''Year Of The Rat''

Only a broken mind can understand that life's a trap when you're a rat.

Sleeve - Front

Sleeve - back

Vinyl - Printed labels
See below for stamped variants

Stats: 

Tracks: Year Of The Rat B/W First Born
Year: 2009
Label: Whats Your Rupture?
Matrix A ?0109 A
Matrix B ?0109 B

Pressing Info: 
3000 12"s

300 With white labels, most stamped, some with and without sleeves

No Test Pressings

(Thank you to Kevin Pedersen for the pressing info!)

Inserts:
Lyric sheet as above

Variants:

• Regular - Printed labels, picture sleeve
• Stamped - White labels hand-stamped in black ink, picture sleeve
• 'Test Press' - Same as above stamped version, but with generic white 'DJ' sleeve and no insert. Made available at shows before the artwork was available, subsequently misidentified by 2nd hand market and sold as test pressings.
• Blue Stamp & Other Stamp Variants - White labels. A handful are stamped with blue, rather than black ink, there might also be a few with purple ink. The colours don't have a use / meaning and maybe just came about because the black ink was running out. The one pictured below came with a picture sleeve. There are also a few with blank labels that should have been stamped, but got missed...

Stamped labels - 'A' Side

Stamped labels - 'B Side'

Blue Stamp - there seem to be a handful of these out there.

'Test Press'(i.e. Vinyl and labels same as other stamped variants, but with generic DJ sleeve and no insert.
The one on the left is the special 'upside down logo' variant...)

From LFG Jan 23 2009: Finally, some of you may have noticed that in New York and Philadelphia, a few copies of the Year of the Rat 12" accidentally slipped into existence. If you got one, you are lucky. The rest will be released with a real cover and etc around the same time as No Epiphany, and we should have both in time for the UK tour in March.

Notes:

From FU Merch Table: 3rd in the series of releases coinciding with the Chinese Zodiac. 'Rat' is a Krautrock-influenced 12 minute blast with a massive finish. Recorded in the same studio as "What's The Story, Morning Glory?" in London and mixed in Toronto. The b-side is an original which treads somewhere between ugly glam and an FU take on Thin Lizzy style guitar harmonies.




Mixed Metaphors (Years of Rats):
Rats have appeared several times in the Fucked Up story; a few previous examples are outlined below, along with the usual cut and pasted random quotes. Some might be relevant to this release.

In their expanded interpretation of Marxist theory, the situationists asserted that the misery of social alienation and commodity fetishism were no longer limited to the fundamental components of capitalist society, but had now in advanced capitalism spread themselves to every aspect of life and culture.[1]

Dream of life on the other side.

The "Baiting The Public" artwork was discussed in a LFG post dated December 2010:

The front image is meant to be a metaphor for what we thought we were in punk, and what punk was in the world (we were really into punk at that point) - a pack of rats running over a proper looking young woman in bed.

The proper looking young woman is asleep, her body is present, but her mind, if it's active at all, is in a dream state, she's oblivious to the rats running over her in the real world. The LFG post goes on to describe the record as being a tribute to the actionist and situationist movements - the following is cropped from Wikipedia:

 Another important concept of situationist theory was... the construction of situations, moments of life deliberately constructed for the purpose of reawakening and pursuing authentic desires, experiencing the feeling of life and adventure, and the liberation of everyday life.[1]

Hunch my back and bear my teeth,
I'll kill you to get the things I need.

"Dance Of Death" repeated the use of sleeping woman imagery, this time the subject is passively accepting death and the song is about...

...the imperialist lifestyle and how its been perfect and reproduced to such a dazzling extent, that people within it are convinced that it is the best way, and that they love it. Its like Stockholm Syndrome, when a captive begins to love and revered the captor. The Harbinger’s spiders laid their eggs inside all of our heads, and convinced us to keep dancing in the muck, because we love it.

"Year of The Rat" seems to take on these themes, in describing the rat race from the rat's perspective.

The push for more provokes the greed,

I struggle for the space to breathe.

Tails connect and pull apart
Friends whose tails strangle the hearts
of friends whose tails are wrapped around
The necks of friends together bound.

Moving on to the Fucked Up / Haymaker Split , which combined rat and Nazi imagery, this time probably referencing state propaganda and the Pied Piper of Hamelin...

