Wax Packs: Marathon / Fire When Ready - Split 7" - Test Pressing (/20), a photo by Tim PopKid on Flickr.
This is 7" number 4 from my Wax Packs hobby box. For a recap on the box as a whole and the story behing the set, please read Monday's review at www.ibuywaytoomanyrecords.com/2014/01/wax-packs-casual-cr.... This split was the 2nd "hit" variation I pulled from my mystery box. I think in trading card lingo, the used to call this a chase card. This particular variant is a limited to 20 copies test pressing for the record. I'm not really one who collects test pressings, so there may be others who would consider this a bigger coup.
As for the 2 bands on the split, again I'd never heard of either prior to putting this on the turntable. I do have to say of all of the bands I've heard from the Wax Packs set, these were the bands I was least impressed with. Marathon's 1st song was a good, upbeat rocker. Big chugging guitar with a catchy chorus, but the vocals didn't hold up to the music. The 2nd songs was an acoustic number with more vocals that just don't work for me.
Fire When Ready is playing a minor chord driven, wacky guitar noodling, late 90s off-beat-drum-signature style that kind of reminds me of some of the Polyvinyl bands from the late 90's era. Again, it's the vocals that I'm just not into with these guys. There's also a bunch of shouting at the end of the 1st song that feels like it comes out of no where. Their 2nd entry is faster and more upbeat, so I like it more than the 1st, but it's still not the sort of band I could see myself listening to very much.
As I said in my first review of the series, there's 19 bands contributing songs to this project. The odds of everyone liking every band seem pretty slim to me. This is just the record that I didn't like of the bunch. I could only find 30 second clips of some of these songs, I couldn't find the whole songs streaming anywhere.
Marathon:
soundcloud.com/plugola/closing-time-at-the-distortion
Fire When Ready:
soundcloud.com/plugola/the-whole-long-while-demo
It would be very interesting and fun to see another label use this concept. Could imagine a Dirtnap series? I would go gaga!
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