Sunday, July 25, 2010

R.A.F. 7" Echoes Of A Slamming Door/Cherry Blossom (Whiplash Records 1980)


Whiplash records, in it's short time, put out a nice little handful of singles that mostly concentrated on the New York scene except for 3 releases that came out of Connecticut, this being one from there. When it arrived in the mail it came with a nice little surprise in the form of a sleeve. This release was originally issued with no sleeve, so naturally my curiosity grew and I contacted Justin over at the Collectorscum site for help and he didn't let me down as he got in touch with Whiplash head honcho Andy Doback and he gave us the scoop on this elusive sleeve.

From Andy Doback:
"We never had an official pic sleeve for the RAF single. The sleeve in your email was done privately in the late 1980s by a French friend of ours called Morpho. His dad owned a printing shop in Paris where Morpho worked. He designed this sleeve and printed about 25 - he gave them to a few friends & I got about 10 for Rick, some of our friends, and me. He did a nice job. Unfortunately, Morpho died a few years ago - he had diabetes. He was a good friend of Eric & Pascal of the Holy Curse."

A big thanks goes to Justin and Andy Doback for the information.


R.A.F. - Side 1 Echoes Of A Slamming Door


R.A.F. - Side 2 Cherry Blossom

Rael Rean 7" Adjust-A-Girl/A To V/Weakdays 7" (Flying Bomb Records 2002)


This was one of those blindly bought records based on it's cover in hope of it being something tasty. There is nothing better than picking up a record with a tame or unsuspecting sleeve and finding out that it was merely the bands way of throwing you off or baiting people like myself that will buy a record based on how ridiculous or in bad taste it looks. The payoffs are never in the same numbers as the strike outs but, that's part of the fun and gamble I suppose. I didn't notice at first that the great Flying Bomb records had put this one out or the buy would have been a no brainer as that label has unleashed a slew of killer releases by, Baseball Furies, The Hunches, The Dirtbombs, The Kill-A-Watts, The Blowtops etc. Rael Rean gravitated more towards what some may call Art Punk but they also had a certain pop sensibility to their tunes that makes it tough to shake this record out of your head. Other than this fine 3 songer which, apparently, I forgot to post the third song so that should be incentive enough to track down a copy of this sucker for yourself, they had a track on a comp of all Ann Arbor MI bands, that's where they were from, and a CD EP which, I would really like to get a copy of so if anyone out there is holding, drop me a line. This one goes out to all the hit's, misses, and the hunt itself.

Rael Rean - Side 1


Rael Rean - Side 2

Thursday, July 1, 2010

Seditionaries 7" - Wherewolf / Shapes (Rabid Records 1982)

I'm just gonna come out and say that I don't know a whole lot about this one so if someone does, please fill me in. I do know that they were from California, most likely Southern, and that this was their only release. Wherewolf is a great Horror Punk number that would fit nicely in comparison to TSOL or Bakersfield's own Burning Image. Some may even say the Misfits which I could agree with, they even went as far as to put the Crimson Ghost image on the hub of their 7". The flip has a great cover of the Yarbirds tune Shapes which kinda steal's the show for me on this one. Enjoy!

Seditionaries - Side 1 - Wherewolf


Seditionaries - Side 2 - Shapes