1. What You Waiting For?
2. Gone Before You Know It
3. Going Nowhere
4. Long Live Extremism
5. Every Generation
6. Faster
7. Demons

Bonus Tracks:
8. A Spark
9. Tame Anarchy
10. Nevermind The Ballots (Original Version)
11. Mindful Vandalism
12. The Devil Is A DJ

This EP was the first full-on punk record I made, and in comparison to the Corn-Fed Dino-Bastard EP that came later, I think it's marginally the better one. Listening back to it now though, I'm a bit disappointed by how weedy the mixes are sounding, and the guitars are also quite muddy and dissonant and sloppy in places, though in my defence, at the point of recording some of these tracks, I'd only been playing guitar for 4-5 months.

The genesis of this record is a little murky as it was released after the demise of the old Rude Corps website, so I have no near-contemporary account of it. So far as I can piece together and recall, it basically began as two parallel projects, one being a techno-punk idea that was basically a 100% stylistic rip-off of ATR / Alec Empire, while the second was a more conventional punk sound. I dimly remember that the ATR rip-off had a working title of Young And Pissed Off - there was actually a track written with that name though it didn't even make it onto the bonus tracks of the eventual release. Roughly, that project seems to have started in June 2007, with four of the five bonus tracks being written between then and the beginning of October.

I first got hold of a guitar in early August 2007, and the main punk side of the EP began in mid-November of that year ("Gone Before You Know It"), with two other tracks also written in the first half of December. I'm not really clear on what happened next. There was an instrumental demo version of "Demons" recorded in February 2008, then nothing again until August, when I recorded two more instrumentals - the opener and a song called "Rage & Regrets", which again, didn't make it onto the EP. It may also be relevant that about this time (late July-August 2008) there was also an industrial / EBM type tournament on the Soundclick forums, which - if you can believe it - I actually won, so maybe this spurred me to revisit the languishing Young And Pissed Off project. At any rate, late September saw the recording of the original version of "Nevermind The Ballots", but the whole project again went dormant until mid-February 2009 when I seem to have recorded vocals for "Demons" and procured a guitar solo from an American lad on the Soundclick forums called Grant Starr. This seems to have kicked the project back into life as I then seem to have written a further track ("Long Live Extremism") and on that same day (24th Feb 2009), uploaded new versions of the first six punk tracks. I don't know if these were just new mixes or partial re-recordings of guitar parts or recordings of vocals. I just know they were uploaded to SC on that date and placed in the final running order. However, beyond that, this still doesn't seem to have been a finished EP in my own head, as there was no cover art or mention of an EP title. Indeed, it would be more than a year later at the end of March 2010 that I would write the final song ("Faster") and merge these two projects into one.

Lyrically, I think this EP holds up pretty well for the most part, though there's some aspects make me cringe a bit. "A Spark", for example was clearly inspired by watching V For Vendetta, though I think it kind of transcends its source. The lyrics for "Tame Anarchy" were actually written in my teens almost a decade earlier, and embarrassingly, were actually directly inspired by Chumbawamba's run-in with John Prescott, which shows what I knew about anything at the age of 17: absolutely fuck all. Ironically, "Nevermind The Ballots" was also the title of a Chumbawamba album, so clearly by the time of this EP, my politics had more or less converged with theirs.

I think the main body of this EP is pretty decent. "Gone Before You Know It" has a nice riff, and "Long Live Extremism" is honestly one of the best and most perfect songs I ever wrote, even if it's also one of the shortest. Years later, it featured on a compilation album put out by Serial Bowl Records and a lot of people seemed to like it. "A Spark" is also a good bit of ATR-styled punk with a surprising pop twist. "Nevermind..." was remade in 2009 with the lyrics re-recorded over a pretty sweet hip-hop beat and that version is also one of my favourite tracks I've done. All in all, I quite like this EP. Yeah, the drums are a bit dry and I could maybe have done more to humanise them, and the guitars are a bit messy in places, and as mentioned earlier, the mix could be better. I never did a remix of this record so I guess the original will have to do. I think I may come back to it to sort that out at some point.