VISION SMASHED
Rejects
Messthetics Greatest Hits: The Sounds of D.I.Y. 1977-80
Hyped to Death : 2006
[Buy It]

TEEN LINE
The Shivvers
Lost Hits from Milwaukee's First Family of Powerpop: 1979-82
Hyped to Death : 2006
[Buy It]

INVERTABRATES
The Instant Automatons
Another Wasted Sunday Afternoon
Hyped to Death : 2006
[Buy It]

WE ARE MACHINES
Animals & Men
Revel in the Static
Hyped to Death : 2006
[Buy It]

Before there were iPods, mp3 blogs, online content outlets, filesharing networks, MySpaces, and ponderous indie PR apparati, there were ... tapes. Tapes and records. Tapes and records and stapled-together zines. I'm not one to nostalgically pine for the halcyon days when people who couldn't play instruments committed lofty ideas to crappily-recorded vinyl, but I don't disdain those days either - there is something persistently charming and romantic about the D.I.Y. ideal. It's not as if it doesn't exist anymore, it just seems less heroically doomed when digital recording equipment is so cheap and the Internet provides such a broad and relatively open playing field for distribution. The idea of making a tape to distribute amoung your friends and local media is obsolete and local identity is on the wane as bands at all levels of visibility compete for the same national and international cultural capital. But reissue label Hyped to Death is committed to immortalizing the highly compartmentalized D.I.Y. apex of the late 70s and early 80s with a series of no-bullshit reissues, digitizing rightfully forgotten bands that are more important for historical than musical value and unjustly forgotten gems alike. Like a D.I.Y. post-punk Nuggets, Messthetics Greatest Hits: The Sounds of D.I.Y. 1977-80 showcases the stark, cerebral trends that overtook British indie music in the wake of punk's mainstream commodification - it's all brittle drum machines and post-human analog electronics, buzzsaw garage guitars and brainy Scritti Polittisms. Rejects' 1977 song "Vision Smashed" appears for the first time on this comp, displaying the combination of pop-leaning melody and dirt-cheap yet innovative production value that would mark Bruno Wizard's work with his slightly more well-known band The Homosexuals. The Shivvers, had they not been moored in below-the-radar Milwaukee, might have been a Blondie or Pretenders caliber power-pop band; "Teen Line" is a near-perfect girl-group/new wave confection. Animals & Men's "We Are Machines" bears the marks of this particular scene's persistent technophobia, and the Instant Automatons' "Invertabrates" is steeped in its penchant for homemade electronics and dub trappings. It's poignant stuff from our current vantage, these petrified remains of a once-vibrant and dynamic culture that levelled an unwavering gaze at the face of futility.