The Pied Piper also featured in the first ever post on the Looking For Gold Site, the post is copied below, for posterity:

RATS

They fought the dogs and killed the cats,

And bit the babies in the cradles,

And ate the cheeses out of the vats,

And licked the soup from the cooks' own ladles,

Split open the kegs of salted sprats,

Made nests inside men's Sunday hats,

And even spoiled the women's chats

By drowning their speaking

With shrieking and squeking

In fifty different Sharps and flats

Welcome to the FUCKED UP log.

Going back a step, the Haymaker split references Philip K Dick's "Black Iron Prison", which could describe the imperialist lifestyle:

Everyone who had ever lived was literally surrounded by the iron walls of the prison; they were all inside it and none of them knew it.

This ball of fear that grows together,

The want for freedom becomes the tether.

A thousand rats and appetites pull,

A thousand ways to bind it tighter.

Take my chance to grab an inch,

When something snares me I don't flinch.

When it pulls I just pull back,

I feel my liberty losing slack.

The fade out on the YOTR includes the "You'd better be prepared to pull the trigger" quote from John Mcain, which maybe expands the rat-race theme to its natural conclusion on the world stage. Likewise the "47   05" on the above insert might reference May 1947, the start of the cold war arms race. Or maybe not.

Reaching up to touch the sky,
The sun, the centre of my mind.

The End
The last ever post on Looking for Gold was David Eliade's top 10 list of Fucked Up Songs. Baiting the Public and Year of The Rat are 1 & 2. (It might not be the last post forever, but it was the last post before a long break)


And Finally
Rats Love Music, became a real thing with the release of this record (according to the credits). Rats Love Music is a subsidary of Hidden World Enterprises

One last thing...

Only a broken mind can understand

That life's a trap when you're a rat.

''Year Of The Pig''

SECURITY BY OCTAVIO ST LAURENT. EXPERIENCED IN THE TRADITION OF WILSIM PUBOLOGY. ALL INSPIRATION FROM DAVID ELIADE. (Extract from credits)

Front Panel - Front
(WYR? variant has two separate panels rather than a jacket)

Front Panel - Back
(YOTP lyrics)

Back Panel - Front
(WYR? variant has two separate panels rather than a jacket)

Back Panel - Back
("The Black Hats" Lyrics + Credits)

Vinyl - 'A' Side
 (WYR? Variant)

Vinyl - 'A' Side
(WYR? Variant)

Stats #1: (WYR? US - Stamped labels)

Tracks: Year Of The Pig B/W The Black Hats
Year: 2008
Label: Whats Your Rupture?
Matrix A PO307 A re PGold
Matrix B PO307 B Salt

Pressing Info: 
First press of  3500
1 Set of 30 rejected test pressings
1 Set of approved test pressings, indistinguishable from the produced 12"

Inserts:
No Inserts

Stats #2: (Matador - Stamped Labels)

Tracks: Year Of The Pig B/W The Black Hats
Year: 2008
Label: Matador
Matrix A OLE 828-1A ?0307 A re 17863-1
Matrix B OLE 828-1B ?0307 B Salt 7863-2

Pressing Info: 
Matador press of  1000
10(ish) RTI test pressings

Inserts:
No Inserts

Stats #3: (Vice UK - Printed Labels)

Tracks: Year Of The Pig B/W The Black Hats
Year: 2008
Label: Vice
Matrix A VICE-006-A2   SS   JB
Matrix B VICE-006-B1   SS   JB

Pressing Info: 
Vice press of 500
5-10 test pressings

Inserts:
No Inserts

(Thank you to Kevin Pedersen for the YOTP pressing info!)

Variants:

1. What's Your Rupture? press: (White stamped labels, separate double-sided front and back panels instead of jacket)
2. Matador press: (White stamped labels, separate double-sided front and back panels instead of jacket)
3. Vice press: (Printed labels, jacket with same 'front' imagery as above panels, ineer sleeve with same 'back' imagery as above panels.

* Matador & Vice variants have WYR? credits

Sleeve Variants - (Click on picture to enlarge):
Top: WYR? (separate front & back panels)
Middle: Matador (separate panels, as above, but with Matador info + barcode sticker on back panel)
Bottom: Vice (Jacket)

Sleeve Variants - (Click on picture to enlarge):
Top: WYR? (stamped labels)
Middle: Matador (stamped labels)
Bottom: Vice (printed labels)

Printed labels from the Vice variant

Notes:

"SPOC" (LFG Post - April 27 2007) 

Sex work, the "oldest profession" has always been one of those tricky jobs made into a languid moral debate that places practitioners into the dangerous no-mans land of legal limbo. Like the war on drugs, prostitution is never going to disappear, and attempts made to its further criminalization only make sex work extremely dangerous for those who do it.

