Welcome to the sixth edition of Discogs Cheapos, a column wherein I spotlight a handful of old, exceptional records that sell for single-digits on the Discogs website. It’s been three years since the last edition – I am a thoroughly infrequent man – and seeing as record prices really went ape over the last few years, stupidly so in fact, deals are getting harder and harder to spot. But they’re there! Today is my birthday, and rather than sit here re-gramming all the sweet birthday-shoutout Instagram stories that I’m sure are coming in… (yup, any minute now…), I thought I’d offer this gift to you, dear reader – here are six old records completely worth picking up, probably for under fifty bucks total if you set your mind to it.

Charm City Suicides Green Blood 7″ (Baths Of Power, 2000)
Charm City Suicides existed right around the turn of the century, which in retrospect was a pretty terrible time for being an outrageously snotty and primitive punk rock band. The collector-based Killed By Death craze hadn’t quite caught on with punks in their twenties, whereas the waning first-wave of screamo maintained significant message-board chatter alongside the burgeoning stadium-crust of Tragedy (whose debut was also released in 2000) as we celebrated the arrival of Makeoutclub (look it up) and hipster dance nights. Not a lot of room in the conversation for dirty local punk bands with poorly-photocopied record covers at the time, which is perhaps why I still haven’t seen Charm City Suicides get their due. Their self-titled full-length from the following year remains one of my absolute favorite punk records of the ’00s, a catchy, ridiculous, primal, memorable romp through the overgrown back-alleys of Baltimore’s suburbs (and unexpectedly released by Youth Attack on compact disc). While that album is a true pinnacle of don’t-care punk rock – check “Out At The Reservoir”, “I Wanna Get With You” and “Pit Of Sorrow” to confirm the group’s transcendent melding of Chain Gang, Flipper and Germs – their debut single Green Blood is right up there too, exceptionally high quality and completely out of time. “I’m In Love” is the only track up on YouTube, where you can sample its trash-can drums, wrong-note riffs and flustered squawk of vocalist Mike Apichella. If you’re like me and you love home-recorded, home-released punk EPs that the band themselves folded, stuffed and mailed, it’s a five out of five.

Jet Bronx & The Forbidden Ain’t Doin’ Nothin’ / I Can’t Stand It 7″ (Lightning, 1977)
1977 was a great year for punk because punk wasn’t remotely figured out yet. A band like Jet Bronx & The Forbidden, for example, were more punk than not, but they also sounded like the recent past rather than a hysterical refusal of it. “Ain’t Doin’ Nothin'” delivers the excellent punk attitude of slacking off and rolling one’s eyes at authority before returning one’s attention back to a shoplifted comic book, and while the music has enough edge to tip a tense pub scene into violence (and I love that they went with “doin’ nothin'” instead of “doing nothing”), it still kinda sounds like Dr. Hook as much as Richard Hell. “I Can’t Stand It” is even more pre-punk sounding, and nearly as killer, like a British Black Oak Arkansas shaking off the gratuitous bloat of ’70s rock like a wet dog for something streamlined, gruff and relatable. Bassist George Ford later went on to Hall & Oates and drummer Stuart Elliott later joined Cockney Rebel, which offers some further insight into Jet Bronx & The Forbidden’s brief moment of existence, this seven-inch single their sole release. It’s a timeless teenage drop-out ripper, and while I know international shipping costs are an absolute beast these days, copies are currently starting at sixty-three cents over on Discogs, astronomically less than many of Jet Bronx’s class-of-’77 cohort.

St. Joseph & The Abandoned Food St. Joseph & The Abandoned Food 7″ (The Aporia Label, 1999)
Pick of the litter right here, when rated on both quality and cost! St. Joseph & The Abandoned Food featured a young Noel Harmonson on guitar – you may recognize his name from his time spent with Comets On Fire and Heron Oblivion; I sure do – and if you ever doubted that he was always ahead of the curve and cool-as-hell for it, go and purchase this self-titled single for three bucks right this very moment. “Harlequin Knights” sounds like that first The Rapture EP on Gravity if the group was inspired by The Electric Eels and CBGBs weeknight no-wave gigs. Harmonson’s guitar is slippery as an eel as vocalist Joseph Mosconi hyperventilates his lyrics… how this isn’t a five hundred dollar obscurity reissued by Tom Lax is a mystery to me. “Grub Blastin'” reminds me of Los Cincos, also operating on the West Coast around roughly the same time, only ten times more demented, as if these guys tried to buy a Rolling Stones record but left the shop with US Maple’s Sang Phat Editor instead. It’s a stunning double-shot of over-the-top art-punk, and I truly cannot believe copies are just sitting around on the internet for less change than a rest-stop KitKat.

