TonyALL - New Girl, Old Story

This album is a Descendents or ALL oddity. It features four members of both bands. In some ways that's not a hard feat considering some consider ALL to be The Descendents with a different singer.

TonyALL was an album made for Tony Lombardo (the bass player on The Descendents albums, I Don't Want To Grow Up and Milo Goes To College)
Tony Lombardo wrote all 12 songs on this album. He sings on five songs and his vocals are something of an acquired taste for the average rock fan. However Scott Reynolds(ALL singer at the time) sings on a five tracks and his voice is far easier on the ear. Bass player Karl Alvarez was Tony's replacement in ALL and The Descendents. Karl appears on the track Guitar Case which is possibly the strongest song on this album. Karl's vocals are melodic here and unlike his recent vocals on his Underminer project where years of smoking show their effect.

The song U R Super has a very fifties feel which is emphasized when Tony sings Scoobie Doo. The lyrics are the same style as ALL which are mostly cute songs about getting girls and losing girls. Download TonyALL's New Girl, Old Story here.

If you download this album please comment whether you think it's good or bad.

Born/Dead Valve - Wellington Jan 19 2008

Auckland booking outfit Dog Run bookings brought US punk trio Born/Dead for three shows in New Zealand which completed the band's world tour. After checking out their songs on their myspace site I decided that I liked them enough to check them out their live show at Valve in Wellington.
I arrived while Co-existir were playing. The type of metal these girls and one guy play isn't really my thing. Still I enjoyed their final song which seemed punkier than the rest of their set. They've improved a lot since Punkfest last year.

If I remember rightly Palmerston North band,Gaylords played next and were good. The Sucidal Tendencies, DRI, Municipal Waste influences on this band's sound and look came through strongly. The dual vocal approach is great. I found myself singing along to their song Might as well working because it's really catchy.

Punchbowl played next and this time they had a guy on bass. I watched them play one song and it reminded me of L7. As I was hungry I went and got something to eat and missed the rest of their set.

Up next were Strangers who still remind me of late 80s flying nun Auckland band SPUD. The difference is they're probably louder and have more of a metal leaning. These guys were angry, loud and high energy.

Finally Born/Dead came on. I've been told they sound like
Aus-Rotten however I've never heard that band. I'd say they sound like early UK bands such as Doom, Dischargeand GBH with a touch of 80s US punk like Naked Raygun . I really enjoyed their set despite not really being familiar with their music. I bought their LP The Final Collapse so there were will be a review of that album on this blog soon.

As my camera is being fixed I didn't take any photos at the show. All pics on this post were taken by trip up at a hamilton house show which finished Born/Dead's 5 month world tour.

All - Pummel

Back in the early nineties I intended to do a fanzine and wrote to Bill Stevenson, the drummer from this US pop-punk band, The Descendents and ex-Black Flag asking if he would do an interview). I didn't really expect a reply however Bill wrote back saying to write back with a list of questions and to get them details of a New Zealand promoter so they could tour New Zealand. A year or two late Brian Wafer brought ALL to New Zealand to tour their Breaking Things album and they played a few of the smaller towns. It was fairly shameful that only about twenty people turned up to the Stomach on a Monday night in Palmerston North.

After ALL's Breaking Thing's album which was released on Cruz records in 1993. ALL were signed to Interscope records due to the commercial breakthrough of pop-punk (The Offspring and Green Dayhad become fairly big due to the Dookie and Smash albums. I guess Interscope records had thought something like having a band with three Descendents (one of the originators of the pop-punk sound would become highly successful a decade later). ALL released the album Pummel in 1995. The album wasn't as sucessful commercially as Interscope records had hoped. So ALL were dropped from their roster and moved to the Epitaph records label which specialized in pop punk during the nineties and their next album Mass Nerder was more successful.

Pummel is now out of print. The song opens with a song called Self Righteous which has a SexPistols type riff with melodic vocals and lyrics about how preachers of straight edge annoy ALL.
Million Bucks is a rocking pop punk love song(which is what this band do best).
Miranda is a cool song about a one night stand. Uncle Critic is ALL's reply to music critics. The song Stalker sounds like ALL had been listening to Pantera with its screamed vocals.

All the other songs are cool too except On Foot wouldn't have sounded out place on a glam metal album. A few of the songs are lyrically depressing. The song hetero comes across as homophobic which is at odds with the 'Don't call me homophobic' line
in Uncle Critic.

Pummel is being reissued sometime without the song Hetero and three extra songs. The new cover will feature Chris Shary artwork with ALL's mascot driving a monster truck and a music note car getting obliterated.
Download the original version of Pummel here. Then buy the re-released version when it comes out.



ALL/Descendents guitar player, Stephen Egerton has recently started his own webpage which features projects he is currently working on, produced and has worked on and produced. The 40 Engine material and some of the other stuff he has written with former ALL vocalist Scott Reynolds is great. Click here for Stephen's website