No Tears In Effect

In my early days of collecting records, I picked up a copy of Sick Of It All's Blood Sweat And No Tears back in 2005, before I started this blog. It was a red vinyl reissue out of Germany, and I was pretty excited to pick it up at that time. Sure it looked nice, but it always ate at me that I didn't have an original pressing of the album. At the start of this year, when I got the latest update of what was available from Tim's collection, I was very excited to see that SOIA album in there.

Blood, Sweat And No Tears was one of the first true hardcore albums that I picked up back in the day. Sure I'd stumbled upon stuff like Black Flag, Minor Threat and Misfits as a young metalhead, but stuff like that first Sick Of It All record, Agnostic Front's Liberty And Justice For, and Killing Time's Brightside really helped to open my eyes and start to shift my musical focus at the end of the 80's.

As a huge influence as that Sick Of It All album was on me, I'm glad to finally have an original In-Effect pressing on my shelf.

Disco Sucks Fuck Everything

To give you an idea how far behind I've fallen with this blog, one of the first records that I bought in 2023 was this Sick Of It All album.

In early January, I felt like I'd spent the last few months chasing nothing but a bunch of cheap records that very few people probably care about. This blog doesn't have a huge following, so I'm not concerned about "creating content" that is exciting and will increase traffic here... but for my own personal satisfaction, I wanted to get my hands on a record that felt more substantial than variants of long forgotten 90's hardcore records. I wanted to cross something a bit bigger off my want list.

I'm under the impression that the majority opinion of the Fat Wreck years for Sick Of It All is that those records aren't great. Fuck that. For me, Call To Arms, Yours Truly and Life On The Ropes were the last really good SOIA albums. Those records are so fun, and while I don't really listen to them that often these days, when I do happen to hear them, they still give me a charge that has been missing from the band's latest albums.

While I think that hardcore kids generally look down at those Fat Wreck albums from Sick Of It All, it doesn't mean that you can pick up the colored vinyl for cheap. Nope. Those things still carry a high price tag, which I assume is due to the fact that an album like Yours Truly hasn't seen a vinyl pressing since the original release back in 2000... 23 years ago! I'm sure a reissue will be around the corner for this album (because everything gets the reissue treatment sooner or later), but I'm happy to grab that original red vinyl.