My first write-up of exceptional older records available on Discogs for five bucks or less was published back in 2013, and I could not have predicted how used record prices would skyrocket in the ensuing decade. The word “astronomical” doesn’t imply the appropriate level of stupidity when talking about the prices Misfits records sell for in 2025, for instance, but you know what, even as the “classics” and their lower-tier strivers insist on beating up your bank account, there are still certain eras, genres and barely-known obscurities that can be had on the cheap and are likely to generate vastly more enjoyment per square cent than that hundredth spin of “London Dungeon” in its original pressing. (That said, if you’re looking to unload a first-press 3 Hits From Hell for 2013 prices, let’s make a deal.) Here are seven more records sitting around on Discogs right now, all of which can be acquired for less than the cost of media-mail postage. Grab ’em!

Fat Nuts Settin’ It Straight 7″ (Back Ta Basics, 1995)
You know who’s conspicuously absent from the multitude of reunion-centric hardcore fest lineups? FAT NUTS, that’s who! Their ridiculous name stunned me and my friends when we first saw it on one of those self-propagating Back Ta Basics flyers that lined every record shop and show-space in the mid ’90s and it’s only gotten more ridiculous with time. You just know that this Jersey hardcore band decided on its name with a total lack of irony or sarcasm, unlike today’s crop of winking, self-aware beatdown bands. It’s refreshing to bear witness to such direct and sincere hardcore lunacy, and that extends to the six songs here, which vacillate between 25 Ta Life “Smakin’ U’ Up”-style groove-mosh, an “old school”-inspired speedy slap akin to Shutdown and Warzone’s rousing call to arms. No, it’s not great, but where I come from, hardcore isn’t separated from its cultural context and judged solely on the exacting replication of its influences. This isn’t a digital Bandcamp demo with a JPG cover image that was never actually printed anywhere – if you pick up a copy of Settin’ It Straight, you’ll get to handle the Rob Liefeld-worthy juiced-up skinhead on the imperfectly hand-cut Kinkos cover, peruse the lyric sheet (including “Theme Song”) and probably dump out at least half a dozen of those Back Ta Basics distro flyers tucked in the sleeve (in various colors and sizes). The antithesis of a non-fungible token.

Fireball Blessed Be 12″ (High Roller Society, 2005)
The existence of this, Fireball’s sole recorded document, has been shocking me for twenty years now. How could such a perfect band come to be? It’s appropriately titled, considering that listening to Blessed Be feels like witnessing a once-in-a-lifetime comet, but not one of those cute ones that leaves a tail of shining stardust – I’m talking about a big ugly molten meatball ready to leave a Gulf of Mexico-sized crater and take ninety-percent of all life on Earth with it. These five Brooklyn women somehow had the intuition and taste to put together a band that melds the best of definitively blown-out Japanese hard rock ala Mainliner / High Rise with lavish stoner grooves and expressively tuneful vocals. Singer Jennifer Black dukes it out with her band (always ending in a bloodied draw) over the rawest NYC guitar music, in spiritual lineage with both Pussy Galore and No Fucker. They even cover Amon Düül II’s “Archangels Thunderbird”, because of course their record collections were cooler than everyone else’s in 2005, and they do so with the gnarliest kick drum I have ever heard. I haven’t dug too hard to find out what else the members of Fireball have been up to since then – if anyone knows and there’s something really cool, please holler – but I’m ultimately content to cherish this EP for the impossible perfection it achieves. Absolutely blows my mind it’s a four-dollar record… we should be out there clawing over each other, crabs-in-a-basket style, to have the privilege to pay a hundred times as much.

God’s Gift Today I Never Thought Of You At All 12″ (Polydor, 1993)
A couple years ago I was picking away at a few of those friends-of-Boomkat year-end best-of lists (wherein Boomkat shares the favorites of what seems to be every single living artist they’ve ever distributed), and sitting at the top of Jessy Lanza’s list was this intriguing name and title. Being familiar with the crude UK DIY act God’s Gift, I googled to see if she was on an unexpected Desperate Bicycles kick, and was thrilled to discover that it was something else entirely: an absolutely bonkers one-off ’90s Euro downtempo R&B earworm. We’re talking true love at first listen, as it only took one chorus of “Today I Never Thought Of You At All” to sweep away my mind, body and soul. I’m not entirely sure who this God’s Gift is, as they seem to be a loose, poorly-documented major-label production squad that time forgot, dropping a small handful of afterthought pop tunes easily dismissed in favor of Ace Of Base, Color Me Badd and Boyz II Men at the time, but I can only assume their lack of renown is because no one besides Lanza bothered to listen to the a-side here. The beat has this volleying thwop that takes control of my shoulders as if through some sort of secret Bluetooth connection, unable to stop myself from pop-lock grooving during “Today I Never Thought Of You At All”‘s much-too-short duration. And the vocal is intoxicating – I’m picturing some guy in Z. Cavaricci clothes with Vanilla Ice hair laying in his nondescript European penthouse loft (Antwerp? Prague? Lyon?) pathetically recounting how he’s over his girl with every piece of evidence piling up against him. Obscure pop perfection that I hold so dear, and maybe I’ll eventually listen to the b-side, “Jelly On Rye”, more than twice.

