Long Beach Blvd

(Skunk/Cornerstone RAS)
by Jon Sarre

Market saturation is to the nth level, but, ahh, who cares, let’s do another local punk compilation. Long Beach, CA this time, shhhhhiiiitttt!! New stuff from Secret Hate, scene godfathers from back in ’82, glad they’re back, but can’t say I missed ’em in the years they’ve been gone. Everything’s still the same, that’s to say they still haven’t risen above mediocre.

Corn Doggy Dog and the Half Pound, don’t y’know, almost have a topical name, but they really don’t fuckin’ rise above the muck that covers any unrecorded band, but oh yeah, they’re recorded. Just say that a Stones cover gone poppunk buzzy (“Connection”) is inspired for these clowns. Speaking of which, Das Clown‘s been around the block and obviously can afford a decent studio budget, so it sounds okay, even though they’ve got little more than a Secret Hate cover, some “go fuck yerself”s and robot slave of society trite tripe. Blah, blah, blah, blah….

The solvent inhaling Juice Bros. show up next playing slow, singing slower, actually duplicating the effect of the first five seconds of a nitrous oxide high, y’know when all the brain cells start popping? They talk about being fat (as in weighty, rather than “phat” which means something else, I guess), so that makes ’em spiritual stepkids to Poison Idea, or somethin’, ‘cept the Kings of Punk never really sounded fat, they just are.

It’s good to end with a little joke, so here’s the Pivot Foots. They’ve “Got the Marshals, but we forgot the songs” and they profess to like Hüsker Dü but wanna be Mötley Crüe. Kramer produced most of their stuff for some reason, but stuck the singer’s annoying singsong vox up front. I guess he didn’t want anyone to miss all the laughs. That’s good cuz that’s all there is here.
(6285 E Spring St #234 Long Beach CA 90808)