Customer Reviews

Wine Is Red Poison Is Blue

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All lovers of true rock 'n' roll owe it to themselves to give this one a spin. Poison 13 were painfully underappreciated in their day, and even though they've had a great influence on the supposed "grunge" scene, they're still not well known. Their music is not Grunge(TM), however-- it's garage-y, bluesy, punk of the most sincere, commited form. Poison 13 could alternately cover Bukka White, Richard Hell & the Voidoids, and the Sonics, and give them all their own twist to make it uniquely "Poison 13". Their original songs are uniformly great. There's a level of passion and energy here that most bands don't even come close to. It's cheap. It has virtually everything the band recorded.

This posthumous compilation is culled from 2 albums released in the late 80s by this Austin, Texas based punk band. If you like authentic, non-pretentious, non-commercial music (what Allen Freed called "rock and roll"), you should appreciate this CD. Many of the songs here are covers done with an approach that shows that basically there's not that basically the same thing. Like the great John Lee Hooker-Canned Heat recordings, the blues songs by Poison 13 challenge the form with the best results. Not that the CD is all blues. These covers can be seen to be in their own creativity by reverentially adhering to tradition. They reflect on the past with a mixture of reverence and contempt. Like James Dean they lived fast, died young, and left a good-looking corpse. The songs are full of morbid humour, grating vocals, and dirty, distorted guitars. Get this while it is still in print! END

As someone who knows squat about punk, forget credibility and listen to those two who apparently do. Granted, the average listener (even today's average diluted rock listener) will not like most of it because it's rather rough around the edges--yet they can play their instruments quite a bit better/more than most punk bands. Not to mention, this is nearly twice as long as the average commercial album. It's got all the hard garagish perks of cracking vocals, unintentional distortion/feedback, iffy mixing, spastic guitar and drum solos, and so much more that everyone should hear through the walls whether they like it or not. END?