Vinyl Parasites

The Parasites (see here), spent much of the nineties being recklessly prolific, sporadically brilliant and sadly marginal. Their 1996 single, Hang-Up did get released by big-time pop label Lookout Records but that never brought the band the audience it deserved. That single was another criminally neglected three-song e.p. where Dave Parasite channeled the ghosts of Joey, Dee and Johnny to create a pop music with guts.

Perhaps it's harder to build an audience when you release two tribute records in one year, one for the Beatles and one for the Misfits. But you, the audience of MRML, are too discerning a music obsessive to be anything but intrigued by such a curious juxtaposition.

Samples are here, download links are below the cover images and comments (y'know free speech) may be added at the bottom of the post.

Download Hang Up

Download Last Caress

Download En Homage aux Beatles

Parasite Time

Dave Parasite is man out of time. While Dave has lead an ever-mutating line up of the Parasites, (a California via New Jersey pop-punk band and not the thieving little organisms) for twenty years, little about the band ever changes. When Dave straps on his guitar and takes on the mike, it's Parasite Time - a little 1989, a lot of 1979 and, hell, even some 1969. Dave's contemporaries are late eighties bands bands like Sloppy Seconds and Screeching Weasel, all of whom worship the Ramones' 1979 LP Rocket to Russia but beyond that he's a classical pop song-writer who, when reaching back in time for covers, leans on such sixties tune smiths as the Beatles, Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchel.

This 1992 single may still be the purest distillation of his work. Each song is a perfect shard of pop and...fuck it...just listen - it's all right here in glorious 192 kbps sound.

Download Paramania

Thanks to skutchy for the images

For further context here's an early comp they appeared on, their first album, another walloping single and and a witty and wistful band memoir that everyone who loves the spirit of D.I.Y. needs to read.

The new album is a devastating return to form and certainly the best full-length of the band's career. As an inducement to go and buy some new Parasites material, here's the sledgehammer pop of "Gonna Get You Back" from the brand-spanking-new Solitary.

French Electro-Punk Weekend

By 1988, Bérurier Noir along with Ludwig Von 88 and Haine Brigade constituted a sort of anarcho-electro punk French scene. This nifty poster sleeve benefit 7" depicts a pretty blunt anti-fascist, pro-united front message and the songs all rock out in a tinny, yet catchy way

Download Bérurier Noir/Haine Brigaide split

I bough this record years ago and, while I still have the vinyl, the poster has gone missing. So, therefore, thanks for this rip and scan is due to this site (if my translating skills are still workable).

Cirque du Punk

I'm not French, despite growing up in a French town named St. Norbert, teaching in a French Immersion school and currently residing in St. Boniface (the largest French-Canadian community outside of Quebec) with a truly Francophone wife.

So while I love and admire much about French culture, their reputation as musical schlockmesiters is well founded. An old friend from St.Norbert recoiled in horror when I asked him if the song he was singing was a French song. "Just because I'm French doesn't mean I listen to French music!" (Funnily enough the song in question turned out to be "Autobahn" by German electro-rockers, Kraftwerk.)

So with all the French musical mediocrity, what to make of Bérurier Noir - masked anarchists surrounded by fire-eating back-up singers and dancing clowns driven by the clinkiest drum machine in music history?

Well, despite all these discordant elements, Bérurier Noir's songs are all dead-simple sing-alongs led by staccato punk riffs. It's as if the Sex Pistols' with Fellini and Malcolm McLaren as their Svengalis, created their own little Cirque du Punk.

This single, L'Empereur de Tomato-Ketchup, from 1986, lays the blueprint for the band from which they steadily built upon without ever abandoning the basic design.

Download "L' Empereur de Tomato-Ketchup

A People’s History of Propagandhi: A Speculative Non-Fiction

Prologue

Once or twice a year a student, one of those scruffy-looking, shit-disturbers, will ask me, their modestly scruffy educator, "Hey, is it true you know the guys in that punk band, Propagandhi?"
Like So-crates, I answer with a question, "You want to hear the truth or the good story?"
"What's the difference?" sneers our S.L.S.D.
"Either way it comes down to this; Propagandhi made it from the basement to the stage because of me."
"Bullshit!"
So, once again I'm forced to teach the truth, the honest-to-Kronos truth about...

Propagandhi, Thrash Sundae and Me

So, amidst all the fooferah over the forthcoming fifth Propagandhi album, Supporting Caste, will the truth ever be released? Sure, the band’s web-site (the version that has since been yanked down) has the Winner's Propaganda about how these two boys from PLAP (Portage la Prairie, Manitoba, Canada), Jord Samolesy and Chris Hannah, became globe-trotting punk-metal anarchists (y'know pro-feminist, anti-fascist etc.) and the voice of a splinter faction of their generation. However, mainstream Propagandhi historians, with their breezy but Soviet-styled revisionism, have covered-up the band's true beginnings. "So then we got a call from a young lad named "Stinky" Mike Braumeister who wanted to play bass," says the band's web-site, a version parroted by the lackeys over at Wikepdia. And how did this epoch-making phone call come to pass?

Before I Can Tell You That Story, I Have To Tell You This Story...

