Hunted Down

It's funny, but this record has annoyed me so much over the last few years. Every time I would seach on eBay for Down To Nothing records, I would find lots of copies of this Soundgarden 'Hunted Down' 7". And at no point did I ever feel like I wanted one.

The original version of this 7" was Sub Pop's first 7" release and first foray into the world of coloured vinyl. It came out in 1987 as a blue vinyl record in a blue paper sleeve. It didn't look overly exciting, but regardless, it was Soundgarden's first release and these days it sells for a lot of money if you can find one. So it was a bit of surprise when Sub Pop repressed this one for Record Store Day in 2010 with a full picture sleeve.

There were apparently over 5,000 copies of this pressed in 2010, and at the time I remember thinking that it seemed like a cash grab. It was easy to find and sold for pretty much nothing. So of course, when I recently decided that I did want one after all, it suddenly seems harder to find and more expensive, but thankfully still nowhere near the price of an original.

Misery Maker

Released back in August 1990, Sub Pop 70 was this 7" by a band called The Derelicts. It's a relatively early record in the label's catalogue, although I had never actually heard of this one until a few weeks ago. It was an easy and cheap buy from within the UK.

Apparently the band was a Seattle punk outfit active 1987-1991. I'm assuming that they influenced a fair few bands of the era. The two songs on here are over in about 4 minutes, and they remind me of both The Dwarves and Supersuckers. It's pretty good but it's also very short, and in some ways a good reminder of how 7"s were so cheap and useful as a way of checking out new bands back in the day.

Beat Your Heart Out

Another Sub Pop 7" that I picked up, and without doubt this is a record that I would not have bothered with had it not been for my 2024 quest to pick up most of the label's early catalogue.

This 7" by The Muffs came out as Sub Pop 157 in July 1992. It came on two colours of vinyl (pink and green), and I plumped for the green solely because I found one for sale in the UK.

The Muffs were a band from Southern California who started in the early 90s and kept going (with a few years gap) until 2019, when lead singer and only consistent member, Kim Shattuck, sadly passed away. Aside from The Muffs, she was also best known for replacing Kim Deal as bass player in The Pixies, until she was fired after her first tour. Apparently she stage dived whilst playing and the band didn't like it.

This sounds like an alternative rock/punk band. The first sound reminds me a lot of L7. I read that this band had a song featured in the movie 'Clueless' and no doubtthis helped to jetison them to a semi popular level. I would say that I am half tempted to check out more of their output. I mean, these songs are ok, but they haven't hit me quite like some of the other 7"s have so far.

Big Damn Crazyweight

The next installment in my Sub Pop 7" journey is catclogue number Sub Pop 173, which came out back in October 1992. I paid all of £3 for this. The cover doesn't really give much away as to what this may sound like.

Again, this one has been a really cool surprise. It sounds kinda like early Helmet. Very loud and grooving riffs.

I can find next to no information on this band. All I could find is that they were from New Mexico. I have no idea how long they were active, but it feels like it wasn't too long. They released four 7" records, 3 of which came out in 1992, apparently played over 1000 shows, and that was it. Done.

Dickless

I have bought so many Sub Pop 7"s in the last few weeks that it's crazy. And without a doubt today's is in the top 3 so far...

This 7" is by a band called Dickless. They were made up of 4 girls, hence the name. This 7" was released as Sub Pop 59 in May of 1990. In terms of 7" releases, this one came right after the L7 7" and right before the Mudhoney 'You're Gone' 7", and it sounds vaguely like a blend of the two bands. The distorted, fuzzed out guitars of Mudhoney but with a female vocal... although the vocal is way more growled than L7 ever were.

All you get on this record is two songs. The first is titled 'I'm A Man' and is a Bo Diddly cover, not that you would know it from the way it sounds. The second is their own. Both are over in 5 minutes.

Another thing that is interesting about this 7" is that it comes with an insert and a sticker. It's extremely rare for Sub Pop 7"s to have been issued with any kind of insert. I'm not sure why this one had one when most others do not, but I'm happy that this copy I bought still had both the insert and sticker present.

Seriously, this band is so good. Without doubt one of the best female vocals I have ever heard on a hardcore/punk record. OK, so I'm 34 years late, but I need more of this. Reading up on this band all these years later, it seems that they only recorded 6 or 7 songs in total, spread across two 7"s and a couple of compilations. There was apparently going to be an anthology record put out at some point but it never happened. Such a shame.

