Customer Reviews

Greatest Gift

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Ahh....Scratch Acid...the little band from Texas that could...could what?...could take the obvious influence of Nick Cave's Birthday Party and make it something their own...something that made me proud to be from Texas.

Lurching, rolling, stumbling caterwauling. Propulsive grinding and yowling. Anguished ennui left out to bake too long in the blistering Texas sun.

There is an awful beauty here. There is the sense that one has entered fully and irrevocably into the mind and soul of an LSD-shattered maniac. A rabid killer out on the roads of Amerikkka. A bowl of rancid guacamole. A blister oozing. A tidal wave of viscous, throbbing yeehaw.

David Yow channelled Nick Cave on the top. Underneath was the music, a technically savvy but unabashedly raw and vicious beast.

Twenty years later, Scratch Acid still makes me proud to be a Texan.

If you know who Scratch Acid is, then you shouldn't need any encouragement to buy this - it's basically all of their music on one cd. If You DON'T know who they are, they were one of the first post-punk American bands (along with Flipper, Big Black, Minutemen etc.). It's a bunch of kids with nothing much to look forward to, and an uncanny gift for giving chaos a good beat that you can dance to, sometimes. There're a lot of bourgeois young people who think that playing an acoustic guitar and singing about Joni Mitchell's feelings is "authentic". I wouldn't know about that; I just know that no one asked these kids to make music, or offered them any money (at first), but they did it anyway.

If you are a fan of early Teenage Jesus and the Jerks or the Birthday Party you must own this one. There was a time when this was the ONLY platter I could stop playing the BDay Party for. Highly recommended. Some of you young uns who think punk is Green Day are in for a very obnoxious awakening. (Strychnine was the original name of the album, Rabid Cat was the label)

The lyrics, vocals and music from Scratch Acid are all awesome. Some CD players refuse to play some of the songs at the end of this disc due to the overwhelming nature of the previous 28 tracks. This music gets in your head and will never, ever, go away.

Catchy, disgusting noise rock with a bit of a tex-mex vibe, and David Yow growling and screetching out fantastically depraved and disturbing lyrics.

punkers and post-punkers should consider this album a neccesity.
David Yow has the unique method of long, drawn out screeches and the ability of stretching his lyrics real slow while at the same time screaming his head off. This is aggressive crude driving music to listen to on a long road trio to keep you awake and ALERT! Owner's Lament turned me on to this band, the 27 other songs on The Greatest Gift keeps me coming back for more!

This is a really amazing album and you should own it.
if you like jesus lizard, birthday party, big black shellac etc you will definately love it. a wonderful postpunk catastrophy.
Greatest Gift is the song that caught my interest first but after listening to the whole album, you realize how amazing and unique each song is.

The vocals are strange, but fit really well.
insane weird guitar riffs, but they have a lot of power and really make this band one of my favorite.

a+ plus ladies

This is a great collection, everything Scratch Acid did is on this one CD. I call that a bargain. Scratch Acid are the band that bassist David Wm. Sims and vocalist David Yow were in from 1982-1987 before their tenure in the amazing Jesus Lizard. Musically SA aren't that far from Jesus Lizard, perhaps a tad bluesier, and much looser, not as mathematically intense, recalling Capt. Beefheart and The Birthday Party. Lyrically and vocally SA mine much the same territory as Yow would explore with the Lizard ie insanity. He developed his entirely unique style that relies on an agonized moaning and sometimes incomprehensible but always intense vocalizations, in other words howling, in Scratch Acid. This is punk when punk wasn't cool, 4 intense young men creating some of the more unique music of the eighties without hope of commercial success. God bless 'em. If you like Jesus Lizard, you'll probably like Scratch Acid.

Buy this. If for no other reason than for the song "Crazy Dan". Some pre-Jesus Lizard David Yow greatness!!

A little too close to the Birthday Party to be truly great, but nonetheless an essential document leading up to the insane brilliance of the Jesus Lizard. Yow manages to sound even more unrestrained in the acid-drenched, art powerhouse known as Scratch Acid. Where tJL is all tight lucidity, SA is a pummeling, amorphous nightmare.