I LOVE THIS FUCKING BAND. The Lowest Form mix the tenacity of Okie Dokie with the vocals of Fatal Flying Guilloteens and the dare-do-all guile of crust punkers to maim the audience and hit an audio angle your speakers may not have heard much before. I want to believe albums like Personal Space will get their due, and I trust y’all to still purchase physical media, and in the end… I’m not sure how much is getting done out there. I mean, when you get done reading this are you going to say HELL YES and go guy the album, or are you going to give it a cursory BandCamp backdoor listen and confine it to a category it doesn’t deserve? I admit I use Spotify but that’s for the fuggin’ BUS and long drives, folks, not for listening at home. If you don’t have a record player (or maybe a few even, why not?) it’s still not THAT hard to find one, whether you get a new one or do a little garage-sale gumshoe action. Actually I got my first turntable in 1999, ended up selling it to a bandmate who really needed it to be in the band (such was the late 90s), regretting it, and then getting one in a steal from Jon Naito (brilliant journalist, look him up) when he moved from Pullman in college and needed to unload a buttload of personal items. I suppose I milked him a little but I was working part-time at NPR and freelancing a ton for basically nothing and didn’t have much money to throw around (I ate a lotta spaghetti.). I paid it forward after buying a Gemini at Last Vestige Records in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. (my daughter Penny, 1 year old at the time, also laughed for the first time in that store, crazy!), selling it at a garage sale for a measly $10 to an eager would-be vinyl enthusiast. I had that Gemini for 10 years almost, just replacing it last year with a super-dope, to me, Pro-ject Debut Carbon that wasn’t expensive compared to a ton of turntables but looks and sounds great to these ears. Thing is though, you don’t have to spend much these days to get a vinyl set up if you’re willing to put in the legwork, so go do it or stop talking big about how you support the scene. Going to shows is not enough if you want the artists you love to eat without worrying about every penny. OK, so now that we’ve established what’s right and wrong, I’d like you to go buy Personal Space because it rocks like a sumbitch and rolls downhill with more punk momentum than a Raiders of the Lost Ark boulder [WHOOOOSH!]. The guitar fuzz is burly too as it bunches up with the bass like a thong in an ass crack, snuggling up to the ear and whispering words you might not be able to make out without the lyric sheet, so study up patnah. I’ve spent a lot of this review bullshitting about other topics so don’t get the meaning of my words twisted unless they’re mangled and ToTaLeD to death like The Lowest Form’s music and that Toyota you used to tote around town till a dramatic chase in the hills left you high ‘n’ dry with a cracked radiator and two kilos of coke. YOU’RE FUCKED and so is this music. And if you don’t buy it they’ll burn your house down, YEAH. Five-hundred copies, two hundred of them on coke-bottle clear (never thought I’d use that phrase so often), plenty left for some reason so fuck it all.
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