Search - Poison 13 :: Wine Is Red Poison Is Blue

Garage-blues-punk...however you categorize it, it's great!

mretrain | Atlanta, GA USA | 09/08/1999

(5 out of 5 stars)

"All lovers of true rock 'n' roll owe it to themselves to give this one a spin. Poison 13 were painfully underappreciated in their day, and even though they've had a great influence on the supposed "grunge" scene, they're still not well known. Their music is not Grunge(TM), however-- it's garage-y, bluesy, punk of the most sincere, commited form. Poison 13 could alternately cover Bukka White, Richard Hell & the Voidoids, and the Sonics, and give them all their own twist to make it uniquely "Poison 13". Their original songs are uniformly great. There's a level of passion and energy here that most bands don't even come close to. It's cheap. It has virtually everything the band recorded."

Songs of libations and violence

r. r. smith | San Fransisco Bay Area | 02/12/2000

(4 out of 5 stars)

"This posthumous compilation is culled from 2 albums released in the late 80s by this Austin, Texas based punk band. If you like authentic, non-pretentious, non-commercial music (what Allen Freed called "rock and roll"), you should appreciate this CD. Many of the songs here are covers done with an approach that shows that basically there's not that basically the same thing. Like the great John Lee Hooker-Canned Heat recordings, the blues songs by Poison 13 challenge the form with the best results. Not that the CD is all blues. These covers can be seen to be in their own creativity by reverentially adhering to tradition. They reflect on the past with a mixture of reverence and contempt. Like James Dean they lived fast, died young, and left a good-looking corpse. The songs are full of morbid humour, grating vocals, and dirty, distorted guitars. Get this while it is still in print! END"