Notes From The Record Room: Post-August Weak Fore — Phoenixville Punk Rock Flea Market, Sleep, Truck Violence
Record Room: Wednesday, 9/2
Current listening: Enneads — s/t (2026)
My wife and I took a ride out to the expo center in Oaks for the 11th-anniversary iteration of the Phoenixville Punk Rock Flea Market, an expanded venue facilitating a higher vendor count, all of whom dealt in punk- or fringe-centric goods. Naturally, record sellers were in attendance and my money is now recirculating thanks to some transactions I’d rendered with them.
The featured guests at the event were rock writer Legs McNeil and former Misfit, Bobby Steele. I’m admittedly (and embarrassingly) sometimes susceptible to bouts of fanboy gushing, so I brought my copy of McNeil’s Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History Of Punk to be autographed. As he was promoting his new memoir, Resident Punk: How I Smoked, Drank, And Stumbled My Way Through The 70s Punk Scene (And Beyond), at the event, I felt compelled to pick up a copy. Looks like it’ll be a fun read. McNeil himself called it “funny.”
Added to my expanding LP library are the following:
Big Black — Songs About Fucking (Repressed / (no date) / Touch & GO)
Couch Slut — My Life As A Woman (10-year anniversary reissue / 2024 / Brutal Panda)
Death — Scream Bloody Gore, Leprosy, Spiritual Healing (not yet logged / Relapse Records)
I submitted a review of Sleep’s upcoming new LP, Hempispheres, to No Ripcord. The review is up and ready for inevitable derision from Matt Pike’s numerous allegiant. I’ll encourage skeptics to sit and listen. My preconceived and ignorant biases were tested and ultimately proven false.
Hempisheres review
The Flenser signees Truck Violence released a live video titled Live at The Windmill, 30-and-some-change minutes of the band’s late June performance at the London venue. The locals were evidently down with the band’s perspiration-drenched catharsis. I imagine the air was pure CO2 and BO, too. Not a dry shirt in the house.
That said, Truck Violence’s shriek-laden calorie burn exhibits the sort of the all-in performance an audience should expect, every available iota of energy spent for the sake of the gig. The crowd certainly appreciated it.
Truck Violence released The Weathervane Is My Body on 6/29 via The Flenser.
Links:
Truck Violence — Bandcamp
The Flenser — Official / Bandcamp
Sincerely,
Letters From A Tapehead
