Swampy, fuzzy, KINKS-like rock’n’roll. Seems a little too produced to call it garage music. Tons of energy, for sure, but it seems sort of put-on to me. It’s also got this herky-jerky thing going on that I almost always find annoying. Other than a nice cover of the GUN CLUB’s “Sex Beat,” this is mostly forgettable for me.
It’s a little freak show on wax, with an A-side showcasing some Rip-Off Records-style garage spiked with the shadowy psych of the SCIENTISTS courtesy of L.A.’s HYPER MINDS. The PIZZA STAINS out of San Gabriel Valley occupy the B-side with two tracks of bass-heavy and bare-bones RAMONES-y rocking, no brains required. While not directly demonic, these sounds are sufficiently twisted for ass-shake-inducing Halloween party bumpage.
The FUZZ BOMBERS were a blink-and-you’ll-miss-them San Gabriel Valley band active circa 1998, built from ex-members of the JAWAS and future members of the TAKEDOWNS and BAD MOTIVATOR, among others—basically the extended universe of singer/label-runner Brian Von Wolfe. This tape pulls together two sessions from that year, and the results are classic no-budget garage punk: fast, loose, and sounding slightly better than recorded-on-a-boombox. There’s an early version of “Get Out Of,” later re-recorded by the TAKEDOWNS, but this one is faster and a shade more raw. None of this rewrites the genre playbook, but it’s a perfectly decent document of late-’90s punk ephemera. Maybe essential if you’re trying to fill out the Brian-adjacent family tree; otherwise, it’s probably not going to have a huge impact on anybody.
