Coliseum, Fuck You Buddy and Judy Go Home

This Friday, over at the No Exit Cafe (6970 N Glenwood Ave on Chicago's north side), there's a pretty amazing hardcore show going on that I'm pretty excited about.

Coliseum (Louisville KY)
Get Rad (Milwaukee Wi)
Sweet Cobra (Chicago)
Thin the Heard (Chicago)

If you've never heard Coliseum, they're a pretty brutally amazing hardcore band out of Louisville Ky, who somehow manage to merge the punk-metal urgency of Motorhead with the musicality of Coliseum's sister band Black Cross. I'm quite the fan of this band and although their LP's are beautiful and the cover art is amazing (and very reminiscent of Slayer style art work), they manage to tug on the right heart strings with me. They give me that tingly feeling in my chest when I listen to them.
Get Rad on the other hand are really into BMX and playing fast and being awesome. Check out their LP. The vinyl itself is half powder blue and half hot pink, which makes me think of 1980's BMX culture (I'm pretty sure that's what they're going for). There's members of High on Crime in this band and that alone should tickle your curiosity enough to check them out.
Chicago's own Sweet Cobra and Thin the Heard are playing too, who are both great in their own respect. Sweet Cobra draws a lot of influence from His Hero is Gone and the Unsane (remember that bad ass video Unsane had in the mid 90s? The one with all the skateboarding accidents?).
Thin the Heard features ex members of Chicago's beloved Kung Fu Rick, but sound nothing like them. If you like politically charged hardcore somewhere between Tragedy and Fucked Up, this might be your new favorite band. Seriously.

All the info you need can be found at http://myspace.com/chicagopunkshows

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Completely unrelated to that, I've been going completely out of my mind crazy about the new World/Inferno Friendship Society record! I got it back in June/July and it didn't quite grab me the way their previous records did and I'm pretty sure it had to do with the glossy production. But it creeped up on my over the last month or so and I can't stop listening to it! I had to leave it in my car just so I wouldn't spend the whole day driving my co-workers crazy listening to this record on a loop! I can honestly say that Jack Terrycloth's voice hasn't sounded better than on this record and they lyrics are absolutely perfect. After hearing these songs for the last couple years live and seeing them on the Me Vs. Angry Mob EP as well as the Brother of the Mayor of Bridgewater single, I was curious about how they'd sound in the context of a full length. The versions on Red Eyed Soul are definitely glossier, but by no means does that make them lesser versions. They're still catchy as hell and they still get stuck in my head.

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I'm pretty excited about the Riverdales re-releases that Asian Man is putting out. I'm a huge fan of most things Ben Weasel/Screeching Weasel and it will be good to have CD versions of these records. When the originals came out, I was quite the vinyl purist and as a rule avoided buying CD's, unless the album didn't come out on vinyl first. Keep in mind though, back then I had a tape deck in my car and vinyl to cassette was a lot easier than vinyl to CD-R. Now that my car has a CD player, it's incredibly difficult to listen to about roughly half my record collection. Basically I rely on burned copies from friends or the kindness of Asian Man Records to re-release these gems. Now if only they'd reissue the Mr T Experience catalog....