For those of you who came in late, my Adrenalin OD story goes a little something like this – I wasn’t cool enough to get into them when they blazed their way through the Hardcore scene for a decade or so in the eighties. Too busy listening to crossover and collecting a series of lifelong injuries in the stupidly insane and vicious pits that were part and parcel of that scenes shows, I was the moron who somehow let Adrenalin OD’s humour laden, hyper-speed Hardcore pass him by. And by somehow, I mean I wasn’t switched on, or clued in, enough to realise and appreciate what was right in front of me at the time, and when I finally woke up, smelled the coffee and got into Adrenalin OD in the early nineties, they were gone. Their frantic buzz saw, lightning quick punk rock attack was over, finished and done and they’d all moved on to play in other, less speed obsessed, bands.

But if, like me, you missed Adrenalin O.D. the first time around, don’t worry, because Beer City are about to drop the 35^th Anniversary edition (or re-issue if you prefer) of the band’s debut long playing rehkid, The Wacky Hi-Jinks of…, which if my maths is right, means that it originally came out in 1984. When I was wearing corduroy pants and obsessing over Citadel, Grenadier and Ral-Partha miniatures. These New Jersey lunatics where thrashing faster and harder than a secret, underground sex chamber filled with amphetamine crazed Dominatrixes before the first wave of Bay Area bands had even thought about plugging in and tuning up.  

There’s fast, there’s super-fast and then there’s Adrenalin OD fast, which is speedy enough to turn colours into sound and even though they accelerate past the theoretical speed of light on each and every one of the ridiculously catchy tracks on Wacky Hi-Jinks, Adrenalin OD never lose control. Not even for a second. Tighter than the tiniest cock ring on the market and more focussed than a bunch of fat kids in a chocolate factory, Wacky Hi-Jinks still sounds super-smart and all kinds of punk rock sexy three and half decades after it first reinvented the “How fast can we really play?” Hardcore rulebook.  And you know what that means don’t you kids? That’s right. It means you don’t want this record. You need it.  Tim Cundle