We've been waiting forever for this to happen! The first four Flipper albums have finally been reissued, and each one of these albums is a crucial chapter of this seminal San Francisco band. EVen if you've never heard Flipper, I bet that you've at least heard the name; these freaks have had an enormous influence on so much of the heavy, fucked-up punk and metal that we love over the past three decades. Flipper formed in 1979 in the midst of the burgeoning hardcore scene, but even though the band was eventually embraced by a cult following in hardcore, these mutants had little in common with the louder/faster aesthetic of punk as it headed into the 1980s. They were much more closely aligned with that weirdo San Francisco art punk scene of the late 70s that gave us other unclassifiable bands like Chrome and The Residents, but Flipper were heavier than everyone. Playing slow, bludgeoning atonal riffs and plodding super-heavy rhythms, Flipper were slower than anyone else in punk at the time, and their sheer heaviness and the nihilistic aura that surrounded the band and their music is what drew in the hardcore punks. In the decades that followed, Flipper turned into one of the most influential bands of the American underground, and you can trace their influence through the sloppy, misanthropic sludge rock of 80's bands like Drunks With Guns, Blight and Kilslug to the success of Nirvana and the Melvins, both citing Flipper as being one of their biggest influences. Especially the Melvins. Out of all of the bands that I listen to, the Melvins might be Flipper's most devout disciples (next to Rick Rubin's mid-80s band Hose); over the course of their career, the Melvins have covered tons of Flipper songs and have cited Flipper as one of their biggest influences since the beginning, and its pretty obvious when you listen to the crushing, plodding drumming and sludgy punk riffs on any of the Melvins's albums. And more recently, there has been a whole movement of fucked up noise/punk bands that are worshipping at the altar of Flipper, from Pissed Jeans to Brainbombs to Clockcleaner, they've all got that Flipper DNA coursing through their veins. Of course, nobody has ever surpassed the mighty, mysterious brain-damaged heaviness of Flipper themselves, and these new reissues are crucial for anyone who wants to hear the band at the height of their demented powers.

Sex Bomb Baby! is a collection of various singles, compilation appearances, and other stuff from Flipper, and all of this stuff is prior to 1982. Originally released by Subterranean Records in 1987, this compilation eventually went out of print before being reissued for the first time by Henry Rollins in the mid 1990s on his Infinite Zero imprint. The disc starts off with the classic Flipper jam "Sex Bomb" from off of the original 1981 single; this versions of the song is a bit different, all sludgy and smeared in noise and those weird electronic noises but lurching ahead faster than any of the other recordings of "Sex Bomb" that the band released, until it just cuts out abruptly at the end. After that the disc covers the Love Canal 7", the Get Away single, the tracks from the Not So Quiet On The Western Front, Eastern Front, SF Underground, and Live At Target compilations, and the flexidisc that came with an issue of Take It magazine from 1982. It's all early Flipper, so you get the damaged studio effects, the scuzzy recording quality, lumbering art-punk sludge, weird spoken word parts and film samples, everything that made the original Flipper lineup so genius. The songs rule, with amazing catchy hooks underneath all of the fucked up barely-holding-it-together musicianship and nihilistic lyrics. There's a handful of alternate versions of songs from Generic and Gone Fishin ("Sex Bomb", "Sacrifice", "Love Canal") plus a bunch of obscurities that you'll only find here. This new reissue also has some cool liner notes written by Rollins, along with rare photos and artwork from the band.