We're putting out "Year of the Pig" in June, which will address some of the issues brought up in 2007 surrounding of sex work, specifically the trial of Robert Pickton in British Columbia, following the disappearance of more than 60 prostitutes. All too often victims are made the scape goats, chosen to characterize and wear the sin or moral outrage society chooses to place on particular activities. While it is prostitutes who are arrested, raped and murdered trying to make a living, they are also made to internalize and launder our own guilt and shame surrounding these issues.

SPOC, the Sex Professionals of Canada, work to make prostitution (which is not illegal in Canada) a safer occupation for its practitioners. They work to decriminalize those aspects of sex work that remain illegal (read the article), work to organize prostitutes toward activism and maintain a "bad date list" as a safety measure against bad johns.

Hard issues like sex work, drugs, poverty are issues that people are often afraid to face head on, yet usually have direct effects on people who they make live or work most closest to. SPOC deals with these issues every day, and we are proud to make this attempt to support their work. So please flood the block for this benefit:





"Pig Public Statement"  (LFG Post - June 13 2007) 

In 2007, the good become superior and the bad become worse. The enlightened continue on their path to understanding and contentment. Take a stand, speak your mind during this Pig year."

The theme for Year of the Pig is exploitation and violence against women, using prostitution as a main symbol. We recorded this while the Robert Pickton trial is picking up here in Canada - Pickton is a farmer from British Columbia who has been charged with the murder of 26 prostitutes from one of the poorest districts in Canada. We feel that violence against women, represented here by the issue of prostitutes rights in particular, is an issue that is still taboo, and rights for sex workers is an issue that people are still afraid to look at head on, and deal with in a meaningfull way. Sexism exists everywhere and as we've seen in the Pickton case, it can far too easily manifest as abuse, rape and murder shut out from the public eye. This violence is more easily accomodated when working prostitutes aren't protected by the full scope of the law in their workplaces, and when their role exists outside of the purview of our collective morality. In this way, we also view violence against prostitutes as symtomatic of our society's tendency to try and launder our collective guilt and shame through a third party, in this case prostitutes. They exist as a special part of our culture where we can lash out at them, of our own shame and guilt with sexual issues of shame and possesion, and blame and exploit them, instead of dealing with those issues ourselves. Sexism and violence agaisnt women exist, and as long as there are classes of society that we keep beneath our collective moral societal obligations, those classes will bear the full brunt of the hatred and fear we can dish out. We also with to state that "Year of the Pig" is not the attempt to condemn Robert Pickton, or any other individual specifically for any specific crime - the scope of these issues are broader than isolated incidents. The habitual compartmentalization of these sorts of crimes is part of the problem - we wish to state that sexism and violence persist not simply due to the actions of a few deviant criminals, but because as a whole we refuse to properly deal with these issues.

We wrote "Year of the Pig" according to the spacial and spiritual rules laid out in the Chinese Zodiac. We do this once a year – last year was "Year of the God", next year is "Year of the Rat". It is a special process we only bring out for these yearly rousing recording sessions. It is a 60 year cycle, so accordingly there will be 60 of these 12"'s, by us or by the bands we pass it down to. The combination element for this year was gold, so (as usual), we tried to surround ourselves with as much gold as possible in the studio – a few people came up who had fronts in their mouths, and we all had to borrow our parents jewelry. The lights from the studio were cascading off all the pieces in the room. The Heaven element for this year was fire, so we also managed to put up a huge fire in the middle of the floor. We did the drum tracks only with the fire, because we had to move the set-up onto the roof of the building. For us recording is all about balance basically – we usually try now to have certain people come in to lay down the area in a way we don't really understand – we just sit there and eat handfuls of salvia while these dowsers come in and point to what instruments are ready, you've got these geosophists pointing us in certain directions, sigils are going up all over the place, it can get pretty real in the year of the fourth trine.

Fucked Up, David, Octavio, Hail Wilsim Publogy June 22 2007 CE

"Friday" - (LFG Post - September 14 2007) 

Hi it's me, Octavio. I have no life and they are making me update this on a Friday night. I have to work early tommorow morning anyhow at the stapler factory, so I'm not going out tonight anyhow.

