C.I.A. Drug Fest

Widely brushed off as a novelty act, late 80's preteen punk band Old Skull occupies a unique niche in music history, like some sort of Reaganomics-era Jackson 5. It's easy to dismiss this echoey noise as the work of malleable children under the thumb of a controlling parental figure, or as the adolescent and aimless squealings of little kids with unformed musical abilities and little self-awareness. I, on the other hand, am of the opinion that it holds up purely on its own merits, legitimately and without irony or qualification. It's ugly, strange, and a bit daffy at times, but so were the 80s and everything that's followed. A couple of years of living next door to a certain member of Old Skull in the oos gave me a particularly affectionate perspective on the band, I feel, but so has pouring through reams and piles of bizarre music in the course of shaping the Swamp. Listening to this next to the vast legions of twisted bedroom black metal out in the cosmos, all the subnormal doom bands and weird inept punk, I can't help but smile. Black metal bands rarely sing about pizza these days.
Suaside [sic]