Let us take a journey back in time. The year is 1978 and a new record label, Slash, has been brought onto the scene by Bob Biggs, who also published a pioneering punk magazine by the same name just one year earlier. It’s longevity lasted for 21 years, releasing the first two X Albums, the soundtrack to The Decline of Western Civilization music documentary on the Germs, X, and other punk icons, and the Blasters first album in 1981.
Decades later, this label is back with their first release, a compilation that showcases the music and artists of that label’s previous roster – The Misfits, Faith No More, X, Asian Dub Foundation, L7, Germs, Burning Spear, Gun Club, and more.
They also give us a taste of what they have in store for Slash 2003. Over the past few years, they’ve switched their spotlight from Los Angeles and San Francisco to Brooklyn, bringing on Shiner Massive, a reggae/hip-hop rock outfit whose members include rapper guitarist Larry Devore (Nas, Wu-Tang Clan) and co-founder/producer Will Fulton, who’s remixed and produced albums for other artists since the mid 90s, including Run-DMC, Ja Rule and Jay-Z.
Shiner’s tracks include the first, “The Sky is Falling”, which blends a Jimi Hendricks vibe with a modern spoken word/rap groove of Rage Against The Machine, and “Here We Come” gets down and dirty with a rich reggae romp.
If Slash’s new and improved label carries on the tradition of discovering gems in the music scene, as they’ve done in the past, we can only expect to look to them for the future of music. In the meantime, there’s nothing like the classics to really rock our trip down memory lane.
