9-13

A friend of mine posted a pic of the first Iron Monkey LP on instagram a couple of weeks. I hadn't listened to it in a long, long time, so I gave it a spin and it was a blast. This then jogged my memory that there was an album released recently (which it turns out was 2017!), so I went to discogs to have a look and within a few minutes I had bought a copy.

'9-13' was put out by Relapse Records, so of course I wanted the clear vinyl version. I was lucky to find one for sale in the UK for a good price. I've said it before, but if there's anything I want on Relapse then I'm only buying it on clear vinyl. They make 100 of each release on clear and they go to the label, band and friends only. Plus clear looks the best.

Iron Monkey was a UK band in the mid to late 90s. They released a CD back in 1996 that I bought when it came out. I can't remember how I'd heard of them. But back at the time a lot of hardcore was pretty metal, and this band stood out. Rather than play fast, they played slow and heavy. I saw them play once in Bradford and they were really good live. I also bought a t-shirt at that show that had 'Iron Monkey' on the front in the Iron Maiden font, which I ended up selling a few years later for a lot of money. There's still a skateboard video on the internet somewhere and I'm wearing that shirt at one point. Good luck finding it.

The original vocalist of Iron Monkey sadly died back in 2002. The band had already broken up a couple of years before. But for some reason a couple of members got together and recorded a new album in 2017. The guitarist also sings on this one, which I think is better than drafting in someone new entirely. I remember being really confused when I saw this was coming out, thinking that it just didn't seem right to get a band back together so many years later without the original vocalist. But I still wanted to check it out. Turns out this is a great record, although I'm still not sure that it feels right that it even exists in the first place.