Cloak Dagger/Headline Records

This last weekend I trekked down to the ever-wonderful city of Los Angeles, California with some friends; good times were had and lots of money that I didn’t have was spent. Most of said spending was done at Headline Records in Hollywood on Melrose Ave. This place is awesome and I could—and did—spend many hours in this record nerd's oasis. Headline Records is mostly a punk/hardcore record store but has some other related genres to choose from.
I bought a lot of good records at Headline, but keeping true to this blog's format I will only talk about the cheap ones, which, in this case, happens to be the Cloak Dagger seven-inch entitled “Piñata” released on Grave Mistake Records. I found this bad boy for around three bucks on white vinyl and I was psyched. This band has ex members from many prominent bands in the hardcore scene such as Striking Distance, Barfight, and Count Me Out etc. but manages to sound nothing like any of those bands. Cloak Dagger brings to mind early punk like Black Flag and the Circle Jerks but with catchier riffs and awesome hooks; definitely a quality buy.
The first time I heard Cloak Dagger was when my roommate gave me the mp3s he had of the seven inch. The notion that someone was able to digitally receive music for free and then still go out and buy the actual record would probably make a major label record executive’s head explode in disbelief, but it happens. Many major record labels are so afraid of music being shared or copyrights infringed upon their product that they have implemented DRM—Digital Rights Management—software in order to disallow music from playing on different mediums as well . I think the mindset that these major labels and corporations are taking is completely skewed and unrealistic. Music has been shared for many years and implementing technologies that hinder rights that people should be granted under fair use—like being able to play a purchased mp3 on more than one source—seems crazy. Besides, there are always ways to circumvent these crazy technologies; within the first page of youtube there are video tutorials to crack DRM protected files. Here’s a funny video illustrating the progression of recorded music to today: DRM video


And here's a video of Count Me Out.

Jawbox Rules

The other day my roommate in his infinite laziness asked me to give him a ride downtown, naturally I said no. That was until he flashed before my eyes five whole dollars worth of fine American currency. In which case, I couldn’t say no. Not only did this make me five dollars richer, but put me in right direction to go to one of my weekly stomping grounds, Amoeba records on Haight Street. Amoeba records is pretty large in terms of records stores go and it has most of the stuff that any musical person would be into…hip hop, rock, blues, techno, punk, metal etc. all categorized for your convenience in new or used condition. They also have various musical formats including the compact disc, vinyl, cassette, and an 8 track or two—for some odd reason.
Amoeba is usually overrun with the typical Haight street tourist, but nonetheless it never usually hinders my record shopping experience. So, as I entered amoeba on that dreary afternoon I made a B line straight for the recent used 7inch record arrivals. This is usually where I spend most of my time and money. After perusing for a while I came across a pretty good find. It was a Jawbox and Tar split seven inch for a solid one dollar. I wasn’t too familiar with Tar but Jawbox is really awesome band from the nineties with ex members from the D.C. punk band Government Issue. The bands both play a Jawbox song called static, Jawbox’s version is from the LP Novelty and Tar’s version is live at a show in Chicago. Although this is not the original pressing of the split it was still a quality find for only a dollar.
To accompany this post I wanted to find and post the video for “cooling card” one of my favorite Jawbox songs, but when I searched for it on youtube the video had embedding disabled. This bummed me out, but it also made me think about how today there are many other facets where media is coming from. I did some more searching and I found many user generated live videos and also some other videos that others had posted.

So, here is a video of Jawbox’s song “Savory” in all its ‘90s glory.