Various - Bullshit Detector Two (2LP)

Bullshit Detector Two catches a movement mid-sprint, sweaty and grinning, and dares you to keep up. Released in 1982 on Crass Records as the second instalment in the label’s open-door demo series, it remains one of the most honest snapshots of anarcho punk you can hold in your hands. Crass invited anyone to mail in tapes. No managers, no gatekeepers, just songs recorded in flats, youth clubs, squats and rehearsal rooms. The label sifted through the hiss and heart and pressed a thick slab of it onto wax, packaging it with lyrics and contact details so listeners could write to the bands themselves. That spirit is the point as much as the music.

Drop the needle and you get a flurry of room tone, mic pops and sudden bursts of righteous noise. Not everything is tight. Not everything wants to be. Tunes veer from clattering two-minute storms to spoken pieces and spiky, near-folk strums. The fidelity is often rough, but the intention is crystal. You hear cheap kit, cardboard drums and guitars that fight their tuners, yet you also hear the shape of ideas that would grow into scenes and record labels of their own. Crass framed it with their stark black and white aesthetic and a pay no more than price on the sleeve, making it clear this was a public service as much as a compilation.

There are names here that history would soon recognise. Chumbawamba turn up with Three Years Later, an early cut that already shows a sharp ear for melody strapped to an even sharper sense of politics. It is brash and catchy and feels like a door creaking open to the road they would travel. Elsewhere you get urgent, squalling punk that sounds like it was tracked in a hallway while the kettle boiled, and brittle, chant-led songs that move by force of will. The best moments feel like overheard conversations that got too loud to ignore. The worst are still worthwhile because they prove the series was what it said it was, a real-time roll call rather than a curated museum.

What makes Bullshit Detector Two stick is how it joins the dots between people. You can imagine the letters that followed the addresses in the insert, trades of zines and tapes, a van turning up outside a community hall because someone heard a song here and took a chance. Bands from towns that rarely make the back of a tour shirt rub shoulders across two sides of vinyl and you hear the common ground: anti-war, anti-sexism, anti-authoritarian, pro-community, pro-doing it yourself. In 1982, with unemployment biting and police powers expanding, the anger makes perfect sense. But so does the wry humour that slips through. It is not dour. It is alive.

If you already collect Crass Records vinyl, this sits in the sweet spot between document and detonator. It does not have the studio heft of the band’s own albums, but that is the appeal. The surface noise on an original copy almost becomes part of the percussion, which feels right for a record collaged from battered tapes. If you are chasing Bullshit Detector Two vinyl today, be prepared for copies that have been loved hard. That is fine. This music never asked for mint sleeves. For those of us in Australia, it sometimes pops up in the wild, and any Melbourne record store worth its salt has a story about someone grabbing a Crass comp the minute it hit the bin. If you prefer to buy Crass records online, there are reissues and decent secondhand listings, and you can still piece together a tidy run of Crass albums on vinyl without selling a kidney. Just keep an eye on condition notes and inserts.

As a listen, it is a ride rather than a set of polished highlights. As an artefact, it matters because it shows how an independent label used its resources to widen the circle, not narrow it. That was always Crass at their best, amplifying a community rather than stamping a brand over it. If your shelves lean towards protest music, UK punk, or you are just deep into the history of DIY culture, this belongs next to the rest of your Crass vinyl. For those who walked into a shop looking for vinyl records Australia and ended up taking home a beaten copy of this, you know the feeling. It is messy, human and strangely uplifting, proof that a compilation can be more than a sampler. It can be a map.