OUT OF PRINT | SACCHARINE TRUST | “SURVIVING YOU, ALWAYS” | SST | 1984

For those of you unfamiliar with Saccharine Trust, it is the ongoing music project of vocalist Joaquin “Jack” Brewer, guitarist Joe Baiza, and a changing rhythm section (on this album, Mark Hodsen plays bass and Tony Cicero drums). This was their 1984 follow-up to 1981’s debut Paganicons (SST 006!), a stone classic of visionary damaged punk. Their sound and their preoccupations were totally their own, Baiza working out a very personal hardcore-Beefheart guitar style with an increasing amount of jazz while Brewer sang and ranted poetry about justice and truth with an increasing amount of Bible. All of Saccharine Trust’s albums are still available through SST except this one, and it leaves a weird hole in their catalog; the jazzy experimentation on their next release, 1985’s Worldbroken, a recording of an improv show at McCabe’s that year, sounds way discontinuous after the weird thrash of Paganicons, which is why you got to track down this here Piltdown Man-type artifact so e’er the twain shall meet! Also, Saccharine Trust is the greatest band ever—“Jim and Jimi in one band,” as Richard Meltzer declared, and he was not wrong. The first sound you hear on Surviving You, Always is Jack Brewer screaming “CIRCUMCISE ME!” kicking the band into a stuttering noise groove, and if that doesn’t sound like the greatest opening of a record ever to you then I give up. If you ever liked Captain Beefheart’s Lick My Decals Off, Baby, or ever even thought about liking the Minutemen, this album is pretty much your jam, and I hope the decent opinion of mankind will prevail upon Mr. Ginn’s better angels so that he will disseminate the album so widely that it shall not be absent from our shops, or that in the event of its absence, it shall be in the record store’s power to purchase more copies, from the distributor, without delay.