This is a tough one to write about for me because the original 7″ on Slap A Ham was a complete revelation for me when it first came out in 1990. That, coincidentally was also the year I graduated high school and meant that it was also long gone before I even knew of its existence. I managed to get a tape copy of it after I moved to San Francisco and was mesmerized by the utter rawness of it and rumors surrounding how those sounds were generated. There were so many theories about how Wood got his bass to sound that otherworldly. I’d heard various theories about how he used a wah pedal all the way open to generate that weird hiss behind everything and there are obviously some flanging effects going on somewhere in the mix. I think Anyway, I finally laid my hands on a copy of the original Fighting Music single which I think even back then in the pre-Ebay days was still a $20 record. It wasn’t easy to find and I can’t remember if I’d snagged my copy off the used buys processing counter before it even went up for sale or whether I traded something for it at a record swap. All said, Fighting Music was a pain in the ass to lay hands on and nothing about that has changed over a few decades.

When I only had a copy dubbed on cassette I assumed that some of the murky and shakey sound quality happened in that transfer. It turns out that I was completely wrong and that the 7″ just sounded that fucked up originally which is part of the charm/brutality. I think the funky recording only added to the other-ness of Fighting Music and added to the feeling of having never heard anything that sounded like this. To me, it sounding like the marching music played over a legion of demons on the march to finally end the world and at the very beginning of the 1990s there wasn’t much being released that would freeze me in my tracks and say “What the fuck is this?!” so Neanderthal and the countless bands that picked up the banner and ran with it afterwards were a pretty crucial alternative to the decent midtempo hardcore (that is an actual description of a record we sold at Blacklist Mailorder before I rewrote it to sound less repellant) that made up what seemed like the majority of the punk rock records being released around the time.

So this reissue is one more chance to grab all of the Neanderthal songs on a single 12″ and I wasn’t going to pass it up. This record collects the Fighting Music 7″, the tracks from the split with Rorschach (which have an even weirder sounding recording than the Fighting Music stuff), and a song from one of those Bleeeeargh comps. The B side is an etching of the skull logo which is cool looking and probably a better use of the other side than what usually ends up filling space like live recordings and practice recordings. I’m super excited to finally have a copy of these songs that isn’t a dubbed cassette. Maybe my needs are simpler than most?

So, this is one of those records that is either going to be great or a complete train wreck. The first and apparently last record from a band jumping from a smallish indie label (No Idea) into a newly formed offshoot of a larger distribution network (Collect Records) and, even more awesomely, entangling it all with the tainted money of Martin Shkreli (the Pharma Bro). One of the dudes from Thursday was the one running the label and I’d imagine that the separation from all that evil/easy money ultimately did that label in. Their URL from not that many years ago now lands on a Thai casino site so I’m not going to bother linking it. Bummer. I was also wrong about it being their last as the Burner 12″ was apparently the last thing they released.

I cannot remember where I picked up this record but I remember the rough time of my life. This was during a pretty shitty end to a marriage and an absurdly shitty denouement to the aforementioned marriage. Hazy and shoegazey was just about the perfect soundtrack to everything going wrong. The biggest problem was that pure 4AD shoegaze is, to my weirdly bent ear, just pop music with too many pedals in front of the guitars. Bands like Cloakroom, Nothing, and Creepoid were a near perfect compromise between the blackened and warped thing my musical taste had become after decade upon decade of black metal, power violence, and tough guy hardcore dominating my listening habits and the spilled pills with matching body pillows world of shoegaze-ish music.

Their guitars were scuzzy instead of just a wash of effects and brought on the totally obvious (and deserved) Sonic Youth comparisons. All of that said, this record is a bit of separation from the band’s history if only in production alone. This record sounds enormous compared to their earlier records and somehow cleaner and more focused. I had their earlier album Horse Heaven all but glued to my turntable after I first bought it and always thought the cymbals sounded unintentionally weird like they were somehow out of phase. That didn’t necessarily bother me or sound completely wrong but I liked the way they cut on this record better. The production boost on this record definitely made Creepoid sound subjectively better on this record. The slide guitar also seems more confidently placed on this one and less tentatively deployed. I mostly despise slide in every context and wish that there were fewer white dudes with soul patches on the planet to elevate their shelving priority at Guitar Center but this works surprisingly well in the oozing and psychedelic morass of what Creepoid is doing here. The slide parts work better for it not being immediately obvious what is producing those sounds. This was a good record for going through some shit and I still put it on regularly even though my world has generally resumed having a comprehensible shape again.

It’s too bad that this band didn’t get more attention while they around. You can Google up the meh on your own. I feel like Cemetary Highrise Slum would actually get a more favorable reaction now than it did when it came out but maybe the same old websites are still busy having bukakke parties over the newest variant of mumble-ly, Soundcloud bedroom rap to take notice of something like this. Seemingly doomed by situation or not, I really liked this record and wish that circumstances were better for its release. You can still find some of their stuff available at their bandcamp site so you should grab some copies, physical or otherwise if any of the above sounds like something you’d enjoy. You look like you could use some gently twisted music to make you feel better.