Sell Out Records - A Music Review Blog

The Hippos 2003 Release (Buy It here) If you were living in Southern California, like I was, in the mid-2000s then you loved ska. You had to. Ok, maybe not, but I was growing up in a religious community near Santa Monica, California and we loved our ska. I wanted to be a rude boy so bad. If you rewind to 1997 I saw my first concert, and it was MXPX, The Hippos, and Less Than Jake. The band put on a showcase of ska fused music that I just couldn’t get enough of. They toured the country with the other two bands and they even made it to MTV and radio airplay. Then things started to change. The band went from ska punk to synthpop and completely disenfranchised their fans. I didn’t like the synth heavy record that came out in 2003, but hey, that’s just what happens. The band didn’t even put this out initially, they waited 3 years to get it out after fans wanted to hear it. That being said, this is not the traditional ska music that you knew from The Hippos. This time around the band...

It’s time for a new series of posts, and one that I have been kicking around for a while now. Today I open up the vaults for you humanoids out there that have given up on finding new and old music alike. We are going back to 2003! In 2003, The Huntingtons and Retarded put out a split record with 12 songs and about 30 minutes of punk rock glory. If you don’t know either band, shame on you! If you do know these bands, then you’re probably Jeremy Allison from Santa Monica, California. But in case you’re not, I’m here to discuss in brief two tracks off of this otherwise forgotten record. If you’re serious about collecting records, however, you can find this CD on Amazon for $63 HERE . I wouldn’t pay that much, but that’s simply because I had the CD in my collection and sold it in 2009 to fund my trip home from Moscow, Idaho aka HELL. Getting to the tracks at hand, you’ll denote the The Huntingtons put on quite the Ramones-esque punk rock element, but Retarded follows suit. The sec...