Bandcamp Bands usually re-record their own songs when a label folds or a contract runs out. LáGoon did it because the songs stopped matching the recordings.
The title is not a slogan, it is an instruction. Every track here already existed, most of them will be familiar to anyone who has followed the Portland trio for a while, and the band’s own explanation is that years of playing them live, plus Kenny Coombs arriving on bass, changed them enough that the old versions had become wrong. So this is not a new album. It is a correction issued against their own back catalogue, and it should be judged as one.
What that means in practice is a record with no arc. Seven songs, twenty five minutes, no build across the sequence and no payoff held in reserve for the end, because these pieces were never written to sit next to each other in this order. Anyone coming for an album in the usual sense will find that thin. Taken as what it is, a document of how a band actually sounds in a room, it holds up better.
The sound is consistent to the point of stubbornness. Dry, middle heavy, almost no reverb anywhere, everything pushed forward. “Skate Fast, Play Loud” is the clearest case: an untriggered kit with real shell tone in the snare, guitars with bite rather than polish, gang shouts in the chorus that sound like people standing close to one microphone. Nothing about it is flattering and that is plainly the point.
“Draculove” is the one I keep returning to, and it is the odd one out. Two minutes forty eight, a theatrical spoken baritone in the verses, layered backing in the chorus, and a mastering job that has not been squeezed flat, which makes it the most open thing here by a distance. It also has the most treble of anything on the record, which is not what you would guess from a track that reads as the rawest on paper. “Father Of Death” is the longest and the most restless, built on rhythm shifts rather than volume, with a genuinely growling bass introduction that earns Coombs his place in this story.
Where it strains is the lower middle. On several tracks, “Smoke And Flesh” most of all, the guitar body, the snare and the bass are all competing for the same narrow band, and the picture flattens into a single dirty mass. In a genre where that texture is half the appeal, that is a matter of taste rather than a fault, but across a full run it costs the record definition it could have used.
One honest limitation. I do not know the original versions, so the question this album exists to answer, whether these readings beat the ones they replace, is not one I can settle. What I can say is that the new ones sound like three people who have played these songs several hundred times, and that is audible in a way no studio trick produces.
Start with “Draculove”. If the theatrics land, the rest will.
Added 18 September 2026. After this went up, Anthony Gaglia wrote to us about what the record was for: “We’re a live band through and through. We record because that’s what bands do, but hearing us live will forever be the only way our songs are really meant to be heard and the goal of this album was to do our best to capture that.” That is worth having, because it turns the thing I could not resolve above into a different question. Not whether these versions beat the old ones, but whether a recording can hold a band that only fully exists in a room. On that count it gets closer than most.
The whole record sits in a narrow, dry, middle heavy band with very little room around anything, which reads as deliberate rather than careless. “Draculove” is the outlier twice over: it carries the highest treble content on the album and the master has been left with real headroom, so the quiet passages actually drop. “Skate Fast, Play Loud” keeps the most natural kit sound, a snare with audible shell and cymbals that stay raw. “Smoke And Flesh” is the densest and the least separated, its guitars and bass fusing through the lower middle until the depth of the picture collapses into one layer.
Standout tracks: Draculove, Father Of Death, Skate Fast Play Loud
