Walt Mink / Gneissmaker - Croton-Harmon Local

 

Label: Skene!

Year: 1990

Two bands, each with two songs, from the two Twin Cities (Walt Mink from Minneapolis, and Gneissmaker from St. Paul). Two of a kind. These are the first two Walt Mink songs put to tape, and serve as a pretty apt introduction to the band's scruffy power pop (punk?), that would eventually get them a major label deal and then the cliched descent into obscurity. Which stinks, cause they were a good band. Nothing revolutionary, but very catchy and punchy songs that had them opening for bands like Lemonheads and Buffalo Tom and the like. Gneissmaker are a nastier, more metallic group of...gentlemen? They bring a ramshackle power trio full of ideas to a relatively stripped down (at least production-wise) version of grungy metal. Not unlike some of the Seattle bands of the same era, but not those really big Seattle bands of the same era. More of a Coffin Break or Skin Yard sort of deal, but then add in some of Killing Joke's DNA, and some of their hometown peers Halo Of Flies. It's cool. It's "off," but in a way that you can't fake.  

Apologies that there is surface noise for the first two seconds or so of the first track. It's an old record and I guess a slightly dirty one. 

DL