Spiritual Gang

Back at the end of September, my friend Gina was in town with her husband as they were starting their honeymoon vacation trip touring the New England coast. I met up with them that night and took them over to Green Hand Books to drool over the expensive horror paperbacks, and then on the walk to the restaurant, they wanted to stop and check out Coast City Comics. I'm not big on comics, so I'd never been into this store, and wasn't really expecting anything of interest. Wow, I was wrong. There were all kinds of fun horror movie things like pins and magnets, and I grabbed a few packs of Evil Dead trading cards to send off to my friends Alex and Sarah. I'm not one to be social and talk with people that work in stores... I will typically just pay for my shit and leave... but I ended up in a conversation with the guy behind the counter about punk bands and horror movie soundtracks while everyone else was shopping and I genuinely had a really good time there. I need to make it a point to stop in there more often.

As we were in Coast City Comics, I discovered that they had a small record section, so I started flipping through them. I wasn't really expecting much, but when I saw this split 7 inch with Spiritual Cramp and Chubby and the Gang, I was very excited and immediately placed it with the small pile of things that I was buying.

The split 7 inch is part of a comic book series called What's The Furthest Place From Here. Each edition in the series comes with a split 7 inch with bands performing a cover song. For this one, Spiritual Cramp does a Radio Birdman cover, and Chubby and the Gang do a song originally by The Kids. I was not familiar with either of these songs, but I love what SC and Chubby do with these covers. I think that I'm going to have to check out both of these old late 70's punk bands and see what I've been missing.

Churry And The Gang

One of my favorite records from 2020 was the new Chubby and the Gang album. That thing just exploded with energy, and I couldn't get enough of it, so I was really looking forward to their new record, The Mutt's Nuts.

I was so excited for this new album that I couldn't resist checking out the first couple of songs that the band released. Lightning Don't Strike Twice was okay but the slide guitar was unexpected and initially it didn't sit well with me...and then came Life's Lemons and I was confused as to what the fuck was going on. This was not the band that I absolutely lost my mind over the year before. I hoped the full album would turn things around for me, so even though I was feeling a bit down on it, I still ordered the record along with the Time And Pressure preorder from REV at the end of summer. That Time And Pressure record saw a few delays, so here we are four months later and I finally have the new Chubby record.

It has taken me some time to warm up to this one. There is still plenty of frantic energy to be found here, but overall it is a bit more relaxed than the first Chubby and the Gang record, but there are just too many of the slower, drawn out songs... like the band is searching for another Grenfell Forever hit... and it really holds this album back for me. I just want the band to rip. Despite my complaints, this is still a fun record...it just isn't nearly as exciting as their first one.

Big Red Chubby

At the start of the year, I started seeing the Chubby And The Gang album plastered all over Instagram. I had no idea what this was, and with a name like Chubby And The Gang, I really didn't feel the need to follow up and check it out. The band came up in a group message with some friends, and opinions seemed to be split...some people really enjoyed it, while others absolutely hated it. I knew that I needed to finally check them out.

With my first listen, I was immediately interested. Sure there were a couple of songs that fell flat for me, but overall, this was some great late-70's inspired punk. I don't know how you could like The Damned and The Ramones and not enjoy this record. Tons of energy and just a lot of fun.

By the time I first listened to the Chubby And The Gang record, the first press on blue vinyl was sold out. The label, Static Shock, was taking pre-orders for the second press on red, so I decided to procrastinate and figured that I'd pick it up at some point down the road. When I saw that Marcus posted about the red vinyl that he'd picked up, I figured that I'd finally head to the label's store and grab myself a copy as well. Well fuck me, the red vinyl was sold out. I had to take a quick side trip to Discogs to score this one before the price started to get ridiculous.