McRad

Absence of Sanity (Uprising)
by Scott Hefflon

This is the sound of skate punk from the mid-’80s. Rereleased for your appreciation, sounding all vital and out-front like we rarely hear these days… This was back when a lot of singers “yelped” and “hollered” like The Bouncing Souls, and there was a lot of soloing and guitar crunch that wasn’t derivative of metal (look it up kids, check out the Crumbsuckers and be humbled). While I missed McRad at the time (I was a mosher, not a skanker, if you have any idea what I’m talking about), they played with Minor Threat, JFA, Agnostic Front, Dag Nasty, Corrosion of Conformity, and all sorts of others. In other words, it’s old but valid and, unlike other classics, still holds up and sounds bad-ass and “raw” without sounding like shit. If you have a few of those Tony Hawk video game comps and wanna know where all this “shredding” stuff came from before metal doods used it to describe speedmetal/thrash, check out Absence of Sanity and some old Thrasher videos some fool sold to “put his childish [fun] ways behind him” and make a down-payment on an SUV or something “grown-up” like that.
(PO Box 42259 Philadelphia, PA 19104)