STRANGULATED BEATOFFS - The Beatoffs (aka The White Album)
"In honor of the band's 25th anniversary, Skin Graft unearths The Beatoffs White Album, the lost debut LP from STRANGULATED BEATOFFS. In 1984, FRITZ NOBLE was performing in WHITE SUBURBAN YOUTH the faster, snottier act that would later evolve into ULTRAMAN, St. Louis most commercially viable punk-rock band. Meanwhile guitarist STAN SEITRICH and vocalist MIKE DOSKOCIL formed DRUNKS WITH GUNS in opposition to the fast-louder-faster punk mantra and slowed the whole works down to a crawl, driving three chords into a primal relentless pound, years before the Melvins, Mudhoney and Sub Pop took the sound to the bank. Drunks With Guns imploded in 1987 and Seitrich teamed with Noble to form Strangulated Beatoffs, picking up where Drunks left off. The Beatoffs would drive the riff to its logical extreme starting with their debut 7 single "Shake Your Dick," ultimately reducing their music even further on the Days of Our Lives LP, and then refining their sound by devolving into a series of loops as on their breakthrough self-titled album also known as Beating Off All Over The World. But Days Of Our Lives was not the Strangulated Beatoffs true first LP. In 1988, the Beatoffs embarked on recoding their debut LP, consisting entirely of Beatles covers. Tapes of the session were lost and Chopper Records, the label responsible for releasing the Drunks With Guns LP, was able to salvage four of the songs which appeared as the bands second 7", The Beatoffs. Now, a quarter century after it was recorded, Strangulated Beatoffs debut long-player has surfaced, bathed in tape-hiss, beer and tongue-in-cheek misanthropy. While some songs would be at home on Sub Pop a few years later, others anticipate the sound Drag City became renowned for in the 90s. Beatles standards like "You Know My Name (Look Up The Number) fit shockingly well into the Beatoffs oeuvre, while songs like "Norwegian Wood," "Ticket To Ride" and "Dont Let Me Down" take on new layers of meaning under the Beatoffs watch-and their cover of George Harrison's "Savoy Truffle" sounds like a lost Drunks With Guns track with a tanging snare, vitriolic vocals and Seitrich's head-crushing sludge guitar." - Skin Graft.
After nearly a decade of false starts, multiple game plans veering off the rails, and a handful of shattered hopes and/or dreams, the odyssey is finally complete—the new Fusetron site is here.
This is the first phase of a multipart rollout that will span the next few months: the currently browsable stock includes miscellaneous new releases from the past 8+ months (we have a lot of catching up to do), plus approximately a third of our backstock. Note that we’ve reduced/slashed prices on many titles and will continue to do so in order to make room for new stock. We’ll also be expanding / tweaking / improving / debugging the site itself (for example, we still have work to do on the automated international postage system, not to mention the inevitable inventory discrepancies that come with transferring an ancient and massive database to a new system).
Over the next few months, as we take inventory, clean house, and delve into our storage, we will be uploading thousands of additional items, gradually, on a near-daily basis. This will include the majority of the LPs, as well as many titles, in all formats, once thought long-gone. Many currently “sold out” items are likely to resurface.
Finally, once our general backstock is up (probably in the next two or three months) we’ll begin making our extensive stockpile of rarities available online for the first time: tons of random out-of-print titles, "deadstock," warehouse finds, secondhand collectibles, etc., accumulated over the past few decades.
Frequent/returning customers will be getting early access to these items. Details to follow on how this will work (a priority mailing list? a 'frequent flyer'-like program?), but it will not be based on dollars spent. We want to reward those who consistently support us, especially in the discogs marketplace era (to those who show up trying to poach five copies of a one-off rarity, and nothing else, ever… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ).
So—we suggest you take some time to dig through the site—even we’ve been surprised by what’s been turning up, and there’s much more to come.
