LA's Wasted Youth
Reagan's In

THE REVIEW

The name Wasted Youth is evidently full of connotations because around the same time it was also adopted by a really good English band (one track above all: "I wish I was a girl"), but that's a different story.

The ones we're talking about, from Los Angeles, were an HC punk band composed of four shady characters to whom the adjective "Wasted" fits quite well. In the photo reproduced on the insert included with the LP, we indeed find four shaved youngsters, with an expression halfway between gypsy and Latino, in jeans and sneakers. A direct extract from the suburbs of the Californian metropolis, whose look, not by chance, already significantly differed from similar European groups.

The record was released in 1981 by the very small label "Sanoblast" and even made it to Italy in a good number of copies (still talking about a few hundred), driven by the relative success that Californian hardcore was experiencing at that moment. Ten fast and very short tracks (I think no song reaches 2 minutes) full of the recipe developed by Circle Jerks in "Group Sex": exhaustive riffs, lightning micro-solos, and ultra-fast rhythm section. The guitar sound is very distinctive - acidic, bright, and distorted; excellent and intricate bass lines; vocals perhaps a bit over the top, like "gnegnegne" (it reminded me a bit of Provolino). As for the lyrics, we find the usual anarchoid and dissident toolkit starting from the cover, but lacking the depth and credibility provided, for instance, by characters like Jello Biafra.

A good work without a doubt, but you can already feel that the golden vein of Californian HC was starting to thin. The genre was transforming into the repetition of the coarsest styles, which would later lead the scene to evolve towards a punk-metal symbiosis with uncertain results (in the opinion of the writer, very few masterpieces and a mass of poor works in the forced search for violence and speed for their own sake, but you know, it's a matter of taste).
Wasted Youth would not escape this drift and a few years later a second metal-oriented album would come, of which we have listened to only a few excerpts that are not remembered for particular aesthetic qualities.