Christ

Here's another one that I brought home a year ago and have only recently got around to properly checking out, largely due to the mess that my record room has been in for months...

This time last year I took a short trip to the States and one day ended up visiting a New Jersey record store called Sky Valley Records, which is owned by a guy called Chuck Miller. Chuck used to run a label in the 90s called Temperance Records, which is probably mainly remembered these days for being the label that released the Turning Point / No Escape split 7" and the 'Rebuilding' 7" compilation (that featured Gorilla Biscuits, Burn, Turning Point and No Escape). Well, a few years ago Chuck started releasing records again, and is now running a small label with the same name as his shop, i.e. Sky Valley Records. I bought a few records from him the day that I was in his store, and even though I mentioned only two posts ago that I was trying to avoid buying discographies, one of my purchases was a discography of a little known band called Christ.

For those of you who have never heard of Christ (which I am guessing is pretty much everyone reading this), they were a band from Philadelphia active around 1996-1998 ish. Members were also in other 90s bands that only a small handful of people in 2025 still give a shit about, such as Prema, Autumn, I Hate You, Genuine & Grip. Temperance put out two CD only releases by Christ in the late 90s, and I bought one of them at the time just because it was on Temperance. The label's press release mentions comparisons to Engine Kid, Black Sabbath, Sunny Day Real Estate and Drive Like Jehu, which almost sounds like they are trying to cover all the bases, but I can absolutely hear elements of all of those bands here.

This 2 x LP forms a discography that compiles the songs from both of their 2 CD EPs that released way back in the 90s (one of which I still have in a crate upstairs, the other I never owned nor heard before) and their demo. I had a vague recollection of the two songs from the CD I have, but I have listened to this a lot more in the past month than I ever listened to the CD I own in the past twenty something years.

One of the songs here is 16 minutes long, which sounds ridiculous, but is without doubt my favourite on here. As I wrote this post, I listened to that song and then when it ended I put it on again. To have a single song that is longer than some hardcore LPs is in itself an achievement.

Anyway, I can see why Chuck wanted to press this discography to vinyl all these years later and hopefully bring Christ to the attention of people who have never heard them before. This truly is an unknown gem from a period when things were starting to splinter into various sub genres and scenes, but I can see that this band could have been popular with many of them. Well worth a few minutes of your time to explore if you're looking for something other than generic hardcore.