FEAR RECORD

Personnel: Lee Ving (vocals, guitar); David Stark (guitar); Andrew Jaimez (drums). Audio Mixer: Bill Stevenson. Recording information: Studio 606, Northridge, CA; The Compound, Los Angeles, CA. Photographer: Cynthia Correll. Lee Ving, the Philadelphia-raised lead singer and rhythm guitarist for pot-stirring Los Angeles punk rock outfit Fear has remained the group's sole original member since 1993. Like the Fall's Mark E. Smith, Ving spent the ensuing years rifling through a rotating cast of musicians and keeping Fear in the game, a tactic he used to great effect on 2012's The Fear Record, a straight-up re-recording of the band's iconic 1982 high-water mark, The Record. Equal parts middle finger to the black hole of album licensing and a straight-up cash grab, The Fear Record sounds surprisingly visceral, with Ving, who was 62 at the time of recording, forgoing the usual template of bringing the material up to date stylistically/lowering the songs' original keys to accommodate vocal cord purification, and simply reproducing the source material for the compression-obsessed MP3 age. In fact, the only real difference between the two, besides Ving's 40 gritty sandpaper howl, which to be fair was hardly like "buttah" to begin with, is the playlist order, which finds the still intoxicating "I Love Livin' in the City" swapping places with the still riveting "Let's Have a War," among other instances of punk rock musical chairs, proving once again that "I Don't Care About You" is just as apt a statement in 2012 as it was in 1982. ~ James Christopher Monger.