The Fatal Erection Years

Poison Idea’s influence spreads far and wide: they had an obvious impact on the punk scene, of course, but have also inspired several key extreme metal figures since the 1980s. Look at the none-too-subtle wordplay of supergroup Venomous Concept’s name, for an illustration of that. When I was first getting into heavy music, I was far more inspired by the egalitarian, DIY rebelliousness of punk than I was by the parochialism of metal. Musically, I saw more depth in the latter, which explains why I’m reviewing here now. Nonetheless, Poison Idea’s Feel the Darkness remains one of my favourite albums, even if my changing tastes meant that until now I have lamely failed to explore any of the band’s other stuff. It’s a monstrous record: It perfectly melds angry social critique- “Do you think this corruption will ever stop? What makes a person want to be a cop?”- with super-heavy riffs, some of which had an undoubted metal twinge, like the Am I Evil?-evoking chords of wrathful anthem Alan’s on Fire.

This review isn’t about that album, though. Rather, this collection put together by Southern Lord includes their first and second EPs- 1983’s Pick Your King and 1989’s Record Collectors are Pretentious Assholes- along with a handful of tracks from various compilations and a set of early live recordings. No double CD should be necessary, however, because, in classic early hardcore punk style all 45 tracks combine to fill just over an hour. The blasphemously-packaged Pick Your King is the most blistering in this respect, with songs averaging under a minute. It’s an impressively concise burst of vitriol, assembled from super fast riffing, laden with vicious hooks, and Jerry A’s furious bellow. I’ve never been into ambiguous poetic expression; for me the best lyrics are those that ram the truth as the band sees it down your throat (or into your ears, I guess) with sufficient wrath to make it impossible to doubt. “You can’t change the world, but you can change yourself” he yells on It’s an Action, like Gandhi, if Gandhi was a morbidly obese American drunkard.

Record Collectors are Pretentious Assholes came out a few years later and it shows: this is a more metal-inflected EP, with (very marginally) longer songs and darker riffing. Legalize Freedom, the quirky, bass-led Thorn in My Side, or the thrashy Don’t Like it Here, among others, definitely precede the fiery crossover of Feel the Darkness, which followed the next year. The most metal moment on the compilation, though, is the introduction to the 1985 obscurity I Gotta Right, a rant against straight edge which has an intro that could have been recorded by Venom. Finally, the live tracks are just as savage as you would hope them to be, and well-worth hearing for that reason. What else? Not much- just a cool compilation of material from the world’s fattest band.