FACTORY (CA) “SMILE! / WORLD GONE MAD” 7″ (KICK IN THE EYE- CALIFORNIA, 1982)
[I am on a roll- here’s my third posting in as many days. Someone I know recently told me my posts are too wordy so here is my big experiment to keep it short and sweet. This one’s dedicated to him]. There were several bands worldwide who have gone by the name of Factory- these ones were from California, and specifically Southern California according to the great Collector Scum site. What you get with this track is some good driving “chugga-chugga” punk with some nice punchy drumming and tense-sounding vocals (albeit a little annoying at times). Now this track is not “Grade A” punk like The Mad’s “I Hate Music” (or anything on the early Killed By Death volumes) but I would say Factory is a nice “B Grade” rarity. The flipside, “Smile!”, has grown on me a bit over the last 10 years that I have been acquainted with this disc and has some decent guitar noise but it’s definitely not on the same level as “World Gone Mad”. The sleeve artwork and font choice, as you can see above, is really BAD in the “yuck!” sense of the word, and I wonder if this caused many people to pass it on by in record store bins. Um, I do not know anything else about Factory so I guess that’s all I have to say for now. Fill me in on any details if you have them.