A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the 4 colored Essentials LP set by Reducers SF. Looking back, it’s pretty incredible how fertile punk’s creative soil was in the Nineties. Sure – everyone knows the mid-Nineties as being the period which broke punk into the mainstream pop punk and made bands like Lagwagon, Propagandhi, Green Day, NOFX, Offspring (I’ve written this list out several times before) and innumerable others household names and/or institutions who would help shape how punk...
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the …And Out Come The Wolves (5 x 7” vinyl set) by Rancid. It sounds a little sensationalist to make this declaration but, of the albums which really sparked the punk revival of the 1990s (including – but certainly not limited to – Punk In Drublic by NOFX, Stranger Than Fiction by Bad Religion, Dookie by Green Day and Smash by the Offspring), it was Rancid who ran closest and truest to...
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the deluxe reissue LP portion of the Manic Street Preachers’ Holy Bible box set. The problem with the Brit-Pop explosion that happened in the 1990s (well, it was a problem for some people – others ate it up with a spoon) is that it was a really pretty, really clean and really sterile-looking solution to the void left in pop when grunge suddenly lost Kurt Cobain in 1994. Everything just seemed to...