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Saving Face

I once had haggis chips gifted to me by my buddy Ricky. They were thick cut potato crisps.

Stay hydrated,
Marc

PS..

The haggis chips were of the Mackie's of Scotland brand. Well, here we are with another bag of Mackie's, this time however they're a more standard flavour, sea salt & vinegar flavour to be exact; naturally grown & gently cooked. The bag, well the bag is quite fetching. The chip description is primarily on what I'd call a natural paper (you know that brown cardboardish looking paper) texture with brilliant blue text and a background that matches the text colour. There's vine graphics surrounding the 'label' on the front. All in all packaging is top notch. When I opened this work of art I saw thick looking chips (upon reading the back of the bag afterwards it appears that my visual assessment was exactly as Mackie's intended their product to be [I had forgotten that Mackie's were all thick cut crisps]). Anyway, I popped one in my mouth and, well, to tell you the truth I was a little let down. For some reason the graphics and colour scheme of the bag made me think that these crisps would be focused on the seasoning rather than the chip (don't ask me why, I'm not a neuroscientist). The chips are thick and on the soft side of crunchy, which is not a bad thing at all..but I'm a seasoning man and those first few chips were lacking s&v flavour, too much potato. As I kept snatching and crunching my way through the bag my initial assessment actually softened. These chips are on the light side of the flavour spectrum (not all chips can be "Loads of" I guess) however every once in a while I was met with a generously flavoured chip. The salt was light all around and when I got the tang of vinegar it wasn't quite malty but it tasted like it'd hung out with malt vinegar before. When the seasoning came to party I was quite happy. The actual chips are fantastic, if you're into somewhat lightly seasoned s&v hit these up. Mackie's, not very aggressive. You'll have to dig around though, I haven't seen Mackie's in a lot of stores.

Lets start of by saying that Bandcamp/the Bandcamp App is awesome. I was reading some year end lists the other day and I came upon a high recommendation for Daylight Robbery's most recent album Accumulated Error. The description sounded like it might appeal to me so I opened up my trusty Bandcamp app and found the album, good shit (sort of 80's goth/new waveish). After a few songs I scrolled down and found that the album is released by Deranged Records and hosted on their bandcamp page. Deranged Records has the vast majority (if not all) of their catalogue on Bandcamp so it should go without saying, I fell into a hole checking out band after band from this fantastic Canadian label. After about half an hour into the hole I clicked on Career Suicide's Anthology Vol 2 (I vaguely remembered hearing the band's name before, but maybe I just thought I had heard Career Suicide's name before..who knows, who cares) and gee golly was it fantastic. Blistering early 80's style hardcore. I finished up Anthology Vol 2 and wanted more from this fantastic band so I figured I'd check out a proper album and jumped over to Career Suicide's second LP, Attempted Suicide. Slightly snotty shouted vocals, songs averaging around the 1m30s mark. There's no songs overstaying their welcome. They came here to rip off your face, accomplished that and onto the next one. Thoroughly enjoyable, I just wish it hadn't taken 10+ years for me to discover this gem of an album/band.

PPS..
I don't know what Career Suicide has to do with Mackie's S&V but I've really been digging Attempted Suicide the last few days and wanted others to experience it as soon as possible. Maybe you just need the aggression of CS to even out the tameness of Mackie's..

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