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hard in detroit

  • parallax reissueParallax In Wonderland – Sonny Vincent (Dead Beat Records)

    Tracking the career of New York City punk original Sonny Vincent is a tall order. The man is nothing if not prolific and he’s has had more labels than a printshop out the back of a bootleg distillery.

    This album was first unleashed in 1998 (on vinyl only as “Hard In Detroit”) and the latest iteration, on CD and LP on Cleveland label Dead Beat, has been re-mastered and is a marked sonic improvement.

    First, an aside: The original wasn’t my entry point into the raw music of Sonny Vincent, but it's where the relationship really took off.  You can draw a line through earlier bands like Testors and Shotgun Rationale, but “Parallax” coalesced everything that makes Sonny’s music great: frenzied punk energy, guitars and melody, laced with passion and verve.