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Stations of the Crass
by Ned Raggett"They said that we were trash/Well the name is Crass, not Clash." So goes the opening of the coruscating "White Punks on Hope," and with Stations Crass takes things to an even more vicious level than on Feeding. The opening yelps and screams from Ignorant on "Mother Earth" over a slow-building burn show that there was already much more to Crass than simple crash and bash punk, and with the rest of the album the collective moves between full-on assault and an ever increasing agit-snarl experimentation. Originally released as two vinyl discs, the conclusion of the second consists of a live show in Islington the summer of 1979, with the band tearing through new and old cuts with passion, including such fierce anthems as "Do They Owe Us a Living?" and "Shaved Women." The studio tracks, including versions of some cuts from the live show, all come from a one-day session four days after the concert, and while some tracks are almost fragments, surprisingly things aren't as constantly monochrome or as r