Summer Strange

After a successful jump from their native Bloomington-Normal to Chicago, the Guilty Pleasures became hometown heroes of a burgeoning Windy City scene in the late 1990s and early 2000s, centered around Horizontal Action Magazine, the annual Blackout Festivals, countless weekends hosting touring garage and punk bands from around the world, and one notorious hot tub hidden somewhere deep within Cook County. The band folded not long after their elusive full length album was finally completed in 2001, when they trekked to Detroit to commit twelve songs to tape with Jim Diamond at Ghetto Recorders. The finished recordings were passed around on burned cds throughout the underground over ensuing years, as the band’s members went on to play in such notables as The Ponys, Hot Machines, France Has The Bomb, and Baseball Furies, among other pursuits… This vinyl release of “SUMMER STRANGE” was mastered from Jim Diamond’s original analog tapes by Justin Perkins at Mystery Room Mastering, and put to wax for the first time at Archer Record Pressing in Detroit, just down the road from Ghetto Recorders, the former chicken processing plant at which they laid these sounds down so many years ago.

Words by Todd Novak (Horizontal Action/Victim Of Time/HoZac)

What you have here is the long lost studio album of THE GUILTY PLEASURES, one of the cream o’ the crop of the turn of the century’s finest rock’n roll bands, firing off at the top of their game, but slipping through the cracks of history… When the Guilty Pleasures headed up to Ghetto Recorders in Detroit to record their debut album, we knew it was going to be an important record. The trip was a blast, as was the crazy moment we were living in at the time. General insanity was around every corner, and this album was the filthy soundtrack. The finished recording was unreal when we first heard it ten years ago upon its completion, and it still sounds just as intimidating today, writhing with slick punk hooks, drenched in the slime o’ the times, yet still as fresh and devastating as the day these songs were conceived. The LP is full of classic songs like “Stretch Marks” and “Endangering” that were so sadly unavailable to the general public for too long – so here’s your chance to revisit this little piece of history, now right at your fingertips. Stop that trembling already, and put on one of the era’s best kept secrets of the underground, and one of Illinois’ finest rock’n roll messes to ever grace your eardrums.