I made on Wednesday—Joanna Newsom’s Have One on Me.

I don’t know why I picked it up.

Actually I do. I picked it up because of the ton of hype surrounding it. I’d seen her name in Paste and Entertainment Weekly. Plus The Music Slut totally cosigned her. And I’m always curious when “artists” have ambitions that can’t be contained in a single disc.

But man, Have One on Me is not for me. Let me see if I can pinpoint what exactly rubs me the wrong way… Um, everything? She’s got a voice that can be described as “interesting” but not really engaging. I find her arrangements and lyrics to be overdone. I just find the whole thing to be sort of pretentious, which is odd because I’m usually a fan of pretentiousness. But here it just feels wrong.

That disastrous trial got me thinking about other leaps that I’ve taken with similar results.

UNKLE – War Stories
I loved Psyence Fiction. In fact, if I had been writing in 1998 it probably would have been my number one album that year. So, when I heard that they were releasing something else, I figured I’d try it out.

But a DJ Shadow-less UNKLE is a scary and sad thing. It’s sad because it takes a crap on the legacy of an album that I hold dear to my heart, and it’s scary because it shows just how naïve I really am.

Jim Jones – Harlem: Diary of Summer
I love Cam’ron. And in 2005 I was halfway through my Las Vegas experiment. Apparently I was really missing the East Coast, because how else could you explain my purchasing of this album? I never hopped on the Dipset bandwagon and I never really cared for Jim Jones (he always felt like a louder, less talented, less entertaining Dame Dash.)

Yet I have this album. And it haunts me to this very day.

Skillz – Confessions of a Ghostwriter
Again, apparently 2005 was a dark period in my life because it’s also when I picked up this album. In my defense, Skillz puts out an awesome song every year (his yearly wrap-up) which is more than most emcees can say.

But it doesn’t sound that far-fetched; he’s a talented emcee he should be able to put a decent album out. The only thing that keeps this album from being disappointing is that no one had high expectations for it.

Lloyd Banks – The Hunger for More
In 2004, everyone seemed to be head-over-heels for G-Unit and 50 Cent—everyone except me. And since I’d heard that Lloyd was a spitter, I figured I’d try out his album, despite my finding 50’s debut to be underwhelming.

I’ve never felt dirtier in my life, and I’ve stolen candy from babies and had sex in a church. Possessing this album is like my scarlet letter. It’s the cross that I bear to remind me of when I was too weak to stand up for my own convictions.

And now Joanna Newsom joins the list of skeletons in my musical closet.

It’s times like this that I wished that I drank, so at least I could blame it on being drunk.
http://machinegunfunk.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/Joannanewsom12037.jpg
http://machinegunfunk.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/gunit50037.jpg

I say, “fusion,” and your mind probably says, “No.”

That image of the middle-aged men in the awfully loud shirts, trying to cram as much in the way of cheesy latin pastiches and bad bebop into their sweating attempts to make a guitar weep in case it might make them look young or sexy. They do it because they can’t afford a sports car or the maintenance on a gold-digging early twenty-something. Imagine a similar looking man listening to that 27-disk super set of such music, spinning away at his air guitar because the sports car and money-related lady is out of reach and who can’t play anything past “Kum Ba Yah” on a six string. Fusion has a bad rep.

Fortunately, the world has The Laughing Man and their thirteen-track debut full of prefix- and suffix-bending fusion, but without the desperation or pretenses. Or the shirts.

After an almost trip-hop intro you’re snatched away by a riff that would make Incubus jealous, with “Smile While I Show You the Door”. This sets the tone for what is to come, with a Faith No More feel flowing through the chorus that continues to shadow the harder parts of the band’s sound throughout the album. The second track is weirdly nostalgic thanks to a bassline that falls somewhere between Booker T. & the M.G.s’ “Time Is Tight” and Ben E. King’s classic “Stand by Me”.

It’s here we meet the first of a few major problems with this release: the vocals veering off on some ill-advised and out-of-key tangent that was obviously thrown out there for a bit of risky harmonic fun, but it fails completely. And the album continues to over-stretch itself over the course of its thirteen tracks, trying to be too clever or experimental. The gimmicky, ridiculous gun shots and wobbly synths that fog the chorus of “Red Lightning Bolt” sent me diving for my Xbox controller thinking i’d somehow left myself in the midst of some sci-fi death battle on a distant combat mission moon. The misfired vocals continue to rear their ugly heads throughout and regularly cause a cringe to squeeze your attention away from the brilliance that may be going on in the music underneath, which is a real shame.

