Kill Your Own

Back when the Homestead was still putting on shows, I headed down there to a Sam Russo gig as I'd always been wanting to check him out and see what all the fuss about the Homestead was. It was an awesome night, and I met some damn cool people including a dude by the name of Ian McIpod. He performed on the night as MC Ipod, a geeky white boy rapper in the vein of MC Lars. He had a song about wrestling and did an Andrew WK cover, what more could you want? The man had impressed me! Anyway, the point of this little story - Ian wrote the zine "Excuse Me Do You Have Any Cocaine?". Whilst I never had the opportunity to read either of the issues, I did pick up issue #3 after the name had changed to Kill Your Own.
I'd read a couple of zines before, but they either concentrated on scenes further afield from me or just ignored local music all together in order to mimic the popular music rags. Seeing as Ian is a rad dude that raps about wrestling, I decided to pick up his zine and was sufficiently impressed. There's all the usual stuff you'd expect from a zine, but with the added bonus (for me at least) of featuring a lot of gigs and features about music in my area.
Recently, Kill Your Own have set up a site offering pay what you like downloads of loads of fantastic UK punk bands. An awesome idea, and something which should of been done a long time ago. Its not always easy to get hold of these releases, and to have quick and easy (and legal!) access to them is fantastic. I've managed to listen to a bunch of bands I've always been meaning to check out, and found some new acts which more than likely would've passed me by. Both the site and the zine are well worth a look if you're a fan of lovely gruff punk. Although that's not strictly all they cover, there's enough variety for fans of hardcore, pop punk and acoustic lovelyness also. My pick to download is Mega Games "Let In These Hands To Hold", best use of melodica I've heard in a punk band.

Check out some awesome free downloads (and donate to the bands if you're the charitable kind) - http://killyourown.bandcamp.com/
Purchase the zine - http://killyourown.bigcartel.com/