3 out of 5

Label: Beauty Fool Records

Produced by: Biff Sanders (recorded by); Dave (remastered by)

Distorted Pony’s Instant Winner is one of my favorite lo-fi hardcore records – an example of how punishing and effective something can be, even when it feels rather minimalistic / monotone compositionally and has to be listened to at max volumes to overcome a silent mastering. It’s a record that seems presented at a disadvantage, and succeeds despite all of that. …It may also be an argument for how a producer can shape an album, either directly or indirectly, as the scattered singles / EPs from before the Steve Albini-recorded releases certainly had the DP elements of masked, flat vocals and drill-hammer drums, but lacked the urgency of the full LPs.

Concrete Business, the group’s first such EP, is represented by Beauty Fool records, prior to a series of rereleases and a live album. It’s probably most notable for somewhat referencing their start as a drum machine act, even though it features Theodore Jackson’s percussion: the industrial leaning of the group’s sound is there in the robotic beat, as-is a kind of generally toned down vibe that you could call a harsher Depeche Mode. If this sounds overly critical, it’s only when coming to the band from their later releases; as a standalone, admittedly the lack of extra bite makes DP less arresting, but there is certainly an MBV noise rock vibe to the guitars that appeals, and the Touch and Go sludginess is present, if cleaned up. So if you’re expecting early Distorted Pony to be rawer, the opposite seems to be true.

As to the remaster, while I can’t track down versions of the original that I can stream and compare, I have to imagine – given other ‘Pony stuff from the time that I can listen to – that “Dave’s” work on this is quite significant, and possibly the cleanliness I’m surprised at is due to their work and not present in the 1990 editions. If surprisingly sounds pretty modern; if you scuffed this up a bit, it might sound more appropriate to its era, and thus bump up the relative edginess in comparison to stuff from the time.

Either way, the DP we’d hear a few years later was a much more visceral and unique beast.