Steel Toe Solution - Demo-lition

Crowd Control Media’s ‘100 Series’

 

LA’s home of Oi!, Crowd Control Media, is on the verge of releasing its first release in the ‘100 Series’. The concept is plain and simple, every release in this series is (extremely) limited to just 100 copies, gets hand numbered, the white labels get hand stamped, the record gets thrown in a silk screened jacket and contains a double sided poster as an insert. Much alike the releases of Lionheart Records for example.  First up in the series is the long lost demo tape (and then some), by Jersey’s Steel Toe Solution.

 

On “Demo-lition”, the band makes their long lost and obscure demo cassette for the first time ever, ‘widely’ available on vinyl. Besides the full demo, assuming there were six tracks on the original tape, this 12” contains two more, both band and crowd, favorites “Dick In The Dirt” and American Oi!’s #1 party anthem “Wrong Side Of The Pond”. Both versions taken from the band’s debut EP, originally released by Headache Records in the year 2000.

 

But back to the demo part of “Demo-Lition”, because despite that the majority of the six tracks are previously released by now, on both the self-titled debut EP as well as the “Eight Year War” CD (Headache Records, 2005), this is a banging piece of history that sounds stunning, despite being demo recordings from 15+ years old! The two unreleased tracks, “Doombringer” (a four minute, mid-tempo anthem about a lost brother) and Cock SParrer’s “Chip On Your Shoulder” (an obvious classic, despite being from the ‘wrong’ side of the pond), easily stand their ground between the songs that eventually made the cut!

 

Bringing you the American Oi! sound of the 90’s and early 00’s, Steel Toe Solution recorded a great demo in their early days that still sounds solid until this very day. Along with the limitation of the 12”, this turned into an absolute must-have for me and I can’t wait until the mailman arrives with my copy!