Toner High Cinderella And The Slipper Fit Perfectly LP (Sissysound / Panzerkreuz, 2011)
There’s some tough competition, but this might be the strangest record of this bunch. At the very least, it’s the most recent, but the sounds of Toner High Cinderella’s “2009 winter depression” record are untethered to conventional space and time. The presumably Dutch artist (could be just one guy, who knows?) struck gold with this loose concept album about, uh, the story of Cinderella, inexplicably rendered in cosmic stoner-psych 2D. Imagine, if you will, Josh Homme completely enamored with two records: Earth’s Pentastar and Tony Conrad & Faust’s Outside The Dream Syndicate. It’s like the best concept record Boris never wrote, and you don’t have to shell out a couple Benjamins to partake in the fun. Toner High Cinderella slips the minimalist glass slipper of droning sludge-rock into the delicate foot of kraut-rock space-vision, and, seeing as it was mostly promoted and distributed by seminal dance label Crème Organization, it never seemed to find its footing anywhere, no pun intended. (The LP is available on Crème’s Bandcamp page right now, but without a single corresponding streamable track – I love that move!) That’s fine, I suppose, as any gem that shines with the hypnotic, prismatic light of And The Slipper Fit Perfectly is bound for eventual discovery and celebration.

Unwanted Christmas Presents Unwanted Christmas Presents LP (Electrocution, 1993)
I remember when Kevin of Pink Reason hyped up the Unwanted Christmas Presents LP online, maybe like a dozen years ago now, and I thought, well, that’s it: this guy has an audience, he has cred, and he’s going to send this cheap record into the collector’s marketplace tout de suite. That increased prominence and dollar value never took place, however – such is the enduring undesirability of this antagonizing, demoralizing album. Unwanted Christmas Presents were a duo, not unlike Ween in many respects, from their willingness to see any bad idea through to its conclusion and their delight in taking apart typical rock music and using it for spare parts while disregarding the essentials. “Keith” and “Jonathan” were from West Virginia, of all unfortunate places, and their noisy, unschooled avant-garde garage-punk is thrilling, full of dingy riffs and occasionally even rockin’ tunes, delivered with the chutzpah of the most nihilistic Subterranean Records groups, the Midwestern mix of vigor and torpor you might hear in V-3 (and yes, Pink Reason too) and the unsettling disturbances of Culturcide. It’s music sure to please troubled high-school bullies of the early ’90s as well as today’s WFMU-DJ weirdo musicologists, and somehow, there always seems to be a handful of cheap copies sitting around for sale on the internet. They probably sold a dozen copies or less when it first came out, and laughed about it, the group’s name clearly an intentionally self-fulfilling prophecy.

Will To Live Will To Live 12″ (Flesh, 1986)
If you lived in or near New Jersey in the ’90s, ’00s or even ’10s and enjoyed digging through the bargain bins tucked under the waist-level racks at record shops, chances are you came across records by Amor Fati, New Jersey’s answer to Throbbing Gristle (or at least its answer to Sleep Chamber). Amor Fati was the name used by Amaury Perez for his solo industrial music, and he released records on his own Flesh Records label, loosely taping or gluing pieces of paper to plain record jackets, sure to get ripped in the shuffle amongst kinder, gentler LPs. Those Amor Fati records are cool, certainly cool for their time, though probably inessential unless you’re a real art-aktion kinda freak (which I guess I am, since I have those records). The one you really wanna grab, however, is the self-titled EP from Will To Live, the group Amor Fati played guitar and sang for in the mid ’80s. They meld a lot of things that are overtly appreciated in the underground now: the staunch and brittle anger of Crass; the masochistic eroticism of Swans in both noise-rock and goth-industrial modes; the acerbic American post-punk of Spike In Vain; the “are we even musicians?” misery-based drone-punk of Campingsex. And they still sound like they probably opened for Rites Of Spring, SPK and Die Kreuzen when they rolled up to City Gardens in Trenton sometime in 1986, when flyers and word of mouth were the only hope a young alternative-type had in getting there. Will To Live existed far beyond mainstream society back then, and while it was arguably easier to avoid the all-seeing corporate eye in 1986 than right now, they’re still dope as hell for it, capped off with this aggressively brooding record that no one seems to know about.