This Year's Savior

When I was a kid, one of the first distros that I would order from regularly was the Toxic Shock/Westworld mailorder. Through some awesome cosmic power of the universe, one of the Toxic Shock catalogs ended up in our hands. As a couple of kids stuck in Maine, it felt like we didn't have many options when it came to buying music...if it wasn't at the mall, we were out of luck. This catalog was like a gift from a punk god. We would pour over each catalog that we received, reading the entry and description for each album, and using a highlighter to mark the ones that sounded interesting. Man, I wish that I still had some of those old catalogs.

A lot of those bands on Toxic Shock Records just seemed odd. Since I absolutely loved the record from Th' Inbred, I was always interested to check out other releases on the Toxic Shock roster...but they seemed so strange, that I never took the chance on them. Almost 30 years later, and with big thanks to the internet, I'm finally checking out some of those records that I never quite had the stones to gamble my hard earned money on back in the late 80's.

I can't remember what caused the name Jesus Chrysler to pop into my head recently, but soon I was hunting down youtube videos, interested to finally hear them after all these years. I found a few and as soon as I heard Kick It Down, I was sold. It had a quirky catchy punk rock sound that hooked me instantly. I couldn't stop singing the chorus, so I figured that it was a good sign to just grab the whole album.

Such a great, fun record out of '88.