Texas is hardly the most open minded venue for weirdo's, gays, and athiests,no matter how much open space they have. There is one oasis of sanity however, in Austin,which remains a surprisingly bohemian outpost to this day,even in the Trump Era. No matter how much the local republicans and cowpokes would love to follow Donald's ally Russia's example,and make it legal to throw homosexuals off rooftops, and beat up your wife,as long as the injuries aren't visible; there is a thriving counterculture there that doesn't agree with all that nonsense,and risks serious injury with its non-christian ways.
Another thing that the USA didn't really have much of,is anything that sounded like UK DIY, mainly because of this inate need to 'ROCK OUT'!
Radio Free Europe are likely the only American band that achieved this unlikely feat, and of course, they came from Austin. Like it says on the insert,as a kind of subtitle for this C-45, "Americans Are All The Same"....well apparently they aren't....not much Rocking Out here on offer, and could easily pass for a DIY cassette made by a bedroom band from Preston, Lancashire in 1979. The same goes for American Post-Punk,which seemed to drop the doom which was so prevalent in European Post-Punk, and become almost exclusively a nation of Devo's.....this trait is reassuringly absent from this US DIY cassette classic. Nothing wrong with Devo mind,but do we really need hundreds of them? This need for a herky jerky nerdsville in every US town explains why XTC are an increasingly popular cult stateside....and there's definitely nothing wrong with that either. It's just that American in yer face Henry Rollins syndrome that needs eradicating... pronto......there are no intense shouty man Rollins types in Radio Free Europe, so you can relax......its subtle; a word expunged from Websters Dictionary, as full of spelling mistakes as it is.
Tracklist:
"Americans Are All The Same"
A1 M-Squad
A2 Dakota Trench
A3 Occupation Of French
A4 Suggested Reentry
A5 Time Between Seconds
A6 Manny´s Blues
A7 Shreds
A8 Alien Day (Houston)
A9 Falling Million Years
B1 After The Hum
B2 Adada
B3 Astral Airports (Austin)
B4 Mother´s Day (Austin)
