Your Food
Poke It With a Stick

I love this label. Who else but Chicago, Illinois's Drag City Records could have unearthed a record like this? Recorded in 1983, "Poke It With A Stick" is the first and only album by Your Food and the first historic LP of the punk scene in Louisville, Kentucky, released by the band on their own label Screaming Whoredog. It's the fall of 1981 at 1069 Bardstown Road, the first "punk house" in the city of Louisville: there are two guys, John Bailey and Wolf Knapp, who play guitar and bass respectively. After an initial experience with a group called Orange-Orange, the two contact Douglas Maxson and Charles Schultz, vocalist and drummer of the Dickbrains, a band reputed to be completely made up of crazy people. That's how Your Food was born. Soon, the four begin to play around Louisville, record an album financed by Pell Grant, and with the few pennies the band managed to scrape together, somehow manage to go on tour three times around the world, until one night on a deserted and icy highway in West Virginia, their van breaks down for the third time in four days, and they decide to call it quits.

1069 was truly the home for Your Food and other genre bands (the aforementioned Dickbrains, Circle X, Blinders, Babylon Dance Band), and practically it was there that all of it happened. Of course, there's little material circulating, and this reissue is the first time "Poke It With A Stick" has been converted to digital format. The album contains nine songs that I would describe as striking as electric shocks: minimal, instinctive, and brief compositions in the tradition of bands like Dannees Boon's Minutemen. The main feature is the bass lines and its powerful sound, guitars sharp as blades, and schizophrenic, paranoid vocal performances, expressions of typical youth restlessness and discomfort. Noteworthy is the long closing track, which lasts eleven minutes, practically as long as all the other eight songs on the LP combined, where the group's garage sound merges with Suicide-esque hallucinations and Half Japanese visions, culminating in a form of Les Rallizes Dénudés expressionism and Public Image Limited hypnotism.

The release of the reissue is accompanied by a statement from a giant in the Louisville music scene like Britt Walford (born 1970 and among other things drummer for Slint): "Every time they played, you knew you were in the presence of something really strong. Their sound was wild and at the same time catatonic. Cathartic. It was an indistinguishable sound." I think there's nothing more to add.