Memories Live In My Skull

The first compact disc I ever bought was The Cult's Sonic Temple-- I was a freshman in college and I didn't even own a CD player yet, so I had to travel from room to room to listen to tracks, but I knew that compact disks were the future and I didn't want to spend any more money on cassettes (if I were really smart, I would have stopped buying music altogether and listened to the radio until I could pirate stuff on the internet . . . think of the money I'd have saved)-- and though I was a little disappointed by Sonic Temple . . . it wasn't as good as Electric . . . I still held on to it, but the second compact disc I bought was called Positraction, by a band named Live Skull, and, with noisy, chaotic songs like "Circular Saw," and "Amputease," it was a little too disorganized for my tastes at the time-- and none of my friends liked it either-- so I sold it back to The Band Box and it remained in their used CD collection for my entire stay at William and Mary (and then I think Whitney bought it and gave it back to me so I may have the CD somewhere in my house) but I pretty much forgot about the existence of the band until I was reading Michael Azerrad's excellent book Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground 1981-1991 and I came across this sentence in the Sonic Youth section: "Why did Sonic Youth succeed when all of their peers-- bands like Live Skull, Rat At Rat R, and the Swans-- eventually fell by the wayside?" and so I went on Amazon and gave Live Skull a second chance and they are much easier to listen to now, since I've been listening to post-punk and post-rock and no wave for years and my ears are better attuned to pulling melody and order from dissonance.