Wheezing Maniac – Complete Discography

I can imagine that a lot of people (including myself) waited for a release like this by Wheezing Maniac, an obscure band out of San Diego that was featured on the soundtrack for H-Street´s Hokus Pokus video with two songs (“Dollar on a platter” and “Don´t come close”). Sadly, this is NOT an LP or CD release, but just a bunch of audio files that can be downloaded via iTunes and probably some other sources. It´s just my guess that this is the complete discography of the band, and hopefully it´s authorized.

On this release titled “Shade through the night door” you get 17 tracks at all, including the two songs from Hokus Pokus. The band had three demo tapes and one split-7”, so I guess their complete output made it onto this “album”.

If you know the two songs from Hokus Pokus you might be a bit irritated by the other tunes on this album, because they aren´t that straight as the Hokus Pokus songs. And at least to me it looks like the band never really found their own style (maybe they never wanted to), because every song sounds different. Just compare the two H-Street songs with each other and you know what I mean. They could have been recorded by two completely different bands.

If I´d run a record store, I´d create a new box for Wheezing Maniac and call it “fucked-up-spoken-word-grunge with some punk, metal and rap influences”.