Speaking of Burn….For a band who only managed to release one EP and a handful of comp appearances in their short time together in 1988-1990, a 2x discography may seem impressive, but this includes demo tapes and live performances. Pretty legendary band whose reputation either outsized them, or they were criminally underrated, or their hype is totally justified - but just looking at the live photography tells you they were something special. I always associated this band with the ABC No Rio scene but according to an interview I read, they broke up before ABC No Rio existed, and generally sort of transcended the various NYHC factions, which is pretty cool.
Absolution is musically talented with a pedigree of well-known bands both before and after their existence. The shades of Burn throughout make sense given Gavin was in both bands (Hangover At Fury’s from the demo shows up in Drown by Burn) - strong guitar work there, and awesome weird vocals from Djinji. The drums are particularly frantic on the live cut of Never Ending Game.
This release is a bit of a mess, track-listing wise: it goes from a studio recording from a comp to live tracks, to EP tracks scattered between… makes no sense to me. And it doesn’t indicate which tracks are on which record or side, or which tracks appear on what comps, or when / where the live songs were recorded, and only has lyrics to 5 songs. And as much as I love seeing hardcore bands live, listening to live recordings of them never does it for me, the quality is usually such shit. About the only reason to listen to live hardcore is for the in-between song banter (“yo it’s hot in this club…but not hot enough. Some people aren’t dancing for some reason….”). So I think I’d prefer a discography that just included studio tracks and demos, and skip the live stuff or at least consolidate it onto one of the two LPs instead of this scattershot stuff. My copy of this has a pretty dinged up sleeve. Seems that original pressings of EP are not hard to come by, which is a bit surprising to me.
Favorite Track: It’s very hard to pick just one, but Take Control, I Am, In the Meantime, and Dead and Gone are stand outs to me.
To read the interview I referenced - search “The Big Takeover: Absolution - The More Things Change” in your favorite search engine.