My War
| My War | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
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| Studio album by Black Flag | ||||
| Released | March 1984 | |||
| Recorded | December 1983 | |||
| Studio | Total Access Recording, Redondo Beach, California | |||
| Genre | Hardcore punk, post-hardcore | |||
| Length | 40:24 | |||
| Label | SST | |||
| Producer | Greg Ginn, Spot, Bill Stevenson | |||
| Black Flag chronology | ||||
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| Professional ratings | |
|---|---|
| Review scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| AllMusic |   |
| Robert Christgau | B− |
| Maximumrocknroll | (unfavorable) |
| The Phoenix | (unfavorable) |
| Punknews.org | |
| Stylus Magazine | (very favorable) |
My War is the second studio album by American band Black Flag. It polarized fans on its release in 1984 on SST Records over the LP's B-side, on which the band slowed down to a heavy, Black Sabbath-esque trudge, despite the reputation the band had earned as leaders in fast hardcore punk on its first album, Damaged (1981).
After a period of legal troubles which prohibited the band from using its own name on recordings, Black Flag returned to the studio with a new approach to its music that incorporated a greater variety of styles, resulting in a sound orthodox punks found difficult to accept. The line-up had shrunk from five members to three: vocalist Henry Rollins, drummer Bill Stevenson, and co-founding guitarist Greg Ginn. Ginn doubled on bass guitar under the name "Dale Nixon" for the recording as he had pushed out co-founding bassist Chuck Dukowski shortly before recording; the album includes two tracks Dukowski wrote.
The six tracks on the A-side of the LP are generally high-paced, thrashy hardcore, featuring guitar solos unusual in punk. On the B-side are three tracks in a sludge metal style, each breaching six-minutes with ponderously slow tempos and unrelenting dark lyrics of self-hatred. The band members had grown their hair long when they toured the album in 1984, further alienating their hardcore skinhead fanbase. My War had a major influence on sludge metal and grunge.
In 1978 Black Flag guitarist and cofounder Greg Ginn converted his ham radio business Solid State Transmitters to SST Records to release the band's first EP Nervous Breakdown. Soon SST was releasing recordings by other bands as well, beginning with Minutemen's Paranoid Time in 1980.
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