Thursday, November 12, 2009

THE ULTIMATE WARRIORS - Discography (99 tracks!)


THE ULTIMATE WARRIORS. Love em or hate em, they had a pretty unique thing going: WRESTLING-THEMED HARDCORE. From the littleass town of Nazareth, Pennsylvania THE ULTIMATE WARRIORS sort of existed in a cocoon, and as a result were pretty prolific, releasing around a dozen records over their existence. From their humble beginnings as a sloppy youth-crew hardcore sounding band, to eventually becoming a fierce grindcore / powerviolence outfit, THE ULTIMATE WARRIORS only got better with age.

We released two split 7"s with these guys (w/ DAYBREAK and w/ KUNGFU RICK) and were supposed to release this massive collection as a discography CD release probably 5 (?) years ago... but general lazyness on both the band & label's part sort of fizzled out the project. The idea recently came up to throw it all up on iTunes as a legit digital download (much like the $11.99, 72-track ENEMY SOIL discography), but figuring out the correct track listing (even with the help of the band) was pretty daunting so... here it is for free instead:

* download THE ULTIMATE WARRIORS - Discography (via MediaFire)
* download THE ULTIMATE WARRIORS - Discography (via RapidShare)
* download THE ULTIMATE WARRIORS - Discography (via SendSpace)

Its worth mentioning that about 20 of the 99 tracks here don't have song titles, and some that do just might not be correct. This may also not be 100% complete, but its probably as close as anyone's gonna get. Sorting all this out was really confusing, but hey, it's free so what can ya do? We received a substantial "discography" CD-R (with a dick drawn on it) direct from the band years and years ago, so most (if not all) of this stuff is the highest fidelity that anyone has heard yet. No more crappy 7" rips, this is straight from the source! We also compiled our label's split 7" tracks from the masters with a rip of the demo too... so I *think* this is everything.

Notorious for outlandish and/or dangerous live shows, some members of the UWs eventually went on to play in THE GATECRASHERS, PEARLS AND BRASS, TORCHBEARER and 3/4ths of them now play in PISSED JEANS. More notably perhaps, a couple guys who did time in the band also turned into semi-pro wrestlers, thus cementing the fact that their whole "gimmick" wasn't fake. A pretty awesome bio/breakdown of the band can be read here and info on the bulk of their vinyl discography can be read here.

As of posting this too, White Denim (the killer label run by UW/PISSED JEANS frontman Matt K.) currently has some copies of THE ULTIMATE WARRIORS' fantastic Our Gimmick Is Wrestling 12" along with THE GATE CRASHERS split 7". Definitely worth checking out here while you can, as both have been out of print for a while now. From time to time the Robotic Empire - Online Store is able to stock THE ULTIMATE WARRIORS and/or related stuff, so it's worth checking out that link as well.

Last and least, the first time I got to hang out with these guys they played an awesome show in Baltimore with DAYBREAK and KUNG FU RICK... some crappy footage of that was shot and one 22-second video clip got digitized, all in the late-90's sometime. I haven't seen any other video footage of these guys online so, if you've got some please post it in the "comments" section and I'll add it to the ol' blog here.



A couple of songs from DAYBREAK and one from KUNGFU RICK from the same show can also be viewed here. Alright that's it, enjoy!