Another Emo Grab Bag For Your Weekend Viewing Pleasure (Gravity Records Edition)

To be perfectly honest I’ve lost track of which of the 12 days we’re up to at this point, and I may have wandered right off the emo map with this one. (Damn these blurry borders!) But if the rapture came (the world-ending dealie) and I was forced to choose which record label catalogs would ascend and which would be left behind, I would not pause when St. Peter came to San Diego’s Gravity Records, whose early string of records, from their stylistic plurality (from Man Is The Bastard’s vivisection-hatin’ prog-grind to Evergreen’s brood-out wuss rock) to their packaging (who else could work the art/cheapness divide so smartly by wrapping a beloved seven-inch by the numbingly fast Mohinder in a rumpled Levi’s ad clipped from a fashion mag?), remain the ’90s high ideal of arty hardcore for me. Fans of speedy, jerky dissonance would do well to hunt down the vinyl of any and all of Gravity’s first 25 or so releases, some of which can, yes, be tagged emo if properly prefixed or suffixed.

Let the contentious genre-policing arguments commence! Were Antioch Arrow “emo” or even “screamo” or just “hardcore” or “some kinda hi-test goth on whippets”? Or “who cares?” Look at ’em go!

Two kinds of Sonny Kay, first an epileptic Angel Hair.

And now mighty no-bullshit synth-punks the VSS, apparently “crap [that] sounds like a wild pack of fucking glogs dying in a blizzard. Long live The Exploited!” (Why did you have to bring Wattie and Co. into it?)

Was Heroin…no, no these guys were definitely hardcore. I think?

Clikatat Ikatowi, proving that I’d let any scrawny boys from San Diego get away with a certain level of pretentiousness in the mid-’90s.

And now I’m off to locate my white belt and starch my slacks and drink a beer for age and lost hairs. Have a good weekend, y’all.

Gravity Records [Official Site]