Garage Punk Unknowns Volume Four

Found this on a return trip to Syracuse in May, when we got caught in a downpour (it being Syracuse) and stopped in to The Sound Garden in Armory Square to get out of the rain. I mean, it was on our destination list for the afternoon, but the heavy rain just forced us to spend even more time there than we might have otherwise. I didn’t complain – it had a great, deep catalog and a very wide variety, and they did a great job marking the conditions of their used records. I’d happily go back again with even more time to spend. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular, but did spend an amount of time texting back and forth with a friend who was on a serious jazz hunt. The place was huge.

I didn’t bring home a whole lot for myself, but this one jumped right into my hand – Garage Punk Unknowns Volume Four.

I love, love, love garage rock compilations – and in the case of the source material, the less polished, the better. I love the sound of a band that’s trying, doing their utter best, completely believing in what they’re doing – and whether it’s effective or not, whether it compares to the top commercial music of the day, or even the very hits they’re emulating, doesn’t matter. This music has energy and heart and I love it to death.

I don’t remember seeing this series before. It appears to have been released in the mid-’80s, but if so, the graphics are aggressively but genuinely DIY for the time. Typewriter and presstype? Hell yeah. The music is no less. It opens with a teen lament about a “Piece of Jewelry” and just drives on from there. Side two gives us two versions of “Gloria” – one in Spanish, and one in which Gloria becomes “Melvin.” Everything on this rocks, and roughly. Love it. And believe me, if I run across more in this series, they shall be mine.