The Wipers - Youth of America

Just about as pissy as intelligent punk ever got. Greg Sage has never gotten the credit he deserves. He remains an obscure namecheck. Probably likes it that way. But the dude has been a heap of influence. Just ask Cobain, or Thurston, or Malkmus.

Damn this stuff is still so tasty!

amg:

A grizzly, furious beast of a 30-minute record, Youth of America saw Greg Sage and his Wipers lengthening some of their material to very unfashionable lengths; many a hardcore punk band of the time could tuck a dozen songs about Reagan and fisticuffs inside the title track alone. Opposed to the compromised Is This Real?, Youth of America was engineered and recorded in-house; Sage's time spent in a professional setup for the debut LP frustrated him, and the fact that he's gained complete control here makes it seem as if a cork has been pulled from a bottle. The shackles are off and the group's own personality hits full bloom. Vocally, Sage sounds like a sleepless outcast loaded on an unhealthy amount of caffeine, fraught with a magnified level of paranoia and angst that needs immediate purging — often, his life seems to be depending on it. "Youth of America" itself is a nightmare locomotive, a ten-minute chug through a persistent rhythm, screeching/careening/wailing guitars, and jarring psychedelic effects... "Youth of America" is truly a peerless, fiercely original piece of music, the result of the D.I.Y. punk philosophy taken to the extreme.

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