Karma Sutra: Be Cruel With Your Past And All Who Seek To Keep You There 12″ Black Vinyl

Description

Karma Sutra were an anarcho pacifist band from Luton, Bedfordshire who formed in the early 80s after the demise of the legendary the Phallic Symbols. Karma Sutra only had one release at the time an album self released in 1987 called Daydreams of a Production Line Worker which came towards the end of their lifetime. Sealed Records now release the earlier years of demos and compilation tracks on a 15 track round up. Be Cruel with Your Past and all Who Seek to Keep you There includes their first and primitive demo The New Economy Roast from 1983. Its very basic and has a Bullshit Detector Compilation quality to it. A few years later came the second demo Shoppers Paradise which is the best material Karma Sutra recorded. Six tracks of well produced classic 80s Anarcho punk with a driving sound. Its passionate, tuneful and politically aware. How this wasnt released at the time on vinyl, is a travesty. Also included is two tracks from the Mortarhate Compilations Who? What? Why? When? Where? and We Dont Want Your Fucking Law!. Finally the last three tracks were from the final line up of the band and were recorded with Spon from UK Decay adding more post punk elements to the sound.

The LP comes with a 40 page booklet of Lyrics, handouts, fanzine interviews and statements.

Our take: Karma Sutra was an anarcho-punk band from Luton, England that formed in the early 80s (their first cassette, compiled here, came out in 1983) and dissolved somewhere around 1988. Id seen the bands name before and never heard their music, but this collection LP on Sealed Records reveals them to be a buried treasure of the anarcho scene. With a long tenure as a band and a lot of lineup changes, Karma Sutras sound covers a lot of ground on Be Cruel With Your Past, which takes in everything from the bands earliest work, which has a heavier sound akin to Amebixs early singles, to their final recordings, which remind me of post-punk-informed anarcho bands like Zounds, Hagar the Womb, and Chumbawumba. Despite the stylistic shifts, these tracks are marked by strong songwriting, with catchy choruses (particularly on Intelligent Life and Its Our World Too), nimble and energetic playing, and more adventurous moments like the flute-infused Poll Tax. The more I listen to this collection, the more Im astounded that something this good has remained under the radar for so long. Perhaps thats because the bands best-distributed release was their LP, which isnt included here, presumably because the members feel it was rushed and was their weakest work. I cant speak to that, but Be Cruel With Your Past hangs together remarkably well as an album, and if youre a fan of that old anarcho soundparticularly the more melodic end of the spectrumyoull love it. Even better, it comes with a massive booklet that compiles what seems like every scrap of ephemera relating to the band, including photos, flyers, fanzine interviews, the many informational pamphlets, booklets, and inserts that were de rigeur in the anarcho scene, and Lance Hahns excellent article from his series of anarcho punk histories that appeared in Maximumrocknroll. With excellent music you almost certainly havent heard before, eye-catching packaging, and a booklet that fills out the records history and context, Be Cruel with Your Past has everything I want from a punk reissue.