Welcome to Boston, Part 3 (The Raw Power of Dischord)

Shortly after our last trip to Boston, Jeff was desperate to get back to the Newbury Comics store in Harvard Square, and pick up some vinyl that he had to leave behind. With Christmas right around the corner, I wasn't too anxious to get back down, since I had no extra money to spend. I happened to be catching up with my brother, Paul, and reminiscing about the trips that we used to take down to that store. I mentioned to him that Jeff wanted to take another ride down, and Paul said that he would be interested in going, and that he could buy me a couple of Christmas presents while we were down there. Sweet! It wasn't long and we had a trip planned. While we were there, I only bought one record, the Four Seven Inches comp from Dischord on clear vinyl. I downloaded this years ago, but for some reason I never really listened to it...just burned it to CD and threw it in the pile. After reading blogs from Marcus and Lins, and seeing each of them post about S.O.A., I figured that I needed to give it another listen. Holy shit, these records are amazing. Teen Idles and S.O.A. are the better of the two, but Government Issue and Youth Brigade were really good as well. So here we are, over 25 years after their original release, and I'm finally getting into these bands. It's a shame that it took me so long to get into them. I guess that's bound to happen, when my mindset used to be to download anything and everything...some great shit gets overlooked. Thankfully, I was reminded to go back and revisit it. Classic D.C. hardcore.

Since Jeff said that it just wouldn't be right for me to leave the store with only one record, he said that he would buy me one. I had seen the Raw Power album on our first trip, but I ended up putting it back so that I could grab something else. This time I wasn't going to leave it behind. Cool Italian hardcore from 1985. It was released on Toxic Shock Records, and back when I was getting into punk and hardcore when I was in High School, I used to use Toxic Shock for all my mailorder. Apparently, Giuseppe, the guitarist died recently, and so the band reunited in his memory and did a couple of tours. Toxic Shock also decided to re-release the bands record to support the tour.

The biggest surprise was that other than what he bought me for Christmas, Paul didn't really find anything that he wanted. How do you spend an afternoon in one of the coolest record stores in the Boston area, and walk away empty handed!?!?! Blows my mind.