Leatherface - The Last

I've posted up the link to this already, and a few people have taken advantage of it, but I thought this album should get a proper post.

Leatherface are, as I have found, a pretty popular and well-known band in the US - seemingly from doing a lot of touring with the Hot Water Music/Avail axis of hardcore punk. At the moment I'm listening to HWM's version of 'Springtime' from their Till the Wheels Fall Off compilation, and it's got a lot of the heart of the original if it does sound a good deal rougher production-wise. Ironically, as someone living in Dublin on the east coast of Ireland, I came across Leatherface - from Sunderland in northern England - via Hot Water Music from Gainesville, Florida.

If I have my Leatherface chronology right, that Hot Water Music split was the first thing the band released after breaking up with The Last. To tell the truth, I haven't listened to much post-reunion Leatherface, although Horsebox seems pretty good; it's just that their earlier albums are such a good collection that it doesn't seem like a good idea to mess with them. In a way, that's a bit like listening to Fuel for the Hate Game, Forever and Counting and No Division, over and over again (the Leatherface equivalents, in the same order, would be Mush, Minx and The Last - and Finding the Rhythms and Cherry Knowles/Fill Your Boots would be, respectively, the good but not great early albums; and Leatherface/Hot Water Music the shared additional work of greatness).

Apparently, Leatherface broke up when singer and band leader Frankie Stubbs decided that everyone else wasn't working as hard as him. Add in the departure of guitarist Dickie Hammond, without whom seven tracks under the moniker 'Pope' were recorded and then re-included as bonus tracks on the BYO reissue, and you've got a bit of J. Mascis/Lou Barlow Dinosaur Jr. situation. Personal disputes aside, Frankie Norman Warsaw Stubbs is a pretty magnetic frontman for Leatherface. Sweetbabyjaysus just did an excellent post on the amazing Daniel A.I.U. Higgs of Lungfish; basically, Frankie Stubbs performs as the most emotive singer of a hardcore band which isn't recognizably anywhere like an actual emo band. Middle initials aside, and I'm not sure if Stubbs has ever had the consistent facial hair to class him as beardcore, but he sure sounds like he fits in that definition.

I haven't got anywhere near describing The Last in itself, but I wrote something about it here and about the Leatherface sound more generally (in respect of the Leatherface/HWM split) here. If anyone might want to hear that split, holler in the comments and I can re-up it for you.

This is the tracklisting for the first session of recordings on The Last

1. Little White God

2. In My Life

3. Patrick Kills Me

4. Shipyards

5. Daylight Comes

6. Desert Island

7. Winsome, Losesome

8. Ba Ba Ba Ba Boo

Leatherface - The Last (Domino 1994/BYO 2001)

Leatherface at BYO Records

Finally, this is the back cover from the BYO album (tracks 9-16 being the bonus tracks I haven't included in the upload). Dog Disco may be pretty psychedically awful but in terms of mind-bending canine album artwork this one, as we say, takes the biscuit. There's some weird Einsteinian relativity shit going on here...