III.  THE DARKER HUES. This stuff is vintage Vermont punk. Not that punk—the halfass watered-down straightedge fucks you find on every corner of Burlington—I’m talking punk with a brain. Punk that is punk enough to give punk the finger and play something else. They’re DIY enough to understand DDIY. Since we met them on Memorial Day in 2008—a fateful day, it seems—they’ve been in the front row of every single one of our shows, and we at theirs. Drummer Scott Robot, the epitome of the drummer turned electrical engineer turned back to drummer, is cool enough for hip-hop, so cool, in fact, that he can deny it. Bassist Joe Boo will give you a tattoo of a naked Virgin Mary on your neck and take your money without batting an eye. And guitarist Mo-GAIN Yandow is—how can I say it—completely out of his mind.

At the very bottom of their varied and schizophrenic catalog is something base and important. This stuff is vintage, I said, and it’s old and storied enough to understand that good music—whatever that is to whoever cares—is grounded in the experience itself. Nothing is as important than the people who participate, whether those people are on stage sweating it out or out in the audience raising a glass of Dead Guy Ale and screaming the lyrics at the top of their lungs, singing:
Calling all the satellites:
tell me can you hear this?
We’ve got to get this information feed.
Communication lines are down,
gotta take this underground
where all are friends are buried.