Pablum

My last post asw about the band Coffin Break, and I mentioned that after recent discovering two of their albums released in the early 90s by Epitaph Records, I decided to look at the label's discography to see what else they had put out that I had never heard of.

One name immediately stood out and jogged my memory as I remembered hearing of Claw Hammer back in the early 90s. I'm pretty sure that they had a song appear on an episode of the 411 Skate Video Magazine. So out of curiosity I checked a song out online and was instantly nodding my head and thinking how damn catchy it was. Next stop was discogs where I found a sealed copy for sale in the UK for £7.50. It's almost as if it was put there just for me.

The band was from Long Beach, California and active between 1987 and 2000. Their bio on discogs describes them as 'a U.S. avant blues rock group'. That's not really a genre I am overly familiar with, and not something that I would really be too motivated to check out. However, this is a really interesting record, mainly because it sounds just so different to anything, largely due to the vocal. The singer sounds like the chracter 'Zed' from 'Police Academy' films trying to sing like Axl Rose. Sounds weird right? And yes, it is. But also strangely addictive. Check out the song 'Vigil Smile' if you're remotely curious.

Coffin Break

Another Sub Pop 7" that I was missing was the Coffin Break 7". It's not really that hard to find, but I knew I wanted a colour vinyl copy and I just had to wait for one to pop up in the UK for a reasonable price. Eventually it happened. This is SP85 and came out in September 1990.

Despite this being on SubPop, this isn't grunge. The band are described on discogs as 'hardcore punk', and on their bandcamp page as 'metal/punk'. Whatever it is, this was one of those records where it was an instant hit after one play and I wanted more. I immediately hit up the internet and quickly found two full length LPs for sale in the UK for only £10 each, so I grabbed both.

Both records are later releases. Also, both are on Epitaph Records. As we all know, a lot of bands on Epitaph became very popular over time. Coffin Break are one of the exceptions. I mean, of course they were relatively popular, but less so than other Epitaph bands of the same era (Bad Religion, NOFX, Rancid, The Offspring, Pennywise etc.).

'Crawl' is their third LP, and was released in 1991. A lot of this record is what I would call 'melodic punk', which is more in line with what I'd expect on Epitaph. Regardless of what you might call it, this is my favourite record at the moment.

'Thirteen' is the fourth LP, released in 1992. So far I'm less into this one, although it may be because I haven't listened to this one as much yet.

There are two albums that came before these two that I now really want, but sadly they aren't readily available at a decent price. So onto the wants list they go.

This made me curious about what other less known bands / records Epitaph may have put out. More on that in the next post...

A Couple More Sub Pop 7"s

I'm slowly continuing with my Sub Pop collection. Still regularly searching for the things I want. Recently I found a couple of different colours I was missing of a couple of 7"s I already have. Nothing overly rare or exciting.

First up, a clear red vinyl copy of the Afghan Whigs 'Conjure Me' 7" (Sub Pop 142). This is my fourth copy of this one, and there are two more I still need after this.

The other one is a green vinyl copy of the 'Deeper Road / R.K.' 7" by Rein Sanction (Sub Pop 160). This is my second copy of this one, and there's only one more to find.

Note to self - I need to put together a want list of all the Sub Pop 7"s that I am missing that I want. It's easy to lose track otherwise.

Mirrorless

Even though 2026 is almost two thirds done, I'm still chasing records for 2025 releases that I didn't manage to pick up in the year for various reasons. In my end of 2025 post on here, there were a total of 11 records that I was lacking vinyl copies of. I have managed to pick some of those up this year, although there are still four more to go. But here's the seventh one that I have managed to acquire, and it's one that I feel has flown way under the radar to this point.

The record is the self-titled, six song 12" by Mirrorless. I was immediately interested to hear this when I heard about it, as the band features people from some great 90s & 00s Louisville bands, most notably Chris Higdon who used to sing for Falling Forward, Elliott and Frontier(s).

I could have picked one of these up quite easily last year but decided against it as I didn't want this vinyl colour. But in the last twelve months or so I changed my mind. Even though I'm not really a fan of these splatttery colours, in the end it occurre to me that this colour is by far the best match to the coer art, and therefore for that reason I figured it would be the right choice.

