"The sweat pours down and stings my eyes..." - Uniform Choice.

We arrived at the office this morning to find one of our top five hardcore records, Uniform Choice's Screaming For Change, awaiting us. With copies of the new Bob Mould and Sleater-Kinney joints also on hand thanks to The Monkey, we settled in for a long morning of listening. We'll talk about those latter two later this week. For now, just a bit about Uniform Choice.

Uniform Choice's record, despite being digitally mastered for the CD, now sounds thin at times, and singer Pat Dubar even a bit restrained. This is one of those situations where the record only pales by comparison because of all the music that has come since. But if you slap on headphones and crank it up you can start to feel the rock. This record was recorded, amazingly, 20 years ago. When we were listening to it in the late '80s and early '90s at ear-bleeding volumes, we considered it the pinnacle of heavy. The band, which evolved out of an earlier act called Unity, was one of the first to take of the Straight Edge mantle, and certainly deserves more acclaim, despite going kind of alternative on their follow-up. Feast your ears on "Once I Cry," track six from SFC. Interesting trivia: Dubar was a top-notch college baseball player and ended up getting drafted by the Brewers, supposedly.

---------------------------------------------------------------

Chromewaves is the first to point out to us that the next Strokes record streets in August. And, like Mr. Chromewaves, it looks like we'll be missing the Dinosaur Jr. tour as well due to some family vacation. We saw so much of the late model Dinosaur in the '90s that we don't really feel much remorse blowing this off. The only alternatives for getting off an island and back to Boston in time for the show were just too cost prohibitive. Or we imagine they would be, if we had bothered to check.

GetLevitation has purportedly first-person (and we have no reason not to believe otherwise) tales from Bob Stinson's wedding and other marginalia about his life and times during and post-Replacements. By the time we got on board with the Replacements, Stinson was ousted from the band, or was just about to be. But by that time the mythology surrounding him was well developed. And while we can't point to a specific instance of his widely accepted guitar genius, we certainly listened hard and often to his playing as we were learning to play ourselves. Anyhoo, we are big Mats fans, but we don't really know about the insidery stuff like the things discussed in the GL post, so it was interesting.

We promised we wouldn't write about Coldplay again, at least for a while, but it is worth pointing out that the band is driving this dude at Scenestars crazy. We think the pressure is getting to people for some reason lately. Example #2: Stereolab is driving Splendid's George Zahora crazy.

That is all.