These aren't really 'reviews' as much as just some recent posts that I plucked from my Instagram. Maybe that's cheating? Who knows.
Ill Repute "Oxnard - Land of No Toilets" EP (It's Alive reissue)
There are a TON of Mystic Records releases that I paid no attention to when they were first coming out, because Mystic bands had a general reputation of being generic and awful, and most of the records looked stupid and had stupid titles (case in point). I mean, I loved the RKL 7", and some of the tracks on those fifty-band "Party Animal"/"Party Or Go Home" compilations (Sluggo!), and the live G.I. recordings that came out, but almost everything else .... OOOF. The scuttlebutt around Mystic back then -- which I mostly picked up from reading band interviews in Flipside and so forth -- was that Doug Moody wanted to release records for almost every punk band that he could get his hands on, so that if one of the bands blew up and got big later, he'd already have the rights to their earlier recordings and could cash in. Unfortunately his mind was elsewhere when it came to the actual product, hence his pressings were miserably low-budget, and his quality control stunk, and probably the one band on the label that truly got 'big' was NoFX (sad trombone noises). The story doesn't end there, however; now that It's Alive has started reissuing some of the old Mystic catalog, I'm finding out that some of the stuff on Mystic that I'd originally overlooked is actually pretty good, like this nifty Ill Repute 7", which totally rips. Not only that, but Black Claw Records stuck a Miles Davis record in the box when they mailed it to me, plus I got a "transition" copy (meaning there are little black streaks in the otherwise clear vinyl, from when the pressing machine was switched-over from black vinyl to colored vinyl) which everyone knows are much more desirable than regular copies, just like everybody knows that record collectors are friggin' goofy.
