Vicious And Toxic

There was a time when the focus of my Instagram page was nothing but records. That got stale after a few years when the excitement of monthly photo challenges started to fade and it seemed like everyone was posting the same 25 records over and over... plus I was starting to discover bookstagram and so I shifted my focus over to what I was reading instead. I've been posting nothing but books for a while, but sometimes I still get the itch to throw some records up in my stories and I'll do a Discogs shake to see which record I should randomly pull from the shelf and post. Over the summer, the Discogs shake dictated that I pull my copy of Vicious Circle from Zero Boys.

The problem with pulling my copy of Vicious Circle from the shelf was I was reminded that I only owned a reissue from 2009. Nothing cool or special about that, and seeing it only made me want to rectify the situation and find something better to replace it. As I started checking Discogs, I was immediately intimidated by the first press of the album on Nimrod Records. I wasn't sure if I wanted to drop $500 for that record, but when I saw a colored vinyl reissue from '87 on Toxic Shock, at a price that I was much more comfortable with, I was happy to pick up this option.

I like the different colored cover, moving from the original yellow over to this weird blue/teal color for the Toxic Shock pressing, which makes it feel more unique. Plus this version has six songs that weren't on the original record, and I'm hearing them for the first time in 2025. I love finding cool shit like this.

House Of Toxic Shock

Picking up that Jesus Chrysler album last month, got me thinking about other Toxic Shock bands that I never took a chance on as a kid.

I was recently checking out Toxic Shock releases on eBay, when I came across a cheap copy of the first House Of Large Sizes album. I guess that "cheap" is a relative term, since it looks like the record isn't pulling in a big price tag, and averaging under $7 through discogs. For $5, and the only person to bid, I decided to take a chance on this record.

Over the years, I've been floored with some surprises...records that I was a bit tentative on, but took a chance and then became completely consumed by it...listening to it over and over and over. Gypsy's Giants Despair was one of those records, and Seaweed's Four was the other. Both bands played a style that I wouldn't have expected to hit me as hard as they did, but man, there was something special that really grabbed me and wouldn't let go.

Now we can add House Of Large Sizes to that short list of great surprises.

H.O.L.S. are right in that same vein as Gypsy and Seaweed...maybe not as good as those two, but I still find them infectious as Hell. Like Giants Despair and Four, my first spin of One Big Cake had me thinking, "Hey, that's not too bad"...but after a few listens, it had taken root in my head, and I couldn't shake it. The more I listened to it, the more I liked it, and soon it was getting a couple of spins a day. Another great find from Toxic Shock.

Now, one of the real reasons that I took the gamble on the House Of Large Sizes album was that it came with a Toxic Shock catalog from '89. I've been nostalgic for those late 80's years, when my brother and I were discovering Hardcore and Punk, and the Toxic Shock catalogs played a big part in those formative years. I made the mistake of throwing out those old catalogs years ago, and I've been itching to find some of them again.

It has been a blast flipping through the newsprint pages of this old catalog, and checking out the records and t-shirts that were available to me at the time.