From the Vaults: Reagan Youth demo

Published April 30, 2009 By Hubbs
Categories Reviews

Fuckin’ Reagan Youth! They ruled. Here we have a rare and mysterious recording of unknown origins! It comes off a dubbed tape from MRR’s archives and as far as I can tell is a different recording than either the first 12″ or the Live & Rare CD on New Red Archives. The sound quality is good and you can faintly hear a recording engineer talking between a couple of the songs, so my guess is that it was done in a studio. A bunch of the tracks are slightly different versions of songs that were on the first 12″, but in my opinion the coolest thing about this is the recording of “Brave New World,” which was later redone for what became the Volume 2 album. Dig the spoken word part over the awesome guitar lead at the beginning of the song! I can practically see the legions of NYC punx creepy-crawling at some long-forgotten CB’s matinee… The last song is an instrumental, and also appeared on Volume 2 with vocals (and wah pedal! Yikes…).

Download here (& thanks to Dan for separating the tracks):

1. Reagan Youth
2. Go Nowhere
3. New Aryans
4. Brave New World
5. Anytown
6. USA
7. Acid Rain (instrumental)

And while we’re on the subject… I love the first Reagan Youth 12″, the Volume 1 reissue with the extra tracks (“No Class”!), and the Live & Rare CD (some great stage banter on this one), but I never got into that second album. I know plenty of people who did though (“It’s metal… but it’s good metal”), so go figure. I do, however, love this YouTube video from this era. Such a different direction from the rest of “NYHC”…

Finally, Reagan Youth has an official website and you can visit it here: http://www.reaganyouth.net/