New Age Catch Up: Cross Control

Almost exactly a year ago, a friend of mine in DC wanted to send me a 7" that she had been given, that she thought I would appreciate. The only problem was that she didn't have anything to mail it in. So she asked my advice. I came up with a genius idea that, if she was cool with it, I would buy a 7" that I had my eye on and have it delivered to her house. She could then open the mailer, insert the 7" she had, and then forward both 7"s on to me. Sounds both clever and simple, right?

Well of couse, the plan backfired. I'm not sure exactly which 7" it was that I had wanted to buy to have shipped to her, but I know that it was being sold by New Age Records. So once she agreed to my plan, I went to the label's webstore to pick up one 7", and ended up checking out on 15 seven inches. Well, it wasn't my fault that they'd sneakily just listed a bunch of test presses for sale at really good prices!

So here begins the story that will take me the rest of the week to tell, because I'm going to break it into several posts, rather than try to do it all in one post. I'm gonna cover them in alphabetical order, just because that's the kind of guy I am. Organised.

So day 1 features the debut release by Cross Control, a band I know nothing about other than they are from LA and their 7" is a banger.

First up I grabbed the 77 pressing. As usual, New Age made 77 copies with the old logo labels.

The pressing info says that there are 200 copies on green vinyl. I'm never really sure if these numbers include or exclude the 77 pressing. So either there are 277 green, with 77 of them making up the 77 pressing and 200 coming with regular labels, else there are 200 green total, with 77 and 123. But probably one of these.

The more common colour is clear, out of 500 copies.

The record is titled 'Outrage Culture', named after the a term that describes the modern era in which we live. I lifted this defintion from the urban dictionary:

When people play the victim card and bend over backwards to be as offended as possible when they really aren't. Using hissy fits, political correctness, character assassination, and a false sense of moral authority, the outrager hopes to gain power and public recognition for their brave act of justice as well as a sense of control over their meaningless existence. Often accompanied by demands for financial compensation for their "pain and suffering".

No wonder these dudes sound so pissed. I'll bet that LA has more than its fair share of these kind of modern humans.

I also picked up a test press. At the time I'd only played these songs about twice, but I figured I should grab one now while the price was right in case this turned out to be my favourite 7" of all time.

In the spirit of these posts, even though I have just posted photos of these 7"s, I thought I'd take another of them all lined up together.