Colossal Spin

So raw and unpolished, and so delicious! This one just screams electropunk.

Sink your teeth into one of the original versions of “Stone”. More industrial than the “official” version from the v2.1.7 release, yet oddly more musical and melodic. This was recorded on a cassette 8-track back in 1994 and has held up well thanks to a mixdown onto Digital Audio Tape.

[Fresh new remix:] This intense industrial dance floor remix will cause you to scream in ecstasy, cut yourself, pump your fists and move like hell. Killing your Jezebel soul has never been harder. She will make you FEEL, boys and girls. Jezebel rises again in the 21st century. 

Another sub-woofer-shredding deep-drums remix for you, straight from the pits of hell! One of our fan favorites from the 90’s gets the 00’s remix treatment just in time for Y2K.

That screaming squelch from Reptile is back, this time riding on top of some pounding, in-your-face drums that threaten to tear your arms off. And then that boom-bass boom comes in to destroy the room. In the middle of all this is some pretty sinister-sounding yet strangely-laid-back vocals. “Slither in your hole…” What? Woah.

From the 2000 Duelling Suzis album.

This song screams industrial metal totally tweaked out on high-speed crank. We throw it all at you on this one—grinding 303 bass, crunchy Marshall stacks, echo pianos, falsetto dream vocals, sped-up breakbeats, power drums, reverbs as big as the universe.

From the 2000 Dueling Suzis album, we now find it funny that this track was first released on Mp3.com in the heady days of Napster, considering that one of its main lyric refrains is “You just want something, something free”. Ah yes, we all certainly do, don’t we?

Stone, from 1996. This can only be described as a monster metal wall of sound. This song started out a joke for some university buddies back in ‘93 or ‘94, but by the time this version was recorded in 1996, the lyrics and music got together and made an all self-important baby that was probably one of the most “take-yourself-too-seriously” of all the Colossal Spin songs. 

Ironically, it makes very little sense to those outside the twisted head of Zurich. The object (both gender and nature) of the song changes several times throughout the lyrics, but one thing is clear: some people treat others badly and it sucks, but don’t let it get you down. 

We love the in-your-face Marshall stacks cranked up to 11 on this one. And Zurich’s vocals are in real fine form here. Classic Colossal Spin.

This was track #4 from our 1996 EP v2.1.7. Recorded in early 1996, this tune pretty much sprouted fully formed from the womb of Zurich’s twisted mind (actually, no it didn’t—that’s a lie). Always a popular tune… thanks to the chance to show off Zurich’s vocal range (which got better with age). This was also so much fun to play live, and the crowd usually loved (judging by the excessive moshing) the extended jam out at the end. In fact, this song took on a whole new life after this recording, and the vocals actually become far more nuanced and emotionally charged during the live show. Hearing this recording again, it actually sounds quite incomplete. We’ll have to dig up a live version some day…

Some trivia about this recording:

• Elements of the snare here were sampled from a Silverchair album. Embarrassing but true.
• The core drum loop (the one that sounds like a set of pans and cereal boxes) was sampled three years earlier during a visit to Edmonton, Canada. That’s what drums sound like on the prairies. Honest.
• The lyrics were written in 1992 and paired with some pretty terrible music as part of an earlier band project Zurich was involved with. So we totally put a stop to that train wreck and wrote some better material for it.
• Some of the percussive effects were actually a mistake. Our sequencer somehow took over Sonic Studio’s synth rack during recording, and all these unplanned swishes and bleeps started coming out. Of course we MEANT to do that and so we stuck with it.
• The bluesy guitar was performed on an old Sano accordion amp Zurich bought for $25. Other than the fact that it would periodically electrocute the person playing, it sounded amazing. Like nothing else on Earth, in fact. And like an idiot he eventually sold it (for $100) and has regretted it ever since. But at least he made a profit—cha-ching!

Classic CSpin tune here: Jezebel’s Grave rises from the dead. Again. And again.

Ok, there have been more versions and recordings of this song than I can remember. But this version—the in-your-face-metal-industrial version—is the most familiar to the majority of old-school CS fans and was released on the v2.1.7 EP of 1996, then re-mastered and re-released on MP3.com in 2000 just before the Dueling Suzis release. It also got some radio play for a while on the East Coast in 1996. That was cool.

Old-OLD-school CS fans may remember a recording of Jezebel’s Grave that was more punky, groovy and raw, distributed by a cassette tape demo (in 1994 I think). That one was probably my favorite versions—I’ll have to see if I can dig that up somewhere…

Tainted Love - performed live by CSpin? Sign us up bitches!!

Raw and unfiltered (in other words—sorry for the bad sound quality, folks!). Recorded live at Sonic in Philadelphia, 1996, in front of a few hundred of our most loyal and crazy fans loaded up on beer and kick-ass hummus. We were nothing if not classy. This tune was the encore at that show, and then the tape ran out at the end before things got awesome. Honest.

FIRST RELEASED 
Released on MP3.com on a live/bootleg compilation of Colossal Spin tracks that we had nothing to do with releasing and therefore accept no legal liability for.

PERFORMERS 
Zurich: Vocals and crowd control 
Jim: Drunken Guitar Style 
Brian: 5 tom drum kit 
Paul: Keeping things tight on the bass (but wishing he was playing keys with Flock of Seagulls instead)