This zine The New York Times reviewed (sort of) Year of the Pig. You can find it here. They couldn't say our name, but we're pretty sure they were talking about us, and not the Japanese band "Messed Up" that was on Blurred Records and is pre-JABARA:

That’s the name of a monstrous new 18-minute song by a neo-hardcore band from Toronto. And the name of the band? Well, suffice it to say that if newspaper coverage were a priority, the members might have called themselves Messed Up instead. You can find “Year of the Pig” on iTunes and elsewhere. The 1980s Portland, Ore., band Poison Idea is an obvious influence, although Poison Idea wasn’t known for composing multipart epics about sexism and serial killing and the meat industry. In any case, this is an unreasonably stubborn song, building momentum slowly as the guest singer Jennifer Castle murmurs the lyrics (“Pigs at the trough show no fear”) and Pink Eye, the band’s lead singer, roars them (“Pigs at the trough getting fat!”). The band trudges slowly along for six minutes, then builds momentum, then lurches forward, riding a relatively sleek groove as Pink Eye declaims the words (“Ashamed of the pig in our head/Ashamed, so we kill ’em instead”) as the band stretches up and surges forward and, finally, collapses in a heap. This is the second installment in a series inspired by the Chinese zodiac; with any luck, “Year of the Rat” is up next. (By Kalefa Sanneh)

"Interview" - (LFG Post - January 03 2008) 

AU- with the Year of the Pig release the band embarked on a 18+ minute opus not unlike what we found on 2004's Looking for Gold which also featured a 17+ minute song featuring all things unconventional. Can you tell us a little about this process and how it all came together?

10KM- Those two tunes don't really share that much. We scripted Looking for Gold to be really long, made sure it had a lot of parts and gaps that you could separate. I also think LFG is a lot more in line with the rest of our catalogue in that its loud throughout and is based on a conventional instrument set up. We were able to shorten it easily into "Invisible Leader" as a result. Year of the Pig started just as a 4 note riff I used to play onstage when I was setting my gear up and it just became a long song because thats how much music we wanted there to be. It was the most fun song to work through we've done. We'd never worked closely with other musicians before, and it was great to work the song out in practice with Max, who played organ and keyboards. We wrote sort of a skeleton of the song in practice and then fleshed a lot of the parts out in the studio, like a lot of the timing and most of the guitar stuff thats on the song.








Sleeve Notes:


"Artworx" - (LFG Post - December 27 2010) 

The art on both sides of this 12" is by Ferdinand Hodler, a 19th century Swiss painter. This was a tricky record to choose cover art for, because it deals with an issue that doesn't really lend itself to subtle representation (prostitution) and we also didn't really want to go the literally route by putting some slaughtered pig on the cover of the album (although we did that for one of the 7" versions of this song because it was a sick photo). We spent a few days in the library until we came across this Hodler piece which fits really well because it kind of alludes to prostitution through public sex (because there are a bunch of men and women sleeping in a public place) but also the central guy seems to be about to get whats coming to him. The central black figure is obviously meant to connote Death and this fits the theme of the album, which is that the problem with our conception of sex work is that the responsibility for carrying with social taboo is with the worker and not the consumer. The cover is meant to allude to a get-back wherein the consumer is meant to pay the ultimate price, not the prostitute. We thought the art and the lyrics on this album were pretty cohesive, but lots of reviewers just thought the song was about animal rights :(.

''Year Of The Dog''

"They can have this revolution as long as they remember who gets to win the war".

Sleeve - Front:
Hand-made sleeve comprising folded textured blue card, with devil image pasted on and white obi (paper belt) strip with the song title embossed in silver.

Sleeve Back:
The back of the sleeve is a half panel

Vinyl - Side 'A'
Blank labels

Vinyl - Side 'B'
The 'B' side labels are mostly stamped with the FU logo. A handful have blank labels

Stats #1:

First Pressing (Above)

Tracks: Year Of The Dog B/W Last Man Standing
Year: 2006
Label: Blocks Recording Club
Matrix A: ◊◊◊◊038-A
Matrix B: ◊◊◊◊038-B

Pressing Info: 
TBA

Inserts:
Double-sided lyric sheet

Variants:
'B' Side label stamped
'B' Side label unstamped (All should have been stamped, but a handful were missed)

Stats #2:

Repress (Below)

Tracks: Year Of The Dog B/W Last Man Standing
Year: 2009?
Label: Blocks Recording Club
Matrix A: 5-69478 Blocks blocks blocks 038A
Matrix B: 5-69479 Blocks blocks blocks 038B DCB

Pressing Info: 
TBA

Inserts:
Smaller insert than first pressing,with devil image from first pressing.
Some also come with additional single-sided card matching those pasted to the first press sleeve.

