I may be wrong, but I think a version of this CD was released a couple years back but it was extremely hard to get, they didn’t include “Missile Destroyed Civilization,” and the packaging was half as good. MDC are one of the undisputed progenitors of PC punk/hardcore. Looking back, they seem a little blunt – “Corporate Deathburger,” “Henry Kissmtassinger,” and their name – going mostly by Millions of Dead Cops and sometimes Millions of Damn Christians. But, it was this blunt force trauma that worked and was needed right out of the gate when Reagan was still in the White House. Absolutely to their credit, MDC were one of the first punk bands to devote almost their entire career to what may seem old hat right now but was ground breaking at the time: discussing immigrant rights, vegetarianism, the abuses of the CIA, police brutality, and the degradation of the environment, to name a few. Quite a few of the songs musically hold up, regardless if you don’t remember Kissinger being Nixon’s Secretary of State who openly proclaimed “The illegal we can do right now; the unconstitutional will take a little longer.” I think a lot of people gloss over the fact that some of the slower, acoustic, and country-tinged songs like “Skinhead” and “Chicken Squawk” are just as good, if not better from a point of view that the straight-ahead hardcore blasts, which tended to get the drums trapped at the same tempo. A welcome re-issue.
–todd (Beer City)