No Pain

Another recently acquired Sub Pop release, and this is one that I have seen many times over the years, often in the used section of record stores, and usually priced at around $3 or so. I have never previously had any inclination to so much as look at this record, mainly because it has a dog on the front cover, and I have never really been a fan of dogs. But in my recent quest to pick up a bunch of Sub Pop 7"s, I figured I would grab it and give it a go.

This 7" was released as Sub Pop 169 in September 1992. It was pressed on both blue and pick vinyl. Neither copy is overly rare, and neither are any of them sought after by anyone. I bought both from other sellers that I was buying more cheap Sub Pop 7"s from.

I bought the blue one first and liked it so then grabbed the pink from another seller a week or so later.

I wasn't expecting too much of this 7", mainly just because I know that nobody cares about it, and I assumed that this was because it was not good. But I gave it a chance, and within seconds I was really into it. It's a slightly weird one, as the first song is very different to the second, so I'm not overly sure which is the more typical of this band. The first song is super slow and downbeat, whereas the second is a more poppy number, which reminds me of early 90s British indie bands. But each song is really interesting and I keep going back to it. Cheap 7"s are the best.

Rein Sanction

As per my last couple of posts, I've been buying up early Sub Pop 7"s the last few weeks. Most of the ones I have bought have been stupidly cheap, as a lot are from bands that didn't make a big impact or, if they did, the impact doesnt seem to have stood the test of time. Overall this has been a fun ride so far.

Today's post is for a couple of 7"s by a band that really made me sit up and take notice when I was working my through a pile of coloured 7"s. Rein Sanction was a band that came from Florida and formed in the 80s. Somehow I had never heard of them until a month ago or so, despite them having released two 7"s and two LPs on Sub Pop in 1991 and 1992. In 1993 they broke up. Sometimes these short lived bands make little impact and end up being forgotten, which kinda makes sense if they weren't active for too long, but in this case I am genuinely puzzled as to how they didn't end up being bigger. I played their 7" and within about one minute realised that this was something really good, and I would have thought that they would have been big against the landscape of where things sat at the start of the 90s.

At the moment I'm collecting only Sub Pop 7"s, and I grabbed both that Rein Sanction released. The first 7" is titled 'Creel' and was released as Sub Pop 91 in February 1991. The band features two brothers and another dude who looks like Dave Grohl. I like to think that if someone showed me this photo and asked me to guess what year it was from that I would instinctively know it was from the early 90s.

The yellow vinyl copies of this are very common and very cheap. There were apparently 3500 copies and these days you can grab one for $4 or $5. There are also some rarer copies on pale blue vinyl which are a little more sought after and cost more, but you'd still only be paying the same price as a new release 7" these days.

The second 7" is titled 'Deeper Road' and was released as Sub Pop 160 in July 1992. What's interesting is that this was released 17 months after the above record, but the catalogue number is 69 higher. That means that the label put out an average of 4 releases a month back then, which is basically one a week. For an independent recod label, that's a pretty astonishing level of output.

Both of these 7"s have only two songs, and they aren't overly long, but they have totally sucked me in. Reading whatever I can find online, the band is compared to Dinosaur Jr and Hüsker Dü, but I don't think that's overly accurate. Maybe it's ballpark correct, but there's something a little more slow, brooding and downbeat about this band. I can't describe it particularly well, but I also discovered that Southern Lord reissued the band's first 12" a few years ago. Bearing in mind that Southern Lord have also reissued records by Uniform Choice, Brotherhood, Neon Christ and Bl'ast!, it feels like they have picked records that they think need to be remembered and celebrated. So it's interesting that they also wanted to remind the world about Rein Sanction.

Ok, so I'm over 30 years late to the party here, but this band could potentially be my find of the year I think.

Conjure Me

Another addition to my Sub Pop 7" collection, and this is one that I used to own and then sold probably in the mid 90s.

'Conjure Me' was the 3rd Afghan Whigs 7" released by Sub Pop, and came out in 1992. I remember buying a copy of this probably in 1992 or 1993, and at the time I liked the songs but not the glossy, cover. Something about it felt mass produced compared to the older Sub Pop releases, which were folded paper sleeves. I know that none of these things should really matter, but I always noticed details and thought a lot about them. Anyway, I can't actually remember what colour I used to have, but I know that it wasn't either of the two that I just picked up.