As an album, I do think a couple of the tracks could and should have been dropped or at least developed further. The main culprits in this regard are the vocally reliant “Mungo Meets Marley” and dull closer “Down to the Bone”. Both tracks are dead weight compared to the other material on offer here, and they do become boring. Paradoxically, over-development is the main problem with some of the latter tracks, such as the aforementioned “Red Lightning Bolt”, giving you a sense that the band just didn’t know when to stop adding ideas into an already over-inflated track.

The momentum of the album’s ear-catching beginning isn’t entirely lost, however, with a number of stand-out tracks. “Having Fun Pt. 1″ sounds like a Mike Patton-led ballad-esque number from Angel Dust but with an uptempo beat behind it. The following track, imaginatively entitled “Having Fun Pt. 2″, takes things the way of The Mars Volta in one of their more simple, gentler, slow-burning guises. Earlier on the album, “Home” and “My Greatest Friend” prop up the positivity carried over from the openers with their infectious energy. And the band almost threaten to lose themselves in the penultimate last stand of “All Hail” with its classic rock tinged, guitar driven wailing that melts into what could have been the perfect outro.

All in all, A Palace For Alice is an album of mixed fortunes and missed opportunities with smile-inducing moments of creative clarity marred by over-thinking and the all too common appearance of broken vocals and their ill-conceived harmonies. Here’s hoping, with this album under their collective belts, The Laughing Man can overcome these small yet all too obvious problems and become the band they’re threatening to be.

Rating:

I was hanging out with my friend as he went to pick up his kids from school. Now since his kids are in preschool and elementary school, there’s really nothing on the radio for them to listen to. It sucks and I empathize with his plight.

I mean, this is my former roommate—my best friend, with whom I initially bonded over our admiration for The Lox. He’s from New York. He lives and breathes hip-hop, but he’s a parent, so he’s got to pay attention to what his kids are absorbing.

Anyway, I’ll toss together a random mix, burn it and throw it his way from time to time. (Incidentally, he shares his birthday with my coworker.) Sometimes I’ll make a mix of songs that I know he’s been dying to hear and other times I’ll make it a theme. Since it was has birthday, for instance, I created a Cake mix.

Get it? “Birthday.” “Cake.”

However, it turns out that when he’s in the car with the kids, he puts on a CD full of songs meant to inspire. If I recall correctly I dubbed it the “Optimix Prime”. It’s full of quirky songs and more than handful of TV theme songs. It’s a pretty light and fun mix.

We’re all in the car and he says, “Check this out,” at which point he puts the disc on. And I kid you not, the kids knew Peggy Lee’s “It’s a Good Day”, by heart. His eldest is seven years old and his youngest is going to be three. His eldest knew every word to the song and the youngest was vocalizing along to the instrumental solos.

I was bugging.

I mean, we’re talking about a song that’s six decades old and two kids who are only going to know about the 20th Century from history books. Not to mention the fact that he and I just happened to stumble across the song by accident (via the criminally underrated U-Turn.) I could barely wrap my head around it. It seemed like a juxtaposition that would ring false if you saw it in a movie or a TV show, yet it was happening right in front of me.

I did my best to keep my composure, because (a) I didn’t want the kids to realize that they were being observed, and (b) I didn’t want them to become self-conscious. But it was such a pure moment.

And then the cherry on top was that they were also fans of the theme to Greatest American Hero. That took me back because I can remember being around that age and totally slayed when I heard it on the radio.

This happened hours ago and I’m still buzzing about it. I don’t know what it did to me. I don’t know if I’m happy that they’re being exposed to music that doesn’t suck and are receptive to it, or if I’m extrapolating to be optimistic about their entire generation. All I know is that it completely made my day and probably my weekend too.
http://machinegunfunk.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/peggy-lee120226.jpg
http://machinegunfunk.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/cake500226.jpg

But isn’t emo the whiney great-grandson of punk?

Good old punk. Locked away in some kind of pop-culture purgatory and disallowed from resting in piece(s), instead grave-robbed and forcibly danced around like a meaty man-sized puppet. It’s dragged up as both an amusing, cringing anecdote of times gone by and a much vaunted milestone for that horrible, all encompassing term: “popular music”.

We all know punk died in 1979. Sid Vicious did a Bruce-Willis-in-Armageddon-style finale, taking out the big, bad, DIY musical asteroid with some Hollywood-sized, nuclear super-bomb: an overdose of heroin and a session of Spungen bludgeoning to avert the oncoming punk apocalypse. Ben Affleck returned to earth to marry Liv Tyler and we all got a happy ending.

However, like all good comic-book super-heroes, punk didn’t stay dead for long, doing a Captain America/Jean Grey/Superman/etc. and bounding back for a retcon and a reboot with a shiny new costume: hardcore, pop-punk, new wave, post-punk… and so on.

