Buenos dias and welcome to week one of a weekly punk round up here at Strictly Reading & Leeds. I will be covering news, fresh releases, live gigs I’ve been to and anything else that falls under the punk umbrella.

New Releases

Tis the season… for a slow month of new releases! December is traditionally a time for best ofs and Christmas compilations but a few new releases have snuck out of late. Gallows return with ex-Alexisonfire vocalist Wade McNeil on the four track EP, Death is Birth. The name itself seems to signal new life for the band since the departure of Frank Carter in July, and I’ll be honest, I think McNeil is a breath of fresh air. I sometimes found Carter’s crazed punk urchin style a little grating, almost a parody of itself while McNeil has added something more genuine.

The songs themselves sound fresh, ‘Mondo Chaos’ is fast melodic and angry (fuck the world anyone?), ‘True Colours’ is a sub minute long thrasher, ‘Hate! Hate! Hate!’ has an air of early Sick of it All to it and final title track ‘Death is Birth’ is equally brutal. All in all it’s a change in the right direction for Gallows.

Re-issues

The end of November also saw re-issues for skate punk legends Lagwagon of their first five albums, Duh (1992), Trashed (1994), Hoss (1995), Double Plaidinum (1997) and Let’s Talk About Feelings (1998). From the years of those releases its plain to see Lagwagon used to punch out records at will but these days fans have to grab what they can so these re-issues, filled with B sides, demos, live material and compilation offerings of the time should be of interest.

Saying all that, anyone eagle-eyed enough will notice that a lot of this material has cropped up before on Lagwagon’s 2000 release Let’s Talk About Leftovers, which featured… B sides, demo material, live material and compilation offerings from their first five albums so a quick stop shop for many of the more prime extras would be this one record. All that said anyone without the original albums would do well to pick up the re-issues and start their Lagwagon collection off well.

Adam’s…Track of the Week!

It’s from the re-issue of Let’s Talk About Feelings that I give you my song of the week. Lagwagon show off their punk chops as well as a pretty metallic solo on ‘Alison’s Disease’, one of the best songs in the band’s entire canon and until this re-issue it could only be found on the Fat Wreck sampler album, Live Fat, Die Young.

This Week in Punk History

It was this week thirty years ago (December 5^th 1981) that Black Flag released their seminal album Damaged. It’s an album that is not only legendary within the genres of hardcore and punk but within the whole of rock and beyond ranking 340^th in Rolling Stone’s 500 greatest rock albums of all time (November 2003). Its immediacy is what truly hits you first; it’s stripped down and in your face and fresh faced 20 year old Henry Rollins truly spews his vocals. Few at the time of release could of predicted that 30 years on Rollins would still be spewing bile now but in the form of his acerbic one man spoken word show.

‘Spray Paint’ is a fast as hell sub minute blast while ‘Six Pack’ and ‘TV Party’, probably the album’s most well known song, are tongue-in-cheek jock arsehole anthems about drinking and mindlessly wasting your life on the sofa. Though Damaged was Black Flag’s first full length it will forever be remembered as their best and most impactful album as nothing that followed could match it. The band themselves have influenced numerous contemporary bands from Rise Against and Dillinger Escape Plan to Maynard James Keenan of Tool and A Perfect Circle while guitarist Greg Ginn’s label SST (which was formed to release early Black Flag material) put out work by Husker Du, Sonic Youth & Dinosaur Jr.

Next week I’ll start my punk review of the year with the first four months of the year. Adam McCartney