Haircuts Haircuts Are No Fun 7″ (Sack O’ Shit, 2005)
Friendly reminder that this is a punk website (blog / newsletter / LiveJournal), so here’s some cretinous punk in the true Killed By Death fashion, ripped from the missing-URL pages of Terminal Boredom. I bought my copy off a distro that used the TermBo message-board to advertise its goods when it came out, and this record has been getting complaints about its behavior from the singles its filed next to ever since. To get specific for the nerds, they take the primitive sonic approach of those first Cramps and Hospitals records and dumb it down to summer-school levels ala The Generics or The Meaty Buys, two simple songs with the worst kid in your neighborhood on vocals. If that’s not enough of a winning gimmick for you, they attempted to glue piles of hair to each and every record sleeve, which in my experience went rogue, a guaranteed mess if you ever made the poor decision to pull the paper sleeve out of its plastic. They hate haircuts, yet managed to amass enough hair to generously adorn three-hundred different covers… I cannot think of a purer form of the artist being tortured by the process of creating their art. Before someone decides to comp the weirdest and wildest early ’00s punk (let’s give it another ten years, please), you’ll wanna grab this for cheap, and also negotiate down whoever is still trying to get twenty bucks for the first Nix single while you’re at it. Come on now.

Shona Laing Soviet Snow 12″ (TVT, 1987)
Shona Laing’s “Soviet Snow (Popstand Remix)” came into my life right around the same time as “Today I Never Thought Of You At All”, and it’s amazing that I didn’t dissolve into a silvery puddle of bliss with both tracks fresh at my disposal. Shona Laing is a New Zealander who found herself on TVT in the late ’80s, a fiery vocalist with an emotional versatility that could place her among pop heavyweights like Pat Benetar as much as New Romantics like Spandau Ballet, art witches like Kate Bush and the earliest stirrings of Nine Inch Nails. I haven’t delved super deep into her discography (yet), but she was willing to get political: her 1987 album South (of which the original version of “Soviet Snow” appears) opens with “(Glad I’m) Not A Kennedy”, a song whose sentiment feels particularly timely today, but it’s “Soviet Snow” that fully captured my heart. Over a sprightly synth-pop dance beat, Laing waxes poetically about the fear of Russian nukes, though from the way she sings you’d think she’s finding empowerment over a betrayed heart. Maybe it was both? That chorus just kills me, it’s so damn good… I can’t help but picture Björk in the starring role of a Mongolian adaptation of Dances With Wolves when I listen for the fifth consecutive time. If I didn’t lose you with that, please allow me to recommend this twelve-inch version, as the Popstand remix adds some dance-floor punch to the original beat and stretches this glorious song out past six minutes.

Minmae I’d Like To Apologize For Last Night 7″ (Airborne Virus, 1999)
In all the grotesque Numero excavation of the ’90s emo-adjacent underground, how come Minmae have yet to receive their roses? Pretty sure they’re the only artist in this edition of Discogs Cheapos to boast a functioning Bandcamp page, and maybe the fact that they never officially broke up(?) works against their collector appeal, but I’ll be damned if they aren’t a prime candidate for a thoughtful reassessment replete with deluxe vinyl pressings, and if it can be sourced, combination Dave Grohl / Thurston Moore liner notes. Like Duster, Hood and Flying Saucer Attack, I file Minmae on the avant-experimental end of the post-hardcore/emo spectrum, operating with the same staunch DIY ethics of that era’s hardcore-punk but crafting music that happily glides past the stylistic borders found in Punk Planet‘s record reviews. On this hand-glued / hand-stamped seven-inch record, you get an a-side track of blissed-out jet-engine guitars ala Labradford; it’s a beautiful sun-bleached spot to linger. The b-side diverges sharply, opening with a crusty drum loop and Her Space Holiday-esque slow-core guitars, and closes with a brief Elliot Smith-y indie-pop depression stain. Combined, it’s a fantastic document of true ’90s bedroom-underground experimentation. I really enjoy what current leftfield-indie bands like They Are Gutting A Body Of Water and Chronophage are doing, but do either of them have the guts to put out a split with Gang Wizard? For better or worse, Minmae did.

Ed Solo / JFB Watch Your Eyes / Time Collapse 12″ (Sludge, 2009)
Alright, set your watches back to the dubstep explosion of 2009, before shirtless bros co-opted the almighty bass-wubble for nefarious ends and Thom Yorke even knew who Burial was. We still had five years until Skrillex’s stupid debut album arrived, and the underground was buzzing with inventive freaks armed only with a Soundcloud account and a prayer. You can file Ed Solo and JFB under such a designation, two UK producers who managed to release no fewer than five different split twelve-inches together between 2008 and 2010, clearly inspired by contemporaries like Skream and Mala. That’s luv, mate! Watch Your Eyes / Time Collapse is my pick of the litter, thanks to the weapons-grade industrial excavator that is “Watch Your Eyes”. Opening with a vacuum-sealed kick / snare to rival the glory of “When The Levee Breaks”, Solo tickles the listener’s chin before dropping a pallet of cinderblocks on their gut. I realize that the dubstep wobble is an unloved son at this point, bastardized by so many of the worst people to claim a role in music, but every aggressive form of music must weather its eventual backlash, sorting the poseurs from the loyal and true. “Watch Your Eyes” cannot be taken down no matter how much anti-dubstep propaganda you throw at it – it still fires me up as it did in 2009, ready to finally take Muay Thai lessons (until someone kicks me – then I’m out). JFB’s track, “Time Collapse”, is less exceptional but still a pleasure, firing off a museum-heist arpeggio and more of that first-wave dubstep swagger, a clear predecessor of Girl Unit and many others. I wish Lil Wayne’s handlers had the prescience to get him rapping over stuff like this back then, but then chances are good that it would’ve become a global phenomenon, this original Ed Solo / JFB record garnering legendary status and costing you way more than the two quid it’s selling for now. Let’s not mess with history.

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.