Description
-BLACK VINYL
Official, from the master tape reissue of this cult classic teen-snot-punk-mayhem record. This long-overdue new deluxe repress comes in an extra thick jacket with 14” x 7” glossy insert, featuring pictures and liner notes written by guitar player/singer Tom Flynn. It is a limited run of only 500 copies, including 100 on clear for mailorder only. This was originally released on the band’s own label Hermaphrodite Records in 1978. Forget about the too expensive original and the cheap 2001’s Kablooey bootleg, this is the best version of this great record!
Our take: I’ve had the bootleg forever, but I’m super excited to see an official reissue of one of my all-time favorite Killed by Death-style records. One could make a good case for Break My Face being the ultimate Killed by Death record, mostly because of its combination of aggression and idiosyncrasy. As for the former, this has a bruising guitar sound worthy of Urban Waste and all three tracks are balls to the wall punk ragers that can stand up against just about anything you want to throw against them. However, it’s the aforementioned idiosyncrasies that make this record for me. A lot of those come from the production, which is confrontationally bizarre at times. Not only is it raw and aggressive, but according the liner notes the overdubs were recorded without the benefit of headphones, so I guess the guitar player just kind of guessed where the solo was supposed to go… they don’t try to hide it, either, as the overdubbed solos come in about twice as loud as the rest of the music and pan back and forth wildly and nonsensically between the left and right channels. Other idiosyncrasies are clearly of the band’s design, though, like the juvenile lyrics and the comically amateur stab at avant-garde twelve-tone music that starts the b-side of the record. Break My Face is, without a doubt, one of the most delightfully weird and wild records I’ve ever heard in my life, and I feel like everyone with a more-than-superficial knowledge of punk should be familiar with it. This reissue does it justice, too, adding a period-appropriate picture sleeve and including liner notes that fill in the context of how this little soap bubble of brilliance came to be. Completely essential.
