As Brother P braves the Atlantic Highlands with his family for a little R&R, FSS has been left solely in my hands for the next few days. Never fear faithless readers, he’ll be back shortly. In the meantime however I’m going to continue with a trend I just picked up on. It seems my last three reviews have been for colored 45s so I’m gonna roll with that for the rest of the week.
Bullet Treatment are a revolving door of a punk band with over 20 different members at recent count. They mention on their website that no punk band these days has all their original members anyway so why not just start a band with that in mind and “do it on purpose”. It’s a pretty sweet concept and they’ve churned out a ton of singles and even a full length with Matt from The Bronx on vox, so they’re definitely making do.
“Designated Vol. 1” is the first in what Bullet Treatment promises to be an ongoing series of singles. The concept is pretty simple: the band records the music for one track and then 6 different lead singers come up with their own set of lyrics and lay down the vocals. If you’re not following, it’s six singers, six sets of lyrics, all set to the tune of one song. I gotta be honest I didn’t even catch this till about the third listen.
I preordered this from Fat Wreck and when it arrived I was happy to see it came on lemon yellow wax. I’m pretty sure everywhere else that it was sold just had plain black. It seems Fat is doing this with most of their stuff these days including the new American Steel album. Personally it doesn’t make a difference for me where I order something online so knowing that going in I just make sure I get it from them and not Interpunk or Vinyl Collective or some such. (as a sidenote: hopefully everyone got in on the Paint it Black preorders today on Fat as they sold out both the red and green versions by lunchtime.)
Anyway back to the single. So yeah I dig it. It’s got Chris from Anti-Flag, Johnny from Swingin’ Utters, Russ from Only Crime, Tim from Rise Against, Thomas from Strike Anywhere, and Stza from Leftover Crack/Choking Victim/Star Fucking Hipsters. The music is pure hardcore and most of the singers hit the same marks with lyrics comprised of typical hardcore fodder. The one exception being Johnny Bonnel, who as P put it when I played it for him last week “went in the complete opposite direction” ,with a song about riding around on a damn bus (incidentally this ended up being my favorite track and I can’t get the “Have a seat. I don’t want to sit down,” chorus stuck outta my head)
The 510 on pressed on yellow are sold out but I’d say this one’s worth picking up on any color. I’m looking forward to future installments and you should too.
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