Artist: New Bomb Turks
Album: Live ’93 VPRO Radio Holland
Year: 1993
Engineer: Paul Weijenberg
Label: Anyway Records

Summary: blistering punk, snarling vocals, bilious lyrics. It rocks. (Click here for detail of sleeve.)

On one of my excursions to the now defunct Sound Exchange in Austin, TX, I stumbled upon an oddity: a 45 rpm 12” of the New Bomb Turks on a radio show in Holland. It only had 5 songs, one of which was the first track on their debut, Destroy-Oh-Boy!!, but I figured that at $5, it was worth a shot.

That was sometime in 2002. Today, I can say that it was easily the best music buy I made that year. The first two songs, Taller Order and Girl Can Help It, are my favorite NBT songs (I own two other NBT albums). I thought that Destroy-Oh-Boy!! was a fairly impassioned album, but those two songs on the LP raised the bar. They are seething with energy.

My favoritet thing about this album is the sound. They turned the guitar’s midrange frequencies all the way up which brought the guitar to the front of the mix - the first and loudest thing you hear is the guitar. It cuts through everything else in the mix.

The good: if you like simple, power chord-based punk songs with simple rhythms, this is your record.

The bad: this record is hard to find. It’s nowhere on Amazon and I only found two other sites that even list it for sale. Look here and here (the second is in Holland). If you can’t find it, there’s always ebay, and as a last resort, give their first album a try. It will give you a good idea what they’re all about and contains one of the tracks on this record.