Secretly Canadian
2009
History Of Zero Boys
About This Album
When punk rock began to evolve into hardcore at the dawn of the '80s, it started at the West and East coasts and slowly creepy-crawled into the Midwest and the Southwest, and Indianapolis' Zero Boys were early adopters of the fast and loud ethic, debuting in 1980 with a five-song 7" EP of entertaining but standard-issue punk, Livin' in the '80s, before morphing into the furiously tight, light-speed unit that cut their debut album, Vicious Circle, in 1982. Zero Boys began recording material for a second album that went unfinished when the band split up in 1983, and while a limited-run cassette of the leftover tracks was released locally, only a hundred copies ever existed and only the most rabid fans ever heard it. More than a quarter century later, fourteen songs that would have been on the second Zero Boys LP have finally surfaced on CD with this release from Secretly Canadian. Just as Vicious Circle found the band moving beyond the scrappy Dead Boys-inspired sound of their first EP, History of the Zero Boys makes it clear this band was looking beyond the dead end that hardcore would prove to be for many imaginative bands; the metal influences on "Inergy" and "Human Body" are clear (and recorded well before Black Flag 'fessed up to their Black Sabbath jones on My War), there are moments of arty introspection that punctuate "Splish Splash" and "Black Network News," there's something resembling a pop melody in "Amerika," and they find some room for both goofball humor ("Dingy Bars Suck") and thoughtful contemplation of where life in punk rock is taking them ("Positive Chance").
Track List (try tracks 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13 and 15)

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