This Is Book’s Music

Punk rock comes in all shapes and sizes, and if you are a fan or collector of the music, it means it comes in various forms of sound quality. Rusted Shut hasn’t been around in years but Dead is an album that documents their early sound by taking some of their old recordings and having the fans decide for themselves.

It sounds as if these were transferred directly from cassette, and while that’s far from a bad thing, the original recordings were not up to par. What you hear though is a sense of energy that comes from a band who sounded like they just wanted to rip shit up because they can. The CD is properly indexed so you can access each track, but a lot of times it sounds like there are seven or eight songs in one track, with no way of telling which is the proper song, where things begin or end. But it’s fun, loud, raunchy, nasty, and disgusting all at the same time.