TSOL* – Change Today?

Incredible record. Some of Mike Roche’s and Ron Emory’s best playing on this album.

"We live in the American Zone, free of fear in our American homes, swimming pool and a digital phone, but what do we say when Johnny comes home?" Great lyrics, fantastic unsung american rock record. Not a bad track on it. Extra tracks on this issue are unessential but worth a listen for converts.

WOW this prerssing sounds great, super impressed. This is the first post-Jack Grisham record and they were still smoking badass, walking that Lost Boys line between goth and punk, an American version of the early 80s Damned. The thing that always made this album stick out for me was the heavy bass lines, and they still come through like thunder here.

Wow, the sound here is BIG! Hard and fast with a dark chorus-y edge. Joe Wood is a good vocalist, better than Grisham in my opinion, and just as good a lyricist. I completely ignored this iteration of TSOL live, to my everlasting regret!

I agree with Dom...this is the only T.S.O.L. album that I like.

Is anyone elses A/B label switched on this record ?

This is repress with (barcode). The original is E-1076 released 1984 without barcode

This is the first pressing, E-1076. The subsequent pressings had bar code and I am not sure why Discogs would have these out of order.

It's basically enough to get yourself flogged by hardcore TSOL fans, but I admit this is my absolute favorite album of theirs. By this point in the band's history both Jack Grisham (or whatever he was calling himself at the moment) and Todd Barnes had both left and were replaced. Inevitably, this album gets lumped in with the late TSOL of their long-mocked "Hit & Run" glam metal period specifically because of that personnel issue, but instead this record is a uniquely West Coast punk version of gloomy goth-inflected rock, with occasional twangy guitar parts. The closest comparison from the period might be The Gun Club or 45 Grave, but even then, this album very much has its own thing happening. Joe Wood on vocals and guitar reaches a kind of rustic dark Americana angle that only really appears on this album. Comparisons to Glen Danzig's drawn-out vocal style might be appropriate, but again it feels like this album just caught a momentary glimpse into a rapidly changing band. TSOL long had a certain goth/psych flavor to their sound, particularly on the "Beneath The Shadows" album, but I feel that the tracks here really nail that darkened mood while still being well-written and tuneful, moodily melodic and still powerful. It's very much not hardcore, and it's not glam nor metal, but it has loads of texture and character, and "Red Shadows" into "Flowers By The Door" remains to me one of the absolute best two-song pairings of all time. TSOL never put out the same record twice, but this one might be (at least) among their best. Highly recommended.