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?