Vitamin Recordings 1981 LP
Genuinely out there art-punk from early ’80s Boston, one of the most underrated of all localized scenes for such things (go chase that Propeller Product discography!). VITAMIN was started by a fourteen-year old vocalist/guitarist and a barely-older teenage friend, eventually to be joined by a few actual adults—an art school-grad violinist who had spent time in the equally off-kilter GIRLS, and a drummer recently transplanted from San Francisco’s own formidable weirdo underground. Recordings 1981 collects the group’s four-song demo and a slew of live tracks captured that year at two different Boston clubs, and while the roughed-up soundboard material (including several songs that don’t overlap with the demo) is definitely interesting from an archival perspective, it’s still deeply disappointing that VITAMIN never really managed any kind of proper recorded output before they splintered. That historical wrong is made especially apparent in the total shambolic genius of the demo tracks, with nerd-sneer vocals, warbling violin scratch, and tangled rhythms all presented in crystal clear audio, fitting right into a turn-of-the-eighties international constellation of like-minded oddball post-punks spanning from TACTICS in Australia (think of “French Fries” as New England’s response to “Watch My Hands”) to UJ3RK5 in Canada. Beyond cool.