Variants:
No variants

Sleeve - Front

Sleeve - Back

Vinyl

Inserts - Front:
Left: YOTD Lyric sheet, with devil image from first press
Right: Card from first press

Inserts - Back:
Left: Last Man Standing Lyric + credits
Right: Card has double-sided sticky tape in corners, already to be stuck on the first press jacket

Notes:


Announcment  (LFG Post - March 29 2006):
The "Year of the Dog" 12" will be released on Blocks Records in Toronto. Blocks is a registered worker co-op label and produces and release records within a co-operative framework. Look for this 12" in Toronto first in the late summer also. Wait until next year for the "Year of the Pig" 12".

Year of The Dog (LFG Post - November 18 2006):
Apparently, there is some confusion as to the nature of this record. If you weren't able to pick one up at the Hidden World shows, or you weren't able to catch our merch when it was on tour through the US, don't panic, this isn't a "show-only" record or anything. It's being hand assembled, and the majority of the press isn't ready to be sent out to distributors yet.

FU Webstore:
1st in the series of releases coinciding with the Chinese Zodiac. 'Dog' is an expansive and plodding track, simplistically recorded and featuring some questionably legitimate forays into recorder and xylophone playing. The flip is a re-recorded song from the FU demo, given the royal treatment. The record is double grooved, so depending on where you drop the needle you'll get one of two possble versions of each song, one of which was recorded pushing the entire mix through a SOLDANO guitar amplifier.




Sleeve Notes:

From  LFG  (Dec 27 2010):
We had never really done many 12" singles when Year of the Dog came out, so we didn't really have a set template down yet, like we had for our 7" singles. The label was willing to go along with a more involved design, because it was a co-operative and had a lot of people down to glue stuff. I was listening to a lot of European revisionist martial music like Der Blutharsch and Les Joyaux de la Princesse, and I wanted to do a design that went along with that - sharp lines, block colours, etc. We picked a dark blue for the jacket, glued white bands around the jackets, and then foil stamped the title in silver print on the bands. Each one had a postcard sized image glued onto the cover - it was an Alfred Kubin (who we also used for the Dance of Death 7") of a giant demon ejaculating as he walks across the countryside, except his ejaculate is made up of humans, implying that humans are satans seed, who impregnated the earth with us. It was a cool layout, but it took forever to put them together, what with all the glueing.

When it came time to repress the 12", we had just released Year of the Pig, and had a more standard design template for the Zodiac 12" series, so the repress of Dog follows that and has some intense biblical imagery for the artwork.

''Litany'' (12")

...AND AGAIN

Sleeve - Front: Folds out to form poster as per 7' 

Sleeve - Back

Vinyl: Blank silver / grey labels on both sides

Stats:

General:
Tracks - A: Litany / What Could Have Been  B: Colour Removal / Reset The Ride + 1 additional song (see below)
Released: 2005
Label: Test Pattern Records TPR 108
Matrix A: TEST PATTERN-108A
Matrix B: TEST PATTERN-108B

Pressing Info:
1000 (The pressing numbers on that source seem a little 'confused'. Relative availability on second-hand market suggests there were less than 1000)

Inserts:
No regular insert

Variants:
At least one has hand-written labels.



Notes

Sleeve is same as 7" version, but bigger. See Litany 7"  for more infos

Discogs:
Comes with an extra, unlisted and uncredited song, and with a huge b/w foldout sleeve. The extra track is a cover of The Younghearts - A Little Togetherness

Commodity Fetishism 

From the owner: 

(I purchased a copy of the Litany 12" from) a fellow from the Czech republic which has writing on the labels, now I know this isn't a hard thing to do all you need is a marker and boom there you go, but I thought maybe there was some connection with the band. On the A side labels it has written: Sudetenland give it up, and on the B side: Fuck Fr. Tiso, in red marker. 

