ALBUM OF THE DAY: MDC, MILLIONS OF DEAD COPS

Back in the late 80s/early 90s, you could usually figure a band was good if their name was a 3 or 4-letter acronym: DRI, SSD, JFA, SOD, SNFU, and DYS, to name just a few of the many awesome hardcore/thrash bands who I grew up on. Of all the alphabet-soup-core bands, the one who stood out among the rest to me was MDC, whose name stood for Millions of Dead Cops, Multi-Death Corporation, Millions of Damn Christians, Missile Destroyed Civilization, and a bunch of other awesomely 80s-hardcore phrases.

As a young punk rocker who got picked on by jocks in junior high school, you can imagine how much I loved songs like “Violent Rednecks”

MDC were a lot smarter than their peers, with much more insightful and clever lyrics, and played super-pissed, blistering thrash that still peels paint to this day. I bought their first LP, Millions of Dead Cops, in 1992 or so, the same day I bought the Capitalist Casualties Art of Ballistics 7″ and No Comment Downsided 7″– not a bad fucking haul for a 14 year-old who didn’t know much outside of Everett, Washington, right??

The album opens with the lyrics “DEAD COPS! DEAD COPS! DEAD COPS!” and only gets better from there. You just won’t find a more intense, pissed-off, raging slab of hardcore than this record, and to think that it’s nearly 30 years old is completely mindblowing to me.

“I Hate Work” is so fucking punk that you will grow a backpatch just from listening to it

I’m not really sure if anybody under 30-ish knows about MDC, but they should be mandatory for all you nu-thrash kids — Municipal Waste, Toxic Holocaust, and all that stuff owes a serious debt to MDC. They beat genre heroes DRI to the punch by a couple of years, and all of their early output (up to and including the live album, Elvis in the Rhineland) is absolutely crucial for any fan of punk, hardcore, or thrash.

DEAD COPS!

-Sergeant D.