Tuesday, July 28, 2015

CD Review: Nail House Party - A Compilation (Emotional Response)

[http://jenandstew.com/item/-A3-NAIL-HOUSE-PARTY-vinyl-compilation/237/c9]

First and foremost I could only find this as a record on the official Emotional Response website so I'm not sure how much the compact disc might go for and all of the other glorious details so if you don't own a record player or for whatever reason just plain don't like vinyl and want this as a CD I recommend contacting Emotional Response and asking them about it yourself.   You can even reference them to this review with the photographic proof that a CD does in fact exist.

There are only three artists on this entire compilation that I recognize and that is only because I've reviewed their releases on Emotional Response previously.    The comp starts with a loud, distorted pop rock number that is the right way to get things going by Bad Daddies and from there the music ranges from twee, garage, psych and all around fuzz to even a slower folk number and the punk rock sounds of TSOL.    Definitely a diverse line up but the placement of each song on here helps to keep them from sounding out of place.

Whenever I think of good soundtracks and compilations I always am forced to go back to my teenage years.   It seems like good compilations and especially soundtracks don't exist after the year 2000.   Maybe it's just me because I'm getting older, but I'm still a sucker for the old Fat Wreck Chords "Survival of the Fattest", Epitaph's "Punk-O-Rama" (up to about 4), Drive Thru's "You'll Never Eat Fast Food Again" and anything from Nitro Records when Guttermouth was on their roster still.   It's just that these compilations mean so much to me that they become as important as the albums the bands on them put out themselves.

With "Nail House Party", I'm taken back to that moment in time when my sister worked for Eblens and was given a CD compilation of Vans "Off The Wall Artists" or some such idea and it was filled with ska, punk and ska-punk bands so she handed it to me because she knew I'd like it and she didn't.  (I still have it to this day)  It's that feeling when you get so involved in a compilation that you'll hear a song by a band on their actual album and wait for the next song to be by a different band entirely.   If you need a most excellent example of this track down the Victory Records sampler "Victory Style 5" and listen to it, then listen to Catch 22's "Keasby Nights" and see how the same song on both can be surrounded by something so different.

One reason why I don't like compilations is because they usually expose me to a lot of new music all at once- as I like to hear one new band at a time, over a slower period of time- and I always end up just going through Bandcamp, searching for them all and listening to all sorts of different albums by them because I just love them so much.   I actually was looking up Kids On A Crime Spree and found them only on this compilation which has a Bandcamp link apparently, but alas, still no mention of there being a CD.

So go ahead and take the plunge.   Listen to a bunch of bands you may or may not have heard of before and fall in love with a compilation the way that I did when I was a teenager.     Though I suppose if I'm never too old to discover new music I'm never too old for another compilation so neither are you.





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