It's Talent Show night in a suburban Winnipeg high school auditorium in 1988. After a parade featuring a Van Halen cover band, Christian-pop karaoke (first and second place winners respectively) and even a synthesizer duo, the lights came up upon scraggly-haired speed-metal upstarts, Thrash Suandae.

Thrash Sundae's lead singer/guitarist, Mike Bryant had a locker, covered in Suicidal Tendencies and Venom pictures, right beside my own (which featured only a toy spider armed with a fork, named Boris). Back then, Mike was like a young Dee Dee Ramone, terse, awkward and musically-obsessed. Needless to say, all of our conversations were about music.

Standing in front of an audience for the first time, Mike seethed with a twitchy energy. However he and his band's absence of technical expertise, not a plus in their chosen genre, deflated them halfway through their ten-minute opening dirge. When the song fell apart, they stopped playing.
"Uh," Mike stared at his guitar as if a piece of it had gone missing. Then he looked up and glowered at something in the distance. "We're gonna start again."
The audience, en masse, let out a pained grunt.
That's when the power went out.
Mike hit his guitar, which let out only a tinny little brr-aaang. He swiveled his gaze over to the tech crew and screamed, "You can't cut me off!"
Then the curtain came down on Thrash Sundae, never to rise again.

Back to the Motor League

Now in 1990 Propagandhi was a rinky-dink two-man basement operation. At that time they were stuck putting out demos, slapping up funny but desperate posters at Records on Wheels and never playing live due to their lack of a dependable bass player. On their web-site, they mention their "progressive thrash band needs bass player" poster but they neglect to mention their later ad that copied the cover of Bad Religion's No Control, claiming that that band was going to play local dirty-watering hole The Royal Albert, before saying, "Just kidding, actually we need a bass player and if we don't find one we're gonna play a set of acoustic Crawl (a local thrash-metal act) covers".

Concurrently, I'm researching a feature article for my university paper, The Manitoban, on Winnipeg's underground music. While picking bands to profile, local zine-tyke Zedgrav played me Propagandhi's first demo and then later an acoustic...er...demo for "Ska Sucks". (Available for your "listening pleasure" below.) So I interviewed them for my article. Jord said, approximately, "We're like a cross between Doughboys and Metallica". (That sorta changed). The article's failure to appear peeved off some of my interviewees. Jord and Chris, however, never fond of media exposure, could care less, especially since I made my former locker partner Mike (soon given the nom de punk of "Stinky" Mike Braumeister) call them to offer his new-and-improved bass services. Mike had, since the days of Thrash Sundae, formed and then broken-up a tight, punchy hardcore unit named, Orange Juice. ("Why Orange Juice?” I asked. "Because it's a powerful substance, man," Mike replied.) Within weeks, Propagandhi Mark 1 was primed and ready

I witnessed both of their first two shows opening up for Guilt Parade, whose precise, bitter and yet melodic brand of hardcore formed a lasting influence on the boys. Their sets rocked but only offered a glimpse of the beast they were to become.

By the time Mike left the band for the greener, wetter climes of Vancouver, I was already living there. After moving back to Winnipeg, I caught Propagandhi Mark 2 at a smoky, sweaty Draft Night at the Royal Albert and they owned that rickety little stage. John K. wore a dress, Chris wrote FAG across his bare chest in Magic Marker and Jord may or may not have mooned the crowd. Most importantly though, they'd written a brace of inciting and intricate songs. The seething (if occasionally confusing) "Hallie Sellasie Up Your Ass", in particular, demonstrated how much they'd honed their attack. And they had a new bass player, a familiar one. You see my unpublished Manitoban article had also thwarted the rise to college-rock fame of a band named Toothpick Hercules, who were John K. Sampson's first band, thus compelling him to become the newest member of the soon-to-be-famous version of Propagandhi.

Then Fat Wreck-Chords came calling and a peculiar brand of fame followed but yours fuckin' truly, like Leon Trotsky, got airbrushed out of the picture.

Epilogue

His question answered, our scruffy-lookin' shit-disturbin’, question-asker will now look up and say somehting like, "Hey, all that B.S. almost killed an entire class."

And though a little class-killing would surely excite the Propagandhi crew, I just say:

"Get back to work."

(The latest version of the band, but that black Government Issue that The Todd is wearing is pure old school, especially in Winnipeg.)


Soundtrack

Well first off, here's something you've never heard before. It is, as Chris says in the preamble, "acoustic Propagandhi solo project album demo thing", provisionally entitled "The I Love Skinheads Song" but that's not the title it grew to fame under. (Rumour had it that a Winnipeg ska band once wrote an answer song called "Punk Sucks" which claimed "the bands are only in it to say fuck." We're cleverer than most cities, we really are.)


Download this tiny, tiny piece of history here.

Here's a bootleg of old demos from the early Sampson era (I gave away those old tapes long ago) called, rather suck-ishly, "Reclaim the Streets"

Download Reclaim the Streets

Moving along to the Fat era, here's the F.Y.P split, which includes three F.Y.P tracks and a Propagandhi song that is really a solo acoustic Weakerthans demo (never let these boys give you a track for your split e.p., children's music comp or seven inch box-set - you never know what you're gonna get).

Download Propagandhi/F.Y.P. split 7"

If you're looking for the top drawer stuff you need to go to their web-site, ignore my little historical slight, and just support the damn band.