Sewer Trout - Meet The Sewer Trout LP - Green Vinyl (/100)

Dead Broke / Lavasocks (2022)

I'm definitely reaching that age where I tend to be more excited about old music than new music.  I assume it happens to everyone and if nothing else, I think I held out longer than most.  Not that I'm giving up on new music or anything, it's just that the older hits are the ones that I tend to be most interested in, at least lately.  Enter an old band; Sewer Trout.

They put out releases on Lookout and Very Small and were very much of that era that spawned so many great bands.  However, Sewer Trout wasn't really ever on my radar.  When I started getting into punk rock, they weren't around anymore.  They were from an earlier era (Four years earlier felt like an eternity back then, though that's blink and you miss it time for me now) that I had to play catch up on.  But they weren't quite as noteworthy as say a Crimpshrine or Operation Ivy, so I never got around to them for whatever reason.

With Dead Broke and Lavasocks releasing a discography LP of Sewer Trout material, it felt like the right time to finally play catch up.  The vast majority of these songs are ones I had never heard before aside from those that were on the Turn It Around and Floyd comps.  How do these songs sound for the first time in 2022? Old.  Honesty, they sound really old.

I would never say these are bad songs, but they are absolutely of a past era and sound like it.  Without much in the way of nostalgia holding me to these songs since I didn't listen to them when they were more current, I can't say they really connect with me very much hearing them for the first time today.  Although lyrically they've aged pretty well (or pretty poorly, depending on how annoyed you are with the world), as many of the political and societal criticisms they're singing about are still pretty valid all this time later.  

The songs themselves feel kind of simple and the sound is a little bit thin. Which makes sense.  This stuff was mostly recorded and released in the 80s on a punk budget.  They're not going to sound like fancy records, but they also haven't really aged in a way that makes them stand out to me thirty something years after they were recorded.  Again, nothing on this record is bad.  I like what the band was going for and I think the songs probably sound as good as they possibly could on this LP considering the source material.  I just can't see myself listening to it much when there are tons of other bands from this era that I already have a multiple decade connection with.  Like so many, I'm a prisoner of nostalgia.

Sewer Trout - Meet The Sewer Trout:
https://deadbrokerekerds.bandcamp.com/album/meet-the-sewer-trout