One Week Left!

Band: Vanzetti Crime

Country: USA

Notable Album: Unity

Favourite Song: Gimme Gimme Gimmick

Today is a very exciting day!  If everything goes well this week, Friday will be my very last posting on my Ska Blog!  OK maybe you are thinking "OH NO MITCHELL WHYYY WE LOVE YOUR BLOG SO MUCH" but calm yourselves.  I'm not leaving you.  I have a grand vision of making a very elaborate blog - with multiple sections, some for photography, a concert review part, miscellaneous mind rambles, and so on and so forth.  But I need to finish this list of bands before I can move on to such bigger and better things, so this week will be a long, drawn-out goodbye of sorts - yet also a really boring beginning to all good things to come.


As a side note, I bought new headphones today!  They will ship here soon, and they will be make ska sound even better that it already does.  If that's even possible.  Which it is.


OK so on to today's band!  Vanzetti Crime is a now-defunct band based out of Salt Lake City, Utah.  They are an anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-homophobic (and, with all great "anti's," also anti-government) band that only ever released one full length album, Unity.  They describe themselves as follows: 


Vanzetti Crime = Against All Authority + Suicide Machines + Operation Ivy


and that is the perfect description of their music and lyrics.  They have the aggression and political ideals of both AAA and the Suicide Machines (well, the good Suicide Machines albums anyways), but keep their ska tracks in line with Operation Ivy's simple but catchy sound.  One thing I have to comment on is the contrast between lyrics and music.  For the most part, Vanzetti Crime do not sing - they yell or scream  But the music is recorded in such a way that the screaming and yelling is offset by the bounciness and complete carefree-ness of happy ska-punk.  It's weird, but it works.


Unity was the first and last full-length album by Vanzetti Crime.  It was recorded in 3 days and boasts an impressive 18 tracks.  That number is slightly misleading, however, as many of the tracks clock in under 2 minutes.  But that's not necessarily a bad thing - as is the case with many ska & punk bands, it takes years to polish a sound so the first record isn't ever a band's greatest piece of work.  This is just as true for Vanzetti Crime - the music is a little scattered and the recording quality isn't that great, so it's nice that the songs change up quickly to prevent listeners from getting fed up with any given song.  So yeah.  It's good.  Listen to it.


Gimme Gimme Gimmick is my favourite track on this album, but it's closely followed by Population: Addicted & Confused.  Both of these tracks have sort of strange-sounding verses, but it's the chorus that really make them stand out.  On Gimme Gimme Gimmick it's the combination of a wicked walking bass and the call/answer vocals that make it a great song to listen to.  The verses fly by, leading into the chorus that's really easy to sing along to - and that's why it's my favourite track for the album.  Gimme Gimme Gimmick is also a great showcase of the weird bouncy ska / angry yelling contrast I talked about earlier, so I hope you give it a listen and support the local ska scene!


The album is legally free here, so download it and expand your knowledge of underground ska!  Letter W will be up tomorrow, and then it's going to be Challenge Time to find XYZ bands!