Also, I like that the sleeve has some cut out bits, so part of the cover art is effectively bits of the inner sleeve which are exposed. The exact same style was used on the first Elliott LP and the first Elliott 7". I love these kind of things and noticing them, and wondering if anyone else has. Details for the nerds.

WHilst I don't think this is as good as Falling Forward or Elliott, it's still a good record, and I'm really glad to see Chris still making new music. Sonically this sits closer to some Falling Forward songs than anything by Elliott, as most of the songs are quite fast and hard and the vocal sounds close to screaming in places. Overall a great record and I really hope that this isn't just a one off.

Treacherous Jaywalkers

I bought some records from someone a few weeks ago and he was kind enough to throw in this 4 song 12" EP for free. This is a 12" on SST Records by Treacherous Jaywalkers, a band that I had never heard of before called.

The band were from Los Angeles and were active from 1984-1992. This is one of three releases that they had on SST - two 12" EPs and one full length. This record is titled 'Sunrise' and came out in 1987.

It definitely brings to mind other SST bands of the same era, and totally sounds like it would have been on a Santa Cruz skate video at the end of the 80s. At times the bass reminds me of fIREHOSE, other bits remind me of Descendents. It's good stuff and I'm grateful to have been gifted this else there's a chance that I would never had heard it.

Rites Of Spring

The last few months I have been digging into the Dischord catalogue and exploring some bands I'd never been interested in previously. This year Holy Rollers, Beefeater and Ignition have all clicked with me. So I figured I wanted to try another record that I checked out years ago that didn't grab me - the Rites Of Spring LP.

This was one of a few Dischord releases that I heard back when I was about 18 and which I didn't 'get' at the time. I then tried it again at some point and just wasn't that into it. And then a bunch of years flew by. With me seemingly now more interested in older records rather than new ones, I figured that this could be one that I may have changed my mind on. Listening to it on the Dischord bandcamp page, I couldn't really understand what it was that I didn't like about this before. But I definitely now wanted a vinyl copy. I just didn't want a recent repress.

A couple of weeks ago I spotted one for sale on eBay. It was part of a lot of four Dischord LPs. I didn't really want to buy four records when I already had three of them. But I fugred that the price was good, so I started to think that maybe I could buy the lot, keep the Rites Of Spring LP, and sell the other three LPs for enough money to cover the price of all four, this ending up with a 'free' Rites Of Spring LP. So that's my plan, and I think it should work out. I just need to go through the hassle of selling some records.

This copy is not a first press copy. Those are denoted by the $5 postpaid price on the back cover. This one here shows $6 postpaid. I'm not sure when it would have been pressed, but the person I bought it from probably got it around 1990, based on other records he had for sale.

Anyway, I'm happy that I finally get this record, and that I found a vinyl copy for a good price. I'm now getting close to having a respectable Dischord collection, but still a long way to go before there are no obvious gaps.

Masks

In late 2024 I picked up a record by Chat Pile. I'd never heard them but was drawn in by the artwork of the record. I still listen to it semi regularly. It's an interesting record, although I haven't got around to checking anything else that they've done, until semi recently when it was announced that they were putting out a 7" on Sub Pop. Given my interest in Sub Pop over the last couple of years, I knew that this was something I was going to

This 7" is very reminiscent of the Sub Pop 7"s of old. It has the same layout (with the Sub Pop logo, band name and song titles in a bar across the top of the front. It also has the same labels. And like a lot of the early Sub Pop 7"s, it contains only two songs.

The first song is an orignal song, and the second is a cover of 'Sifting' by Nirvana. They obviously chose a song by a classic Sub Pop artist, and the song that they chose fits their style really well. Even though I'm not a fan of covers generally, this is a good choice and they do it really well.

The white vinyl version is the rarest colour. There are 300 exclusive to Rough Trade. The other first press colour was green with smoke, but despite that colour being much more common, I managed to miss out. It seemed to sell out everywhere in an instant. A couple of months later and they announced a second press on dark blue vinyl, so I scopped one of those quicksmart.

Hopefully one of the green smoke copies will show up soon. Even though it's the most common colour, it looks the best, so it would be good to round this collection out and go back to focusing on older Sub Pop 7"s.