Hammer Fight Covers Joe Peschi = The Greatest Thing Ever

 

A couple weeks ago, the Deciblog introduced you to Jersey black metal act, Putrascension via an interview with drummer Justin Spaeth. As noted at the time, Spaeth plays in a number of other bands, including long time friends-of-Decibel, Tombs, which was the catalyst for us become pals. Justin makes no bones about his unstoppable love for actor/musician Joe Peschi. In fact, his admiration – and we’re being kind and trying to soften the unhealthy/creepy/stalker angle by referring to it as admiration – is so infectious that if you haven’t tracked down Peschi’s 1998 solo album, Vincent LaGuardia Gambini Sings Just for You after hanging with the man for a half-hour or less, you truly are either an unconscionable human being or have an iron willpower. Or,, you simply have no soul. So, it was no surprise when he mentioned that one of the bands he backstops – Jersey thrashers Hammer Fight – had recorded a cover of a song from said album, “Take Your Love and Shove It” which you can give a spin below.

HAMMER FIGHT – “Take Your Love and Shove It” (Joe Peschi cover)

 

And for the heathens amongst you unfamiliar with the original, here you go:

And here’s Spaeth giving the lowdown on what is quite possibly the greatest moment in music history:

Obviously, covering one of the greatest songs in the history of music is a good idea and anyone who knows you isn’t surprised this has happened, but what was the impetus behind doing the cover?

Oh my god! Our fascination with Joe Peschi goes back so far! I’m a huge Joe Peschi fan. Everyone in the band is a Joe Peschi fan and if you’re around us long enough and you’re not a Joe Peschi fan already, you’ll become a Joe Peschi fan [laughter]. In fact, it’s one of the requirements of being in this band. We can’t do a single tour or any kind of trip together without blasting that album at least once or twice, but probably a lot more. So, the idea actually came up several years ago when we were on tour. We wanted to do a bunch of cover songs and as usual we were listening to the Joe Peschi album and I said, “You know what? This song would sound pretty fucking sick as a thrash song. It’s got the polka beat already; just picture it with a guitar.” And everyone was, “Fuck yeah, let’s do it!” But we kind of dropped the idea for a couple years. One day we were in the studio recording some stuff when the idea of doing the Joe Peschi song came up again, and we did it. We also thought it would be a good call to put it out as a single around this time what with Joe Peschi starring in The Irishman, his first move in ages and he’s got a new record out.

 

Is this going to be part of a bigger release or just a single for Deciblog purposes?

We actually did an entire EP of cover songs and that was one of them. However, since we haven’t put anything out in a while, we decided we’d put this out first as a single along with one of our new original songs. We basically did two EPs; we did one EP of all new Hammer Fight songs and the covers EP. Those will come out later in the year, but this is going to kind of be a preview to that.

 

Your previous album came out on Napalm. Are you still signed to them and are they cool/smart enough to want to release this?

Not anymore, and we only just recently found that out [laughter]. The guy we were in contact with at the label kind of fucked us over. I don’t know if he got fired or quit, but we lost contact with him, completely. We got in touch with the head dude who runs the North American operations for Napalm and he got back to us telling us that our contract was up. We’re going to look around a little bit, we might put it out on our own or find someone else to do the EPs.

 

As expected, a couple fliers for a recent Hammer Fight show (at which, apparently, a video was shit for the cover! This story keeps getting better and better):

Hammer Fight Facebook and Bandcamp