Ill Repute was a hardcore punk band straight outta Oxnard, California. They were the first major Nardcore band and are fucking awesome.

Sometimes, when a label re-releases an album, they fuck it up by putting too much extra shit on it and ruining the short, fast, to-the-point hardcore punk that the original album was. This is very much the case with Mystic's 1995 re-release of Ill Repute's What Happens Next?, which they re-titled What Happened Then and added an extra 11 songs. As much as I love this band, I feel like the extra songs can drag on, and the effect of the original album is lost. That is why I'm just going to review the original release and original 11.

The album starts off with "Oxnard," an incredibly fast paced kick in the nuts, featuring chants of "Oxnard!" The rest of the album doesn't slow down at all. Most of the songs are under 2 minutes long and manage to include a slew of lyrics and even guitar solos. They have positive lyrics without being overtly straight-edge (except for "Fill It Up," which reminds me of Minor Threat's "In My Eyes"). Their lyrics also avoid being cliché. In "Don't Get Used," singer John Phaneuf advises us to "use your head, not your heart." My favorite song on the album is the hectic anti-war anthem, "Turn the Guns Around." Words cannot express how good the dueling vocals and high speed yet catchy chorus is. This is probably the best Nardcore punk song ever written.

So, if you like `80s hardcore you will fucking love this. An easy way to summarize this album is it's fucking fast. The only version available now is the re-released version, but you can do what I did and just copy the original 11 songs onto another CD. It only takes about 15 minutes to listen to so, needless to say, you will play the fuck out of it.