Sunday, August 26, 2012

World Class Punk - Various Artists (USA 1984)

An Uncle Roddus Album Review




Uncle Roddus has been shopping lately, both locally and on Amazon and have amassed quite a back log of new CDs that I want to review here on Blog Roddus. I will start with the most recent arrival because I actually know it quite well due to actually owning a cassette copy of this set way back when it was released. Quite how some obscure release like this turned up here in Christchurch, New Zealand back then is a mystery but I really enjoyed quite a number of the fast and furious punk blasts in this set and several of them became favourites over the ensuring years. The Cassette was sold quite some time ago and the album slipped from my conscious memory until I remembered about it recently during some blog research on some obscure punk blog and I managed to find a digital copy to down load and get re-acquainted with. Several of those favourite songs then ended up on a punk sampler I created a while back. I was quite surprised to see it available on CD on Amazon the other week and so ordered a copy.
It's quite apt to be reviewing this at the moment with all the publicity surrounding the Russian Girl punk band Pussy Riot and their incarceration for subversiveness by the Russian authorities. It just goes to show that World class punk is still alive and well. This selection of very obscure punks stems mostly from Europe with some cuts from South Africa, South America and even a really obscure number from little old NZ.
With most of these sonic blasts lasting under 2 minutes and some under a minute, we are dealing with some fast, furious and often very lo-fi noise here. Some of the very badly recorded lo-fi hardcore stuff is a bit too much to handle but those shots blasts are soon over with and we can enjoy all of the rest covering a good swathe of the contemporary punk scene of the time and several classics here still get me excited. I will rate this set 4/5.

No comments:

Post a Comment