Nothing Done To The First Step

A few months back, I picked up a special pressing of Nothing Done's Powertrip LP, which you can check out here. I was trying to find some pressing info about the record, but could not seem to locate the pressing info on the Not Just Words Records website. I was pretty sure that I had checked that site for pressing info before, but this time out I couldn't find anything. After searching for a few minutes, I clicked the Contact Us link and fired off an email to the man who used to run the label, Ronald. Minutes later I got a reply with pretty specific directions on how to find the pressing info on the website..."scroll down to the bottom of the page". Wow. Am I lazy or just blind? Ronald and I ended up exchanging a few emails, and he let me know that he had an additional copy of the Idiot Stomp EP mispressing, and he'd sell it if I was interested.Of course I took him up on the offer. Nothing Done were so good, and I'm always looking for opportunities to add to my collection for them.

When Not Just Words received the original pressing of vinyl, they noticed that the first few seconds were missing from Side A. The label pulled 65 on black and 12 on colored vinyl for themselves, and the rest were rejected. 50 of the black vinyl were used for the record release show, while the remainder got a special cover for the record nerds to fight over.

Thankfully the whole story about this pressing is printed on the backside of the record cover.

Of the 27 copies with this sleeve, 15 are on black vinyl, an 12 are on green with pink splatter. I'm glad that I got the more limited of the two, but when you are talking the difference between 12 and 15, you'd have to be a pretty big geek to care about such things. Welcome to my world.

Right next to Have Heart's The Things We Carry, What We Know by The First Step may very well be one of the best albums released in the past ten years. Five years after their initial release date, both of those albums still sound fresh and vital. For some reason, I had never gotten around to picking up the second pressing of What We Know from Not Just Words. I asked Ronald if he had any spare copies laying around, and he managed to find one copy and agreed to sell it to me for a very fair price.

330 pressed on white vinyl.

Shipping from The Netherlands to the States was crazy expensive, so I asked Ronald to ship the records to Marcus in the UK, and then he could ship them to me and save me some money. Marcus has used me as his personal Postal Bitch a few times, so it was time for me to return the favor. Since I'd never heard of a band named Deal With It, Marcus decided to properly introduce me to the band's first album, End Time Prophecies, and slip it in with the other records that he was forwarding to me. Deal With It play some serious metal influenced hardcore in the same vein as NY bands like Maximum Penalty, Leeway, and Cro-Mags...only DWI aren't at the same caliber as the bands that influenced them. Good stuff, but it isn't blowing me away...we'll see if it sinks in after a few more spins.

Thank you, Ronald and Marcus, for the records.