HIS HERO IS GONE RE-PRESSES!

Prank has finally re-pressed all of the Prank HIS HERO IS GONE titles " The Dead Of Night In Eight Movements' 7" ( this time on Clear vinyl), "15 Counts Of Arson" LP/CD and "Monuments To Thieves" LP/CD. These were produced in a short period of time between the start of 1996 and end of 1997 when the band was basically touring non-stop , were well received at the time, and have never really stopped selling since they were released, something that has always been an anchor for the label allowing us to put out more experimental and new bands.

When these Records were originally made in the 1990's, there was a huge schism as to how DIY records would be priced and distributed. In light of where Record making and selling has gone since then and is now, it seems almost quaintly unfathomable that pricing the records wholesale over $4 or $5 wholesale would be cause for the records not to be distributed as "too expensive", or the schism between the more "mainstream" punk distributors of the time like MORDAM and the small DIY distros like TRIBAL WAR, PROFANE EXISTENCE and EBULLITION, who brought the European style "show distro" to prominence in the U.S., was a huge one.

Hardcore had largely become cut out bin material by the early 1990's and more above ground distributors had little interest in it, so these DIY distros did do an enormous service in keeping the flame going...Distribution, Exclusive distribution and wholesale prices were serious issues at the time , as the point was to foster the community and it's ideas further through distribution at shows, and for kids to be able to buy and re-sell the records, the wholesale had to be dirt cheap. It was somewhat, but not ridiculously , cheaper than now to make records in the 1990's, but it was possible before the scene became larger and divided into even tinier and tinier subsects to sell amount of records in the thousands and thousands of a DIY release. Now releases are almost vanity micro-pressings of 500 or 1,000 with the exception of a few bands, and pricing for these basically collectors items has become less of an issue.

If nothing else based on record sales and touring, One of the best years for hardcore since the 1980's was in 1997, the apex of interest in divergent forms of Hardcore -from AUS ROTTEN to SPAZZ to LOS CRUDOS to HIS HERO IS GONE, all these were major bands and people that helped define that and this decade and all were young enough to ( and gas was cheap enough for them to) exhaustively tour both the US, Europe and beyond, a long with a heap of other great bands happening at the same time-from MAN IS THE BASTARD to DROPDEAD to DEVOID OF FAITH to the continuation of the start of Japanese hardcore tours ( ASSFORT and GAUZE toured the US that year) which set the stage for the influence Japanese hardcore would have in DIY in the next decade. For some places on the east coast and Mid West, this was just the start of when these scenes would eventually shake off and distance themselves from tough Guy moshcore or the SD (San Diego) or DC-influenced emo hardcore and indie music.

From this environment these HIS HERO IS GONE records were born, and so they have always -from the bands request at the time-had a low wholesale price of under $5 to distributors. While throughout the 90's and early 00's Prank was a Mordam Records Exclusive, and Mordam sold Thousands and thousands of copies of these records, putting DIY hardcore back into places it hadn't been since the 80's and fostering the communtiy in a different way. You'll now find the records, honoring the same low wholesale at EBULLITION, NO IDEA, Revolver USA, ETC.