SPEAKING OF FOUR DUDES IN A sweaty room hammering songs onto a cassette tape thru a four track… Check this punk rock time capsule that just came across the desk from a 1987 Bremerton band. They were called Toxic Slaughter. One of the dudes from the band just put the original cassette tape recording up on the internet. Not as a reunion, or an anniversary release, but as “nothing more than a piece of bremerton punk rock history trapped in time.” Thirteen tracks. Twelve minutes. Song titles like ‘Taking A Vacation From Radiation,’ and ‘Nuke The Nimitz.’ It’s brash. It’s obnoxious. It’s fast. It’s loud. It’s young and dumb. After a few groans and some gibberish, the first song looks into one of life’s big questions, ‘toxic water killed the otters, are you happy with yourself?’ The next song is about the Flintstones. Third song: ‘Cops Suck.’ The recording is raw. The songs fall out of tempo and out of tune at times. It’s unpolished. It’s imperfect. All the glorious rawness is made even better by the story in the liner notes of how the band scammed the record-able cassette tapes from a church group and dubbed their punk rock demo over religious propaganda. // NICK SLEDGE
TOXIC SLAUGHTER ‘Bremerton 1987’ up at mikethepike.bandcamp.com, album art by Ryan Maiden
