Search - Mouthpiece :: Can't Kill What's Inside

A former strictly '80s hardcore dude reconsiders '90s hardco

Andrew Jacobs | 02/19/2009

(5 out of 5 stars)

"I've always been pretty set in my ways with regard to hardcore music - only '80s or '80s sounding hardcore in my house. This being the case, I pretty much totally missed out on Mouthpiece during their '90s heyday, though I am fairly positive that my band Cereal opened for 'em at Macondo in L.A. in November of '93. The show wasn't listed in this discography's CD booklet, which includes a complete listing of every single show that Mouthpiece has ever played (just one of the many cool aspects of this enhanced CD), so I'm probably wrong on this. Needless to say, when I first heard about this discography via the very fine Double Cross webzine a.k.a. DCXX (co-maintained by none other than Mouthpiece singer and frontman Tim McMahon), I honestly didn't have any intention of purchasing it. As I said, '80s and '80s sounding hardcore only, baby.



So what happened to make me reconsider my hardcore listening ways? Two words - NEGATIVE COMMENTS.



In the months and weeks leading up to the discography's release, Tim posted a series of entries on DCXX where he painstakingly dissected the visuals of each Mouthpiece record cover and capped off those entries with an analysis of the discography photos. Within a day of posting this, DCXX was flooded with extremely mean and below the belt anti-Mouthpiece and anti-DCXX comments, mostly from people posting anonymously (as internet haters who have never and will never accomplish anything of any real importance are want to do). Pretty soon though, the DCXX faithful (myself proudly included) rallied to DCXX's and Tim's defense and even managed to convert one or two haters to our side in the process. This battle of sorts, along with the undeniable coolness of all of the Mouthpiece record covers, made me decide to give this discography a shot.



In a word - AWESOME.



Thanks to Mouthpiece and DCXX, I now intend to listen to all of those '90s hardcore records that I refused to listen to in the '90s. There's obviously a wealth of great '90s hardcore out there to be listened to. Now that I've heard this discography, I can say with certainty that I am no longer a strictly '80s hardcore dude."