Cocobat is a band I first heard of while watching a TV documentary on Mad from the mid-90s, when Mad was shown covering their song Cocobat Crunch, so I became interested in them pretty quickly. This album, which is (I believe) their fifth, is the first one I picked up, mainly because of the sweet digipak, and the bonuses included. On Wednesday, it showed up in the mail, and I'm glad to say it's a pretty good hardcore album. It's not as good as anything I've heard from Mad or AA= or Wagdug, per se, but I can get into it. It may take a few more listens for me to really love most of the album, since the only thing I'd heard before picking this up was the semi-titular track Grasshopper.
It turns out, in a sweet little bonus, that this copy of the digipak is a promo copy! The inner ring on the disc's label side has "sample" written on it, along with some additional Japanese characters on the other side, overlapping the matrix runout on the disc. It may not be very visible in the picture below... but trust me, it's there. There's also a numbered sticker over the barcode on the back which, while I can't read any of the Japanese written languages, I'm pretty sure it's just something about how it's a promotional copy. I messaged the Discogs seller I got it from to ask them, and that is indeed what that sticker means. Excellent!
The tracