All That Was Built Here - Ten Years At The Old Fire House

If you grew up in the greater Seattle area and attended all ages shows during the era that this blog covers, chances are you spent some time at the Old Fire House teen center in Redmond. Today's offering is the Old Fire House benefit compilation that was released in the early 2000's and features 24 blasts of nostalgic noise. The track listing features pretty much every amazing local band I remember seeing there in those days: The November Group, Pretty Girls Make Graves, Sicko, Botch, Gas Huffer, Teen Cthulhu, Undertow, Waxwing, Akimbo, Automaton, Murder City Devils...etc

All That Was Built Here

White Jazz - The 4th Practice

My buddy Benson found this tape at Everyday Music up on Capitol Hill a while back and was gracious enough to let me borrow it for inclusion here. White Jazz weren't around for too long and almost every bit of information I found was from an online show write up from The Stranger in August of '09, which is where I've taken this descriptive paragraph from:

"White Jazz are a new (dare I say super-)group featuring Brandon Nakamura of Teen Cthulhu/Doomsday 1999, Jon Weisnewski of Akimbo, Jeff McNulty of BlöödHag, and Jared Burke Eglington of Patrol. You might expect a band with such a pedigree to combine competently terrorizing metal riffs with a tongue-in-cheek humor meant to deflate not only the metal tough-guy aesthetic, but also themselves. And you'd be right: The band formed to open a show for Pig Destroyer, and they played the show "in silk kimonos and underwear just to bum people out," according to Nakamura. He continues: "We're doing this as a tribute to bands like Excruciating Terror, Crom, and other bands that just destroy basements, ruin lives, and never say sorry." No apologies necessary, guys."

The 4th Practice was released by Wall of Dogs and serves as, I believe, the only available recordings of this all-too-brief unholy musical alliance. I've failed to be able to separate the tracks on this release as many of them run together and I don't believe the tracklisting on the label to be correct, but the whole thing weighs in at just under 10 minutes so you should be able to enjoy it in it's entirety.

White Jazz

EXCLUSIVE: Akimbo - 3 Early Unreleased Songs

Here are 3 songs recorded in the early Akimbo days, late 2000 or early 2001. The first two were intended for a split 7" that never happened, though "Sense of Smell" was eventually re-recorded  for their debut LP, Harshing Your Mellow. The final song is an unfinished demo thrown together to make use of some extra studio time. As far as I know, these have never been available until now. Enjoy.

Download the 3-song EP here.

Teen Cthulhu / Akimbo - Split 10"

I figured I might as well continue on the track Zardoz started with yesterday's entry and post some more early Akimbo. I no longer have a physical a copy of this bad boy but after digging around in my hard drive I remembered I was able to find mp3s on soulseek (yes, people still use soulseek) at some point in the past.

This time around (or should I say the first time around?), Akimbo were joined by the wholly unholy lords of crusted blackness, Teen Cthulhu. This 10 inch contains six songs, three by each band, and if you follow this blog you probably already know what to expect: abrasive, tight and metal-tinged Northwest hardcore.

Somebody got to the blood! (with artwork and lyric sheet scans courtesty of discogs)

Akimbo - Army of Evil Robots Programmed for Human Destruction

If you're a regular reader of this blog, chances are you've heard of Akimbo. Since forming in 1873, this hardcore/metal three-piece played approximately 13,000 shows, including, and this stat is real, 8 shows during one October, all in Seattle, all in different venues, all with different setlists. Before finally announcing they'd be playing their final show in August of this year, Akimbo was a punk machine, and the title of this, their second release (the first being a split 10" with Teen Cthulu) explains just why the machine was so efficient, focused, and all-around badass. Founding guitarist Kyle Iman left after this one, and was sequentially replaced with 10 different guitarists. While Jon Weisnewski, Nat Damm, and those ten guitarists soldiered on, Kyle formed the Super Magnificent Action Trio, and currently records experimental ambient music under the name Emuul. I picked this up right when it came out in 2000, and listening to it again, I realize I'd forgotten some of the lighter touches around the edges of the distorted riffs and pounding drums. Some synth, some Rhodes. This does not diminish the ferocity. It is still very much Akimbo. Enjoy, my friends.

Download Akimbo - Army of Evil Robots Programmed for Human Destruction - 320kbps with sleeve scans here

Homo Eradicus

I honestly don't know much about the band Homo Eradicus. I learned of them through the Is It... Dead? Northwest Hardcore compilation that came out in 2001 and featured bands like Raft of Dead Monkeys and Botch (speaking of which, if anyone out there has a cd copy of Is It... Dead? that they could hook me up with a rip of, that would be awesome). While they're just as aggressive and screamy as you'd expect from the local hardcore bands of the era, musically Homo Eradicus definitely fall to the slightly more technical side of the pile. Homo Eradicus featured members of Akimbo and Teen Cthulhu and singer Dylan Sharp went on to play in the Olympia based punk rock band Gun Outfit.

As always, if you've got any more info on a band or it's members, have any memories or need me to make a correction, feel free to leave a comment.

Misanthropology

Unreleased 2nd Recording Session