A few weeks back I watched It's Gonna Blow!!!: Sand Diego's Music Underground 1986-1996. It's a cool look at a really fascinating scene that produced a lot of records I really loved back in the late 90's and early 2000's. Towards the end, Ian MacKaye says that he thinks San Diego "dwells in the shadows of Los Angeles...and it's in the shadow where life begins, you know. That's where the ideas can grow, they can grow enough to become interesting." I moved to Southern California (Santa Barbara) for college in 1998, a couple of years after the period covered in the film, and lived and played music there until 2005. A bunch of the bands and records that came out of the period covered in the film were still a huge part of the larger Southern California music scene at the time, and were pretty uniformly doing more interesting stuff then the vast majority of the L.A. bands that my band shared stages with during that era.

One of my absolute favourite of the bunch was No Knife. We played a couple of shows with them over the years and I saw them play countless times at shows all over SoCal. Since watching the documentary, which Mitch Wilson (Guitar, Vocals) is prominently featured in, I've been revisiting a bunch of their stuff. In particular their last two records Fire in the City of Automatons (1999) and Riot for Romance! (2002). These songs really hold up. I love the way the two guitars play off each other, and the rhythm section is just killer. I'll share a few of my favourite tracks over the next few days.

First up: Flechette