Your Food – Poke It with a Stick LP Drag City Records

Poke It with a Stick was the only full-length from Your Food, an early-’80s post-punk band from Louisville, Kentucky whose members later went on to play with Antietam and Christmas. The group’s lineup played standard rock instruments, but their songs otherwise defied convention, with nervous vocals delivering slightly cryptic lyrics over angular rhythms. Album opener “Leave” is one of their more straightforward tunes, containing a throbbing rhythm and vocals that gradually grow more distant, as the lyrics turn darker and more violent by the end. “Foreign” is more lopsided, with a groove almost resembling a skipping record and lyrics expressing a sort of alienation that borders on xenophobia. “Baby Jesus” is a brief, blasphemous punk blast, and the group’s rage is elevated during “Cowtown,” the seething hardcore denouement to the anxious, increasingly agitated “Cool.” While much of the album consists of this sort of wound-up tension with a few releases of punk fury, closing track “Order” is a cathartic 11-minute live epic that gets increasingly bleaker, ending up in a chant of the world “falling” that devolves into screaming and moaning. As an odd sort of serendipitous comic relief, after the band stops playing, someone throws on a synth pop record, and an audience member shouts “This record sucks!” Especially going by this live track, it makes sense that Your Food combusted after one album, but they had a unique, perplexing sound, and it’s not hard to see why this album is regarded as seminal among certain corners of the American indie rock underground. -All Music Guide

Poke It With a Stick by Your Food