Tuesday, January 26, 2016

Cassette Review: Aloners "Demo" (Hesitation Wound Records)


[Recently I placed an order with Sorry State Records for the new Whatever Brains LP.   I found some cassettes at low prices and decided to throw them into my order as well.   Initially, I had a total of ten cassettes in my shopping cart but two of them were out of stock and so I was given a refund and only actually sent eight cassettes by Sorry State Records.    Since most of these are from years ago but I don't really want to think of them as "classic" reviews yet, I am simply going to think of them as the Hateful 8 Cassette Reviews in honor of the new Quentin Tarantino movie.   This is review number 7 of 8 in The Hateful 8 Cassette Reviews.] 


One of those small world type coincidences with this cassette is that it begins with an audio clip from the movie "Airheads" in which he asks them how their band was called the Lone Rangers because there are three of them and so they're not really lone.   That same idea can be applied to the band calling themselves Aloners here, so I understand why the scene was sampled on this cassette, but what's kind of strange is that around the same time I was listening to this cassette Lemmy died.   So, of course, I posted to Twitter the question "Who would win in a fight: Lemmy or God?", which was a reference to "Airheads" that no one picked up on.

Even though it says up there that this is sold out it is worth noting that it can still be found and purchased via the official Aloners Bandcamp site for $4, which is well worth the price if you ask me.    In my google search I also managed to find an empty link for this cassette being on eBay and I was kind of interested in seeing how much it was going for second hand and if anyone was actually buying it, especially after seeing it was still available from the band themselves.   (It was on an eBay store outside of the U.S. though so that might have been the reason for it being on eBay)

Aloners has this gritty punk rawk sound that I can never seem to explain because I always feel like there should be this easy comparison for it and there simply is not.    Somewhere between Bullets & Octane and the dirty south comes something between Maylene and the Sons of Disaster and an amped up version of Halfacre Gunroom.     While these six songs have a free download price on the Aloners Bandcamp page, I would recommend spending the $4 to download them even if you're not interested in the cassette itself.   I'm not sure what happened to these guys, as this is from 2013, but some new music from them would be most welcomed and I hope that they are involved in music in some way these days.

That is the bittersweet quality of listening to these cassettes.   They were not that expensive when I bought them from Sorry State Records, but since they are a few years old I can never be sure that the band still exists.    So it's kind of like finding out about this really great band only finding them too late in some ways and, yeah, that is a bit of a bummer but great music is timeless so I at least know that I will always be able to put this on whenever I want and feel happy.  







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