Grudge - Project-Ex 7"

Remembering shit is sometimes hard for me to do, even stuff that happened 10 minutes ago. I don't know where or when I got this record, but I do remember liking it immediately.  I'm pretty sure I got it when it first came out at People's Record store in Arcata, CA.  For being in a small college town, that store really had a good selection of music.  They knew that you could get the popular stuff at the mall 7 miles away so they kept it pretty underground.  If they didn't have what you were looking for they would order it and were very familiar with the smallest of distributors.  Pretty good prices too.  The used section was nice because most of the idiotic college kids would buy a record because they thought it was "punk" and take it back to the record store because it wasn't that pop punk that was popular at the time.  I think it was that way at a lot of smaller used record stores back in the late 80's when "punk" was really becoming mainstream.

When this record came out the straightedge scene was getting pretty out of hand.  It had become trendy to be straightedge and a lot of bands and cities were taking it to fascist extremes.  During this time I was a beer guzzling, drug using fool but that didn't mean I didn't respect what straightedge was originally about.  Now that I'm clean (do cigarettes and coffee count?) I could care less if you're clean, straight or whatever, I just know I was a slave and wanted to be dead.  Grudge was a response to what was going on.  They were idiotic in a way but so was the scene they were responding to.  I love the use of satire when approaching certain issues and these guys really had that going on.  That was a pretty popular way of talking about issues in the punk scene, kind of made famous by the Dead Kennedys.  What takes Grudge another step forward is that they play some pretty sick hardcore.  The first song Drinking's Great is probably my favorite, but give these a listen and see what you think...

EDIT: Links deleted for fear of copyright police...go give your money to iTunes or something...