All This Sunshine is Just Going to End

It's time for another piece of that candy of nostalgia, wrapped in a shoddy DIY wrapper and tainted with just enough poison and broken glass to give you a slightly "off" feeling for a while.  This backhanded, backward glance is dangled before us by Rights Reserved once again, a band resolute to drag you behind the house and shove your face in a steaming, shameful pile of memories best left alone.  As promised, I'm offering the band's split with Assfactor 4 as a starting point.  Rights Reserved are in what I consider their prime on these two tracks, holding back none of their prodigious angst in neither the music nor lyric department.  The only other song of theirs that matches these would be the one on the 400DayHeadache comp. While their LP is full of heartfelt and emotionally charged material, none quite compare to the power of these three songs.  On the other side, Assfactor 4 make one of their earliest vinyl appearance before going on to dominate the modern hardcore "scene" of the nineties.  The two tracks offered mark a transitional point between the members' time in Tonka and Unherd, and the solidification of the A-4 sound on their later 7" and LPs.  Essential for fans, plus the mood meshes well with the RR tracks.

I also mentioned that I would post Rights Reserved's other EPs, and while I am a lazy-ass, jaded, distracted son of a gun, I'm no liar.  Many bands have enjoyable early material that shows them working out their ideas; RR's early 7"s are fine examples of that.  The band mixes and alternates between indie rock, punk, and melodic hardcore, like, well, small town youths trying to find themselves and having fun doing it.  With no small measure of talent, I might add.

Rights Reserved 7"s

Everyone's Already Said Everything

Besides sludge, melodic punk, and the newest releases and reissues I've grabbed, vacations always send my musical choices in one final direction-- an often inebriated amble through the gleaming boardwalks of nostalgia.  As my musical coming of age was in the nineties, it's not surprising that I should reunite with some Rights Reserved records this summer, a band with whom I made an instant connection so many years ago (first exposure was the Assfactor 4 split).  The problem of genre is only a problem if one obsesses over it.  If you're one of those, I'd say for a brief moment RR may have been called hardcore, in the same way Kerosene 454 was.  Which is to say that in retrospect... they were not really that.  The band, in their closing statement of the liner notes, chooses the self-deprecating "crappy rock" tag, which if you take time to read the lyrics, they seem like the types that would say that.  I will gladly settle on indie rock/punk with a definite DC/Maryland feel.  What brought instant camaraderie between me and RR's rock was the honest, confrontational, and ultimately cathartic way they handled the often overlooked, but extremely frightening dilemma of young adulthood.  We come barreling out into the real world like a second birth, knowing everything and sneering at the masses who of course have it all wrong, ready to conquer the world, only to be repeatedly tripped up by the baggage of our past, and clothes-lined by our arrogance and ignorance.  The boys in Rights Reserved, jaded before their time, knew this I think.  Maybe they even understood how crucial those pitfalls would be in making us who we are.  I can't say for sure, as the LP posted below was their last testament as a band.  It's a bitter pill to swallow, but this band's tough love will get it down your gullet one way or another.

Rights Reserved LP (Assorted Porkchops Records, 1996)

A Rights Reserved EPs post should make it here before too long.

400DayHeadache

We're gonna slow things down a little, add a pinch of dissonance, and coat them with a nice glaze of melody for easy ingestion. "400 Day Headache" spins like a good Allied Records comp from the mid nineties, but this one was put out by an operation called Unite and Fight Records. The cover above has a few very recognizable names, but a few that are less so offer some pretty impressive contributions as well. A very nice listen that brings back angst-y coming of age memories-- as does the suggested retail price. Four bucks in 1993 got you an LP shipped to your doorstep, and the label was still able to send fifty cents of the proceeds to The Rainforest Action Network. Bygone as those days seem, at least these days you can get a free simulation of the real thing beamed right to you...

"400 Day Headache" LP