Sudetenland is the German name for parts of Czechoslovakia mainly inhabited by German speakers, hence the (I thought) connection with the band. Again though I'm probably just a sucker for some kid with a red pen!

Fr Tiso

Sudetenland

Is it Genuine? 
The 'tour versions' of  ''Black Army'' & ''Black Cross'' often came with hand-written labels and were sold in 2005 on the first Euro Tour. The Litany 12" came out the same year. The tour included visits to the Czech Republic and Germany. The handwriting matches up and the references are typical FU. Of course it's (almost certainly) genuine!

''Let Likes Be Cured By Likes''

Sleeve - Front (First Press)

Sleeve - Back (First Press)

Vinyl: First Press. The above picture shows the two main variants.  Both were pressed with black labels on clear vinyl.  The record is single-sided; the ones with the logo have the label painted white on the blank side.  

Sleeve Opened - Front

Sleeve Opened - Back

First Press Inserts: The first press records often have a small flyer advertising Schizophrenic releases.
The pictures above and below show the front and back of one. There may be other designs.

Stats:

General:
Tracks: 1. Generation 2. Colour Removal 3. Black Iron Prison 4. No Pasaran 5. The Light That Never Comes On 6. Last Man Standing 7. Zezozose 8. Circling The Drain 9. Police
Year: 2004
Label: Schizophrenic Records SCHIZ 21
Matrix 1st Press: SCHIZ 21
Matrix 2nd Press: PIRATES PRESS SCHIZO 021 A 66126E1/A

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Pressing Info:
Figures based on the info on Toxic City, because the numbers seem to stack up better there, than on Discogs

First Press (2004):

Sleeves - 500 Total:

500 Brown paper with brown ink

Vinyl - 500 Total:

444 w/ FU logo

66 without - 8 had label painted white

Second Press (2006):

Sleeves - 850 Total:
630ish in brown ink sleeve
200 in black ink sleeve
Less than 20 in rejected sleeve

Vinyl - 850 Total:
400 on black / blue 'inside out'
400 on blue/orange split
50 w/ blue vinyl w/ black splatter

The 200 black ink sleeves contained all 50 of the blue w/ black splatter vinyl and 150 of the blue / orange

The 630 brown ink sleeves contained  250 blue / orange split  and  400 black / blue 'inside out'

The above figures are approx; the rejected sleeve contained a mixture of the colours.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Inserts:
1st Press - Variable, mostly small inserts, see above
2nd press - Variable - see below

Variants:
Sleeve and vinyl variants - see below.

Sleeve Variants:

The 'regular' sleeve has three variants; one for the first press and two for the second.

Top: First Press - Brown print on brown  heavy-stock paper (500 copies)
Bottom Left: Second Press - Brown print on white heavy stock paper (approx 630 copies)
Bottom Right: Second Press - Black print on mixture of heavy and stock and thin paper (200 copies)

Vinyl Variants: 

First Press - 500 Total
Left: 'Clear' (66 copies)
Right: 'Clear With Logo' (444 copies)
(Approx numbers - 8 or so have white painted label, but no logo)

Second Press - 850 Total:
Top Left: Blue, black inside out (400 copies)
Top Right: Orange, blue split  (400 copies)
Bottom: Second Press - Blue with black splatter (50 copies)

Second Press Flip-side
The second press is double sided and has the same recording on both sides

Blue / Black 'inside out'
Pictured above are three examples of this variant.

Second Press Inserts:

Second Press Big Inserts - Front: A lot come with the large Schizoprenic insert shown above. These come on different types of paper.

Second Press Big Inserts - Back: The backs are variable; they are mostly the same layout, but have different images, reflecting available Schizophrenic stock

Second Press Small Inserts: 
Some of the second press have a small insert, an example is shown on the right of the picture above.
On the left is a gig flyer; this copy was bought at the gig.

Black-Ink Sleeves

Black - Ink Sleeves: These come on different weights of paper, some have a row of circles along the bottom edge, which looks like something to do with the hanger attached to the original artwork transparencies. Some of the black covers seem to be  printer's proofs - i.e. tests on different papers, for print quality. The one on the left at the bottom is on heavy shiny paper and the print quality is patchy - the record it came with also had a second sleeve,  which is one of the ones with rings on.

Notes:

''Let Likes Be Cured By Likes'' 

Recording has backwards messages at start and end of record.

