TVD's Alternative Ulcer

It's been a long time since I've heard music that really made me f-ing excited. I mean, I hear a ton of music that I dig. That I'll play again and again. But nothing that's made me really want to jump on my bed and run in place for 5 minutes straight like I'm in some horrible 80s workout montage.

Then I started reading about Death. A group comprised of the Hackney brothers-three black teenagers from Detroit who put out an album in 1975 that I had never heard before, nor could I get my hands on. That is, until February. The Hackney boys, you see, now live in Vermont where they moved away from Detroit and towards a new sound-gospel rock and eventually to reggae. So other than really really rare copies of the record and recordings, the album has pretty much been nowhere to be found.

The story goes something like this: a son of one of the Hackney boys was out in San Francisco at some party and hears "Tryangle" playing and thinks basically "holy shit that's my dad!" Eventually one of the Hackney's dug the original recordings out of a box in his attic and in February 2009 Drag City reissued seven songs of what was originally a 12-song album, 'For the Whole World to See' for the whole world to enjoy. Fortunately on Record Store Day I happened across a copy over at Red Onion Records and Books.

Death has been called a "power-trio" whose sound is "proto-punk" but I don't think it's that simple to classify them as such. And then there's people like Adam Moerder who, I think, downplays how great the album is when he writes that "[t]he album falls short of a diamond-in-the-rough-caliber discovery, but considering these seven songs are the remains of an aborted 12-song full-length-from a band that reinvented itself every three or four years, 'For the Whole World' holds up well alongside, say, concurrent Blue Oyster Cult or New York Dolls albums."

I think he's wrong. But that's just my opinion. You kids have yourselves a listen and let me know what you think. To me Death never sounded so sweet.

Death - Keep On Knocking (Mp3)
Death - Let The World Turn (Mp3)
Death - Where Do We Go From Here (Mp3)
Death - Politicians In My Eyes (Mp3)