The Nation of Ulysses
The Embassy Tapes
Dischord
Why would Dischord Records release a sub par, home recorded demo that was never intended to be released eight years after the fact? Good question, huh? It is, of course. The Nation of Ulysses, arguably one of the more influential groups in the Dischord back catalog. Its members went on to form the recently defunct group The Make-Up. There’s definitely an audience out there for this. But why now, and why with the silly “long lost tapes” story? Well, here’s my theory. There’s this band out there right now that some of you may have heard of called At the Drive-In that’s a pretty blatant NOU rip-off act. Imagine a conversation between Dischord staffers. “Have you heard this band everybody in the fucking world is talking about?” “Yeah, they sound like NOU. I’m officially bored.” “I wish we had something laying around here by the NOU that we could release that puts that other shit in perspective. Oh, look what I found•” “Fire up the presses!”
So here we are in the year 2001, and there’s a new NOU record that none of us have heard. It’s pretty rough around the edges (it’s a demo, for God’s sake!) and it doesn’t stack up very well against the rest of the NOU output that’s still available from Dischord, by the way. Go track down that stuff and leave The Embassy Tapes and The Relationship of Command alone.
Dischord Records, 3819 Beecher St. NW, Washington, DC 20007
