My long overdue mission of owning all of the Minutemen records that are not Double Nickels on the Dime begins with this, the cheapest one. When I set out on this mission, I realized why I did not already own these records: they are not readily available as dirt cheap used copies. (A large bulk of my collection.) It’s not hard to figure out why. People who buy Minutemen records tend to know what they are getting into, first, and once they have the records, they are actually good, second, and third, the band is consistently well-regarded over decades by fans and critics alike, so their records are non-embarrassing to own and therefore resistant to purge, even if you never listen to them.

This is not a very typical record for the band, it’s more of a proof-of-concept EP, which I like. In particular the opening track The Cheerleaders, because it illustrates perfectly why I hate the band Cake so much. Here they take all of the political message of their earlier work over a much simplified and easy to swallow version of their music. The band Cake would then take this kind of sound, with the semi-funky clean guitar and the trumpet, and remove the political message, which is not the worst music in the world by any means, but what’s the point? I guess the point is that is the kind of thing that could get mainstream radio play. Not this so much. It’s like they took all the notes that people had been telling them was “wrong” with their music and applied them literally. No one really wanted to say they didn’t agree with the message, or the overall package so they would pick apart the rough edges of the music. Remove all those rough edges and there should be nothing holding it back!

There’s some other songs—they cover Steppenwolf, they were a good band, it’s not entirely ironic. C’mon.

Tour-Spiel is my favorite track. The words alone, repeated as a mantra, could almost be any words without reading along. I heard “torch me out” the first several times. I dunno what it means, but it seems evocative of what happens when you jam econo too long. The jam turns literal(ly figurative) on More Spiel, which seemingly runs the concept off the rails, but is similar to the ‘Bonus beats’ tracks of the day, which also turn up on Watt’s collab with Sonic Youth The Whitey Album, but that’s something else entirely.%

buy mp3s on amazon 4 cheap or I guess it's regular price, there's only 6 songs