Title reference 1:The band also released the Let Likes Be Cured By Likes live 12" (the title being a reference to one of homoeopathy's dicta, the "Law of Similars"). (Everything2.com)

Title reference 2:

Taking the Law of Similars one step further, there is a similar quote by Paracelsus about similar things. The Latin Phrases on which they're based are even more similar:

(Wikipedia)

Paracelsus pioneered the use of chemicals and minerals in medicine. His hermetical views were that sickness and health in the body relied on the harmony of man (microcosm) and Nature (macrocosm). (Wikipedia)

Sleeve Notes:

Homunculus (Wikipedia)
Homunculus (masculine, Latin for "little man", plural: "homunculi"; from the diminutive of homo) is a term used, generally, in various fields of study to refer to any representation of a small human being. Popularized in sixteenth century alchemy and nineteenth century fiction, it has historically referred to the creation of a miniature, fully formed human.

In Alchemy
Paracelsus is credited with the first mention of the homunculus in De homunculis (c. 1529-1532), and De natura rerum (1537).

The homunculus continued to appear in alchemical writings after Paracelsus' time. The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz (1616) for example, concludes with the creation of a male and female form identified as Homunculi duo. The allegorical text suggests to the reader that the ultimate goal of alchemy is not chrysopoeia, but it is instead the artificial generation of man. Here, the creation of homunculi symbolically represents spiritual regeneration and Christian soteriology.

Carl Jung believed that the concept first appeared in the Visions of Zosimos, written in the third century AD. In his commentary, Jung equates the homunculus with the Philosopher’s Stone, and the "inner man" in parallel with Christ. 

Ritual image:

''Ritual'' By Lynd Ward

Image From 'Rejected Artwork' Sleeve:

Copied from Dulce Et Decorum Est Blog:

This engraving, by the 17th century English artist John Payne, is the frontispiece to The Mirrour Which Flatters Not. Dedicated to their Maiesties of Great Britaine, by Le Sieur de la Serre, Historiographer of France. Enriched with faire Figures. (1639), a book of poetry by Jean Puget de La Serre, translated into English by Thomas Carey. The epigrams beneath the engraving read O that they were Wise, that they understood This, that they would Consider their Latter End! Deut. 32:29 and –Mors sola fatetur Quantula sint hominum corpuscula, a line from Juvenal’s tenth satire, which translates roughly to Only death reveals what a nothing the body of man is.

Commodity Fetishism:

White Painted label, without logo (8 copies)

Second Press 'Rejected Artwork' Sleeve - Front (Less than 20 copies)

Second Press  'Rejected Artwork' Sleeve - Back

Test Press (First Press)
From Craig at Schizophrenic:
they were made with old record sleeves turned inside out and the FU logo was screened on it. There are maybe 5 of these.

Test Press (First Press)
Picture taken from LFG Blog; maybe the blue-text covers were a 'band only' thing?

Test Press (Second Press) - 'What God Means To Me' Package (See pictures below)

From Craig at Schizophrenic:
What god means to me were large cardstock envelopes that were roughly 12x14. They were hand screened and contained the let likes be cured by likes testpress. the package also contained the rejected sleeve and two stickers. What god means to me and a take off from the Fuck ups 7". There were 10 copies made of the test press package.

Screen Printed Envelope - Front

Screen  Printed Envelope - Back

Test Pressing - Came in Rejected Sleeve

Test Pressing - Vinyl - 'A' Side

Test Pressing - Vinyl - 'B' Side

The stickers (Placed loose on stamped dust sleeve for picture)

Fuck Ups 7"

Germs 7" 

From Mixtape 3 Notes: 
We have worked with Craig Caron from Schizophrenic records before. He runs a great label and put out a liver 12" for us that turned out great. When he asked us to be on a cover tribute comp of the "YES LA" LP, I secretly went "groan" because I hate cover comps. Here is a section of the cover that resulted. I hooked my ipod speakers into my guitar pickups and played the actual Germs original, and started running it through various effects and looping pedals. What a disaster. Didn't ever hear back from Craig about the song, and the comp never came out...

Exceptions To the Rule

Pictured below are a few 'odd' ones

Exception 1 - This one arrived with the 'Looking For Gold' insert. Maybe its synchronicity #2 or maybe it just got misfiled

Exception 2 - This 'Inside out' pattern vinyl with black-text sleeve

Exception 3 - 'What God Means To Me' cover, with regular vinyl