Aquired: January 2024 from thrift store
Favorite song: Electric Molecular
I love love love this album even though it's just by a little industrial band. The only reason I know about them is because of haveyoulistenedtothisalbum-poll on tumblr- shout out to them. Chemlab's not terribly obscure- they have over 20K listeners on Spotify and are on Spotify in the first place- but that's not super popular either. I feel like this album and more broadly this band were made specifically for me to like. They're hard and energetic and have driving guitars with cool synths. Their lyrics are provocative and all their songs are cacthy. I used to not like East Side Militia as much as Burn Out At The Hydrogen Bar as much, but now I think that I actually enjoy it more than the Burn Out. Perhaps it is because Burn Out has a very consistent sound throughout but the songs in East Side Militia are more varied.
I always smile when I think about finding this CD in the store. I had just started listening to them a month or so beforehand and was completely hooked. Burn Out was playing almost almost every day on my phone and this less often but still a significant amount. I walked into the thirft shop with a visa gift card I got for Christmas, just wanting to buy whatever was familiar to me and I liked. As I combed through their stacks of CDs I saw this and Burn Out next to each other. I literally say out loud, quite loudly in this small and quiet store, "I can't believe that they have these!" and know immediately that I must have these. Still the luckiest find I've ever had in any thrift store ever. What were two CDs by a semi-obscure industrial band from DC doing in a random thrift store in southern Illinois? The world may never know, but I'm so happy that they were there.