When the money’s there, there’s always a sequel and, more often than not, it sucks. There are always the exceptions of course, but what the mainstream now know as “emo” is no Aliens, Empire Strikes Back or Die Hard With a Vengeance.

Maybe they managed to reanimate the body, but not the brain? At least what’s survived from the ’70s now sports a devastatingly good hairdo and some skeletally skinny, designer jeans. Swish.

Of course, none of us are melting our eyes to a monitor for a musical history lesson. We want interesting noise!

What can we still call “punk” in 2010? What stands out from all the clones and misshapen spawn of what has become a genre instead of a creative force and refreshed standpoint?

Here are 7 “punk” records for the 21st century in no particular order whatsoever.

Fucked Up – The Chemistry of Common Life
Yes, it’s been praised to high heaven a million times already, but how many times have you face-planted and proven gravity works? Go figure. Fucked Up forsake the hardcore trends of now, choosing instead to throw together an album that tears a path through time and space and drags the straight-up punk of yesteryear, kicking and bleeding into the here and now. There are three guitars, a mountain of musical ambition that dwarfs even their bear-proportioned frontman, and a tenacity within each track that will happily claw your sockets clean of eyes.

Rolo Tomassi – Digital History/Beatrotter
If you see Rolo Tomassi before you hear them, your eyes are met with a band of five fresh faced “kids”, one of which is a female on the petite side. When you’re then told they play some of the most intense, exciting hardcore going at the moment, you may err on the side of the skeptics. After your ears have been acquainted with Rolo, however, any sense of doubt or mocking disbelief you may have held will be long gone—blown away to blisters and dust. You won’t belief the banshee screams emanating from frontwoman Eva Spence, or the sheer ability to pull off the ridiculousness that the band constantly display. I have it on very good authority that their very imminent new release for 2010 is going to kick things up several notches. I’ll hopefully be getting my greedy reviewing claws on it soon.

Fear Before the March of Flames – The Always Open Mouth
Think of the scope, development and accomplished execution of ideas present in the much celebrated work of Brand New but applied to the darker shades of the modern post-hardcore fraternity. Fear Before have eschewed any notion of a predetermined or predictable path of progress from their early spazzy hyperactive sound to the dominating torrent of quirky, synth-tinged epic hardcore on The Always Open Mouth. It’s punk, Jim, but not as we know it…

Converge – Jane Doe
Brutal, intense and, at times, worthy of the term “extreme”, from the frantic intent of the guitar that opens the album to the huge, heaving finale, Jane Doe never lets you escape from its snarling clutches. Scratch beneath the veneer of violence and you’ll find an album of passion and fury overloaded with energy and ideas. Converge always require, if not demand, an open-minded commitment from their listeners just as the precursors of punk did of their audience way back when. It’s definitely not for everyone, but then again, not everyone got it the first time round in the mid-’70s, either.

La Quiete – Self-titled EP + various splits from the last ten years
Still with me after that last entry? Your persistence has paid off. With all the intensity of their hardcore predecessors, but with a beautiful sense of melody and structure, La Quiete is what “real” emo actually sounds like. It’s called screamo, emotive hardcore, skramz… the name will probably change again soon due to the constant assimilation of genre labels. There is a faintly hilarious arms race for an ever more obscure, and now ridiculous, name that won’t be copied. But don’t let that detract from the music; it’s just another fan-borne based distraction. La Quiete manage to pull off the powerful and intense with real impact and aplomb whilst keeping their sound very clean, crisp and light which only adds to their immense sense of depth and vivid tracks. The vocals are all in Italian yet not knowing what’s being said doesn’t detract from the music. Everything on offer has so much feeling to it, it doesn’t matter what’s coming out of anyone vocals chords.

65daysofstatic – The Fall of Math
Just because it’s electronic doesn’t stop it from being punk. 65days push their horizons whilst maintaining a beating heart full of energy and intent within their sound. Their fusion of the parallel intensities within hardcore and electronic adds another level to where they can take their tracks and opens up a whole new source of inspiration to fire through the listener’s ears. It may not be strictly, generically punk, but the attitude is there and that’s what makes it onto this list.

The Fall of Troy – Doppelganger
OK, so the follow-up was awful, but that doesn’t stop Doppelganger from being a near faultless sprint through tech-guitar insanity at breakneck speed that retains all the hallmarks of a three-piece, destroying shows with their energy and impact. The Fall of Troy are a punk band who know how to play their instruments to stupid degree. Face melting just doesn’t cut it here.

…there are many more out there and this small selection are in no way highlights of the last ten years or forgettable no-events. They’re all just great records that exude the old spirits and original ethos that we still worship as punk. Enjoy them.
http://machinegunfunk.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/sidvicious120224.jpg
http://machinegunfunk.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/sexpistols500224.jpg