Descendents - All

"All" started as a joke between Bill Stevenson and his friend Pat McCuistion on a fishing boat in 1980, a shorthand for going the total extent and never settling for some. By 1987 it had become the band's operating religion, and it got its own album. Recorded that January at Radio Tokyo in Venice with Stevenson producing and Richard Andrews engineering, All came out on SST in June and then the band immediately dissolved, with Milo Aukerman leaving for postgraduate work in the sciences and the rest reconstituting as ALL with Dave Smalley singing.

It is also the most musically ambitious record in the catalog, and that is entirely down to the new guys. Karl Alvarez and Stephen Egerton had been best friends since 1976 in Salt Lake City, joined together, and brought what Stevenson calls the "nasty chords." Aukerman described Egerton walking in with "this kind of King Crimson-esque thing." The result swings wildly: the title track lasts one second, "No, All!" lasts two, "All-O-Gistics" lays out the commandments in full (thou shalt not commit adulthood, thou shalt not partake of decaf), and then "Clean Sheets" and Alvarez's "Coolidge" deliver two of the most quietly devastating songs the band ever wrote. Egerton's near-seven-minute "Schizophrenia" closes it out. Dez Cadena of Black Flag sings backing vocals.

The second half's instrumental stretches got this one labeled uneven for years, which now reads as the whole point. It is the record where a hardcore band decided being good was not enough.

Reissued by ORG Music (ORGM-2333) on Boo Berry colored vinyl, and this pressing finally puts "Jealous of the World" and "Uranus" on the LP for the first time, two tracks that had only ever appeared on the CD and cassette. Worth grabbing even if you already own an SST copy.