"Rot rot rot rot, rot rot rot rot."- Lost.

Often times here at Clicky Clicky when a song pops into our heads we have to make do with what we have. For example, there is very little one can do if they wake up on a Sunday morning wanting to hear the Pauly Klauss tune "Little Albert" or (the amazingly titled "1,100 Words You Need to Know"). The song was pulled out sometimes when Klauss was logging time with Manta Ray [website dead, now apparently with Kam Fong's Mike Boran on rhythm guitar], but to our knowledge there isn't a recording of it. So when the urge came today we went to the next best thing: Lost.

No, not the popular American television drama.

At the turn of the '90s, Lost was a suburban Philadelphia-based high school hardcore act that, as far as we know, first united bassist Klauss with Manta Ray's Erik Evol and Chris Hate. The act made available a couple cassettes, one (Do You Have A Problem?) with a singer named Mike and one without (self-titled). When we go to the cassette crates we usually reach for the one with Mike on vocals for a couple reasons. First, this is the first Lost tape we got, and we devoted a lot of time listening to it while doing such teen activities as cutting lawns and running to be in shape for high school sports. Second, despite the demonstrably more creative and smart efforts on the self-titled cassettes, the recording quality seems to suffer a bit and the playing gets bit loose as the band relaxes its adherence to an orthodox hardcore sound.

Back in the day it wasn't deemed cool (by the admittedly few informed enough to have an opinion) to prefer early model Lost to the late model act, and the self-titled tape's song "Eyes" was held up as the band's pinnacle number. Be that as it may, we find it hard to deny the first tape, and the earnestness of "Don't Smoke Crack," the horrorcore of "Pig House," or the suburban everyman story of Do You Have A Problem's title track. Here's the opening track, "After the War."

To pass some allergy-beleaguered time this weekend we dug out our aforementioned Yuengling boxes of cassettes and made an informal list of songs from old mix tapes that we need to acquire in a more appropriate format for the digital age. Coincidentally we also were presented with a search strand for Google that does a fair job of identifying where a savvy person might be able to find specific songs available. Here we present a list of the songs from cassettes in our dusty boxes that we've acquired in a more IPod friendly format:

1. 7 Seconds - Here's Your Warning
2. Embrace - Dance of Days
3. Embrace - Building
4. M.D.C. - John Wayne Was A Nazi
5. M.D.C. - Corporate Death Burger
6. Mercury Rev - Bronx Cheer
7. Pailhead - Ballad
8. Pailhead - Don't Stand In Line
9. Sugarcubes - Hit

Speaking of old, to the extent that this is news at all, you may be interested to note that there is about to be a large promotional push for the digital release of the Smashing Pumpkins catalog, according to our favorite Ice Magazine contributor. Hopefully this will drive down the used prices for a copy of Gish, since I still don't think I want to pay more than five bucks to get a copy of the CD on my shelf.

That is all.