Consider It Contempt
Thirsty Ear, 1996

This noise rock gem probably isn’t on your radar unless you spent some time stumbling through the smellier punk clubs of midtown Kansas City circa 1996, so consider this post the radar bleep your ass needs to get on board and blast off with the Rocket Fuel Is The Key. While a number of AmRep’d up young men (sadly, they were nearly always young men) in the midwest were bashing away and crushing cochleas in a similar manner, Consider It Contempt always hit a bit harder and has stood the test of time in my not-so-humble opinion. True, at the time their moniker could easily be confused with Rocket From The Crypt, who’d been caught jamming at MTV’s Spring Break Live on suburban household television sets across America two years prior to this release, and true, the cover art with the 1950s milkman on a checkerboard background would most likely indicate to mid-’90s eyes that this could be the latest goofball ska/pop-punk Hot Topic sensation coming to the Vans Warped Tour near you, but Rocket Fuel Is The Key were neither of those things, and to this day remains one of KC’s most overlooked bands.

So why should you care? Well, if you’re on this blog and you’ve scrolled this far, you’re probably not too averse to the more obnoxious sounds on the rock spectrum, and you might just recognize what makes this record stand out from the hundreds of thousands of lesser releases pressed to vinyl and compact disc in 1996. To my tinnitus-wrecked ears, RFITK transcend the simple obnoxiousness of everyday noise rock with more of an attack than its noisenik peers of the time. The bouncing bass lines, shredded stuccato barks and jabbing riffs like the tension/release monsters found on “World Class” and “Carnival” place their sound somewhere in the realm of AmRep ragers Guzzard, but in a less poppy and more direct form. The loud Tim Mac / AmRep Recording Division production directly links Contempt to those Minneapolis noise rock institutions, and a hilarious A&R tool voicemail sample on “Six Dozen of 1, 2/3 of Another” places this record squarely into the defiantly indie camp of the post-Nirvana underground. The CD version even includes a final middle finger in the form of some vinyl clicks that play after the last track before a violent record scratch ending. It’s a nice touch that pretty much tells your where RFITK were coming from in case it wasn’t obvious from the album’s title. If you’re a fan of primo ’90s AmRep noise, consider it a classic that’s now on your wantlist radar.