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.