Like bizarre stuff? Like cool covers of hardcore classics? Then you will dig our full album stream of Singles, Other Shit from Portland’s RABBITS. Take a listen below and then read the “virtual” liner notes compiled for your friends at Decibel. You can check our RABBITS on Facebook and pick up a copy from Eolian Empire.
RABBITS has been a band for about 10 years (our first show was in 2004). We realize we’re still pretty unknown to most people and don’t have widespread appeal, but that’s not going to stop us! We’ve wanted to release some of our non-LP material that hasn’t been as widely distributed, including some of the punk and hardcore covers we’ve been playing for years. After our European tour with Arabrot our booking agent asked if he could release a cassette of our 7-inches in the Czech Republic, and that eventually morphed into this SOS collection. We decided to do a US version on our recently rebooted EOLIAN EMPIRE label.
We divided the tape into the traditional A-side originals, B-side covers. With the originals we wanted to capture a little bit of everything we do, whether it’s no-nonsense tracks like “No (More) Depth,” which is a re-recording of a last-minute song from our Relapse debut Lower Forms, or “Slow Mars” which is a jammed-out, extremely altered version of one of our oldest songs, or the live radio performance of “Lungs,” a very old song that we end most shows with and play differently every time.
We started playing punk and hardcore covers one summer about five years ago when we were kind of burnt out and just wanted to have fun playing. The first ones were “Evacuate” and “I’d Rather Be Sleeping,” and slowly over the years we built up a sizable catalog. Anytime we went into the studio we’d knock out a few covers, usually without any plans for releasing them. We’ve always thought of ourselves as a hardcore band and not a metal band, so playing those songs maybe helped get that point across a little more. Or maybe not.
But learning those songs definitely had an effect on us. We simplified and streamlined our songs, and got way more into hooks. Anyway, we love all those songs and bands, it’s stuff we grew up listening to and inspired us to make the music we do, and it’s fun to see how people react when we play them. When we played “Hard Times” opening for Rorshach some people kinda lost their minds, it was wild. And to this day we think we sealed the deal with Relapse when Matt Jacobson saw us play “I’d Rather Be Sleeping,” and rumor has it that someone from Poison Idea got a copy of our version of “Think Twice” and approved. We did our best to not fuck the songs up too much. We hope that shows through the fuck-ups.
