Flex Appeal

For about a year now, the paper and staple parent to this little blog thing you’re reading has been offering subscribers exclusive bonus tracks and covers by some of the magazine’s favourite folks via the antiquated and nostalgic, but nerdishly cool, medium of the flexi disc. We are indeed bringing flexi back as stated in issue #86’s Call and Response featuring Landmine Marathon.

I’ve been informed that the DIY hardcore scene is also apparently doing their darnedest to make using quarters as weights part of your turntable use experience. Then again, while the circle pit may have gone the way of the dinosaur in HC circles, the 7” record never did, as you may have noticed if you’ve been to a show at any point in the last 30 years. Take that another step to the left and you can see why – however tenuously – the flexi might be the sort of thing hardcore heads desire to get their tattooed hands all over. Either way, a few of the labels making the flexi a conspicuous item of their release catalogue are BSVIV, Pirates Press and Baltimore-based A389 Records. As far as the latter is concerned, label boss Dom Romeo has some new material from Integrity coming later this month on a flexi called Evacuate, he’s also managed to squeeze Ringworm’s 1999 Madness of War demo on to 250 pieces of thin, but sturdy, plastic.

I have a couple A389 flexis in my personal possession. One, Kill Life’s “Dead End America” (w/Mike from Eyehategod on guest vocals) which is a collector’s collector’s item as it features members of Fucked Up, Magrudergrind and Crass, waves of cantankerous and filthy Black Flag-ish-ness and riffs on “Amazing Grace” and America as a whole. As well, I have Pulling Teeth’s delightfully faithful and hard-hitting cover of Rorschach’s “Lightning Strikes Twice,” with only 250 copies pressed on clear plastic. Awesome shit!

So, if you’re feeling nostalgic for the days Grim Reaper gave away free flexis of “See You in Hell” in the pages of Hit Parader, or enjoy getting off the couch and changing whatever’s on your turntable every two-and-a-half minutes, check this stuff out. I could have made life easy for you and embedded all the tracks mentioned above, but then what you do with all those quarters?

Why not use all those quarters and subscribe, if you already don’t, and get free flexis draped within the pages of the best metal mag ever sent directly to your abode every month?