This dirty green marble colour looks great. It reminds me of the green vinyl Gorilla Biscuits 7", although it costs about 2% of the price.

I also picked up a clear vinyl copy too, because clear is the best colour.

I always loved the first Afghan Whigs LP, but for some reason I sold the second LP years ago. Probably because it had a bad cover and was black vinyl only. This 7" has one song from that LP and one exclusive song. But vinyl colours and glossy sleeves aside, the songs here are great. It also prompted me to download the second LP again and it's so good. Man, this trip back to the early 90s is such a fun ride.

Smells Like Smoked Sausages

It's been a weird year so far. Two months in and it's been all work, work, work and listening to the same few records. But recently I was chatting to a friend online and it inspired me to pick up some more of the older Sub Pop releases. Fortunately I have a lot of the bigger releases that everyone wants and that are worth a lot of money, but there are a lot of other releases that are super cheap nowadays. So it feels that it's not a bad time to go decide to collect these things.

This double 7" compilation is titled 'Smalls Like Smoked Sausages' and was released in early 1992. hot on the heels of the worldwide Nirvana explosion. All copies were on pink vinyl, with one record being clear pink and the other a solid pink.

A lot of the Sub Pop singes club releases were not Sub Pop artists, and that's certainly the case here. All of the 8 bands on this release were signed to the Amphetamine Reptile record label, which is probably still most famous for putting out early records by The Melvins and Helmet. Seems like a really cool idea to me, having one record label put out a record showcasing bands from another label.

I've listened to this one quite a bit the last couple of weeks, and the Helmet song on here is absolutely one of their best. It's only a minute and a half long, but it's an incredible song. TUrns out it's also a cover of a Melvins song that was originally released on a 7" on Leopard Gecko records, which was run by some dude from Seaweed. There's also a great song on here by a band called Surgery, which made me want to explore more of their catalog too.

All in all, I'm having fun listening to something a bit different at the moment. More to come...

We Got The Beat

So here's a thing - I have never been remotely interested in Poison Idea. I'm not exactly sure why. I mean, there are probably a number of reasons. The fact that they just looked like a bunch of fat old dudes didn't help, neither did the fact that they have a recrd titled 'Record Collectors Are Pretentious Assholes'. Other than that, there was never really anything that drew me in. However, when I made a conscious decision to start picking up more old Sub Pop 7"s recently, the Poison Idea 7" was pretty high up on my want list, as I wanted to pick up the releases that were by bigger, more established bands who were not really Sub Pop acts as such.

Sub Pop 7"s were pressed in relatively high numbers in the late 80s and early 90s, and there are a lot of copies that made it out of the States, so I was able to snag a copy of this from within the UK. This 7" was released in 1990 and there were 4,500 copies pressed, with 3,000 of those beng on this mint green vinyl. The rarer version is on black vinyl, but I'd rather have the colour version because that's just how I roll.

I mainly wanted this one for the Sub Pop collection, but I was actually pleasantly surprised as to how good this is. Two really good songs on here, the second of which keeps getting stuck in my head. Hell, maybe I'll even check out more of their songs at some point.

King Face

I often go back to the past to try to find new stuff to listen to, and last year at some point I was listening to the Dischord compilation LP 'State Of The Union' and it reminded me of the band King Face. I have a King Face record in my collection that I've had since the early 90s, but I never listened to anything else. So I checked out their first record and immediately loved it, and then the hunt was on to find a vinyl copy. Fortunately it seems that King Face have been forgotten about and their records and pretty cheap these days, but given that the record came out in 1987, the challenge was to find one in good condition.

This 12" contains 6 songs and was released by the band themseleves. I love the simple design of the dront cover which is just plain black with a small sticker in the top left corner. There are actually two versions - the colour sticker (which almost looks like a tattoo design to me) and a black and whhite version. You'll have to take my word for it that the colour version looks much better.

King Face was a DC band and with hindsight it seems crazy that they weren't on Dischord. The singer, Mark Sullivan, was in a band called The Slinkees (which also featured Ian Mackaye and Jeff Nelson, and whose 7" came out as part of the Dischord 200 box set a couple of years ago). Mark is also the borther of Soulside vocalist Bobby Sullivan. This 12" was also produced by Ian Mackaye. So quite why Dischord didn't releases this I have no idea. I'm sure if they had done then this record would be much better known than it seems to be. But for me this was a great find at a great price, and I'mreally happy to have it in my collection.