Saturday 31 August 2019

Not For The Weak

I'm finally at the end of this haul of stuff that I picked up from a reader of this blog. I didn't put much thought into the order of these posts, and this is certainly not a case of saving the best until last, but it's just how it's worked out.

The final item in the batch was this Life's Blood 'Defiance' 7". A classic NYHC EP. This copy is a first press with the brown (sometimes referred to as red) labels on Combined Effort Records.

I was keen to bag a first press copy as all I had previously was a second press copy, denoted by the silver labels. But now that I have both I can confirm that the label colour is literally the only difference between them.

Picking this up sent me on a bit of a research mission as I realised that I had very little knowledge about the band. The one thing that always struck me is that, from what I could gather, the band were fairly low profile compared to other bands of the same era, yet they are always cited as a very important and influential outfit. The thing that I hadn't appreciated until recently is that the band only actually existed for a little over a year. OK, so they managed to put out a 7" and a split 7" and get onto three separate compilations, which is kinda impressive in itself. But a band whose total existence spanned just over a year in today's world would be completely forgotten within 6 months. So it's impressive that Life's Blood continue to be remembered and leave a mark over 30 years later.

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