Blangk

One of my favourite aspects of record collecting is finding a band you have never heard of before, especially if it is something from a long time ago. I've been listening to hardcore since 1990, and I've been obsessed with discovering new bands since that time when I placed my first order with Ebullition. I would religiously scour mailorder catalogs from Very, Lumberjack and Ebullition, reading record descriptions for everything that was available. I'd use a highlighter and mark which records I wanted and check off those that I owned. I was a fanatic, and spent more time with those catalogs than I did with my college textbooks. I'm not looking for some badge of honor for my nerd level of knowledge for hardcore bands through the 90s, but I feel pretty confident that I know my shit when it comes to that era of hardcore. I'm sure that there are plenty of obscure bands from that time that I've never heard of, but it still took me by surprise when Marcus mentioned the band Blangk on his blog last year. Blangk? Who the fuck is that?

Blangk were a band out of Louisville in the mid-90's. They released a 7 inch, a split 7 inch, and a CD... and coming from the home of Endpoint and Falling Forward, you would have thought that the band would have popped onto my radar at some point. Maybe it was the odd fucking name of "Blangk" that kept them out of my circle of interest, but either way, when some nerd from the UK knows about the band, and I've never even heard their name, I sit up and pay attention. I quickly found a download on Soulseek... because if you are relying on Spotify to feed you all of your music, you are missing out... and I checked out the songs for their 7 inch.

Initially, I wasn't too interested in what they were doing. It was okay, but it didn't really excite me. Still, I'd go back to those four songs occasionally, and sometime over the past few weeks they really got their hooks into me... to the point where I was queuing them up a couple of times a day. Wow. I fucking love this. An absolute treasure to discover 27 years after it's release.