Black Flag: Slip It In [SST]

Why you'll love it

This SST LP brings back the 1984 album with Raymond Pettibon's original cover drawing. Punknews.org called it "a classic and a landmark for independent music," and Greg Ginn's guitar work here is some of his wildest.

This edition

• Pressed at RTI

About the album

Black Flag did not do rest. In 1984 they put out three full-length albums and played so many shows that Henry Rollins counted 178 of them, and Slip It In was cut on a short break from the endless tour behind My War. It fuses that album's slow, heavy crawl with the fury of Damaged, and takes the songs into longer, stranger shapes.

Rollins wrote the lyrics for four of the eight songs, and his voice is at full stretch on "Black Coffee" and "Rat's Eyes." Greg Ginn's guitar slides between sludge, thrash, blues and jazz, and the instrumental "Obliteration" mashes sludge and jazz into what Punknews called "an ominous hybrid." Kira Roessler's bass and Bill Stevenson's drums hold it all together, "My Ghetto" points toward powerviolence years early, and Suzi Gardner, later of L7, adds backing vocals to the title song.

Its pre-grunge weight has aged rather well, and you can hear its shadow on a lot of heavy music from the next decade. Ginn, Stevenson and the engineer Spot produced it in the gaps between gigs, which is about the closest Black Flag ever came to a holiday.

Also at Kops: more Black Flag on vinyl · browse Punk

Tracklist

Listen

On SST (cat# SST 029), a reissue of the 1984 album.