Slap A Ham Records was a hardcore punk, thrashcore and grindcore label from San Francisco, California owned and operated by Chris Dodge of Spazz, Despise You, Lack Of Interest and several other bands.
The label is now defunct.
Release #45 is The Very Best Of The Slight Slappers. It is a 2" which is unplayable, not even a record but a cake decoration but with a sleeve and custom SS labels. Can this be listed? It has everything a record has except the music.
One ov the best labels ever, championing the best idioms known to man or animal, moron or mutant, (powerviolence and noisecore OV KOURS), a label whose merit is most conspicuously exemplified by the relevance ov their COMPILATION RELEASES which were --ARE-- miraculously better than even the artists they contain! This is UNHEARD OV...most labels release regrettable time-wasting lackluster compilation recordings to push bands that don't deserve more than one track at a time in any situation...SLAP-A-HAM's comps incredibly turned the format itself into a fine art and may hav innovated the how-many-bands-and-tracks-can-be-fit-onto-a-7" contest, an ongoing competetion which has spawned innumerable participants and crossed over into many genres but whose formal limitations --the art ov brevity and/or intensity-- is favored by the idioms the label championed, the idioms that are exalted BECAUSE OV THOSE PARAMETERS OV INTENSITY AND BREVITY, the pan-idiomatic blind-genius ov NOISECORE, and it's metal-free parallel, the livid grandson ov HARDCORE PUNK, POWERVIOLENCE. Even mor remarkably, those very idioms being forged by the bay area scene and a few other disparate scenes and/or lone clusterfuck situations world wide, were aproximated by bands who did not even engage in those musicologikal deskriptors OUTSIDE ov their comp-appearance...in other words, no matter your style, if you were on a SLAP-A-HAM comp, you were noisecore or powerviolence for the (blink-and-you'll-miss-it) duration ov that track! In a brilliant inversion ov the highest-contrast low-to-high-culturecide, Phoenix's TOMSK-7 consummately outdid SLAYER with the most threadbare reimagining yet kaptured ov their songcraft, an entirely unredundant excoriation ov "South of Heaven" in which amp heads seem to be audibly shaking off the the cabs on which they are now-so-tenously seated. The bible hath been photocopiedeth to the point where the TEXT DON'T READ NO MOR YET it never MEANT MOR.
midsizesedan
October 16, 2019