Various artists - "Mandatory Marathon" - Amendment Records
It takes just the right kind of packaging to get me to pick up a punk compilation. Or Charles Bronson.
“Mandatory Marathon” has C. Bronson AND a great b+w design straight outta the 1990s, so how could I resist? The fact that it also contains rough-housin’ cuts from Capitalist Casualties, The Gooch, The Gaia, Last Remaining Pinnacle, GOB, Captain 3 Leg, Palatka, Laceration, The Pervatrons and Gaspirilla Day Parade only SEALS THE DEAL!
Reviewing a collection of brief-as-shit songs like this is a practice in patience. I have to get up and either reset/turn over the 7-inch every few minutes (which means putting down my laptop; NOOOO) and it’s tough to put a coherent thought together.
Some observations:
- “Mandatory Marathon” is the perfect 7-inch experience: deep, varied, bloody-minded, good all the way through; kudos
- Every band on this compilation sounds virulently passionate about SOMEthing; I’m not sure what, but the fiery anger is definitely there …
- The production is so dirty I wonder what the next step down is … noise? An indistinguishable mass of drums, guitar and vocals? A Times New Viking record?
- Palatka’s more “epic” songs are about 10 seconds long
- What I wanna know is how Dave Allison, the man behind Amendment Records, found so many sleezy, slum-dwelling bands for the same compilation. I can’t even find ONE band that packs such an inhospitable combination of punk, hardcore and screamo (does that term still exist?)
- My brother Glen used to listen to a lot of Capitalist Casualties — I never realized how crazy he was back then until now … these guys make old D.R.I. seem tame
- The bands on this comp are so crazy Charles Bronson seem almost … not “clean and wholesome,” exactly, but … their bad-ass-ness isn’t as apparent; also, I already had the two tracks they offer … oh well
- If there were a black sheep of “Mandatory Marathon,” it would be GOB; they’re submerged even deeper in thick black goo than the rest of these punk pranksters
- “Marathon” was originally released as a four-cassette release limited to 300 copies … hmmmm, wonder if I’ll ever find THAT
- I’ll bet Kaiser Soze, the band whom my old group, Stigma, opened for years ago, played with some of these bands; they were fast, brief and overly aggressive just like most of these bands
- The genius of “MM” is its brevity. Before you have time to complain about the shoddy craftmanship, annoying squeals of microphones and intensely bass-y production, it’s over and you have to decide whether to listen again. I say go for it.
What more can I say? Journeying through the underbelly of the late ’90s is a strange endeavor, indeed. Who says young people didn’t feel just as desperate then, pre-recession, as they do now?
The American Dream has been dead for a lot longer than most of us realize …
