My mom was the newspaper adviser at a high school for the better part of her career as an educator. The paper would often have fundraisers to make up for the money they couldn't generate through subscriptions & funding and in the mid-90's, a "Battle of the Bands" was one of them. I was in middle school at the time and right in the early stages of my musical development. Every year there would be a few bands that were legitimately good and as someone just getting into punk, I was drawn to those bands more than any other. The band that made the biggest impression on me at the time was Thirty Seconds Deep. They were still something of a ska-punk band, but they were so much tighter and cohesive than the other bands that were vying to be crowned kings of an arbitrary award.
A year or two later I saw a flier for a show they were playing at a church in downtown Naperville with The Undesirables, Three Days, The Tardies and Luke Skawalker. This was the first show I ever attended and I still remember the day vividly. We had a half day from school so my friends and I spent afternoon smoking pot and eating pizza until my parents drove us over. That part sticks out to me because it was one of the only times I smoked pot and actually enjoyed it unlike every other time where I thought I was having an anxiety attack.
The show itself was great and it opened my friends and I up to a whole world we had only read about in interviews and liner notes. It just kind of made sense. I was neither popular nor outcasted in school, but I never really felt like I fit in either. However, in the confines of this show I felt like a part of something bigger. Even if only on a surface level.
I bought the Hot Carl 7" at the show even though I didn't own anything to play it on. I had my mom borrow a portable record player from her school and I'd listen to it on repeat on the floor of my bedroom and read through issues of Maximumrocknroll in which I'd only recognize the name of one band in the entire magazine (as part of an advertisement, not because of an article or review).
On Hot Carl they had officially ditched the traces of ska that permeated their previous 7"s and took the direction of classic Chicago Punk Rock with a midwest emo bent (namely on "Gamble"). There are some moments on here that haven't aged too well in the grand scheme, but much of it just sounds like something that came out of Chicago in the mid-90's. Regardless, this record will always be important to me because of the memories associated with it.
I have also included the self-titled 7" (aka The Chiquita Banana 7") as a separate download.
Thirty Seconds Deep - Hot Carl
Thirty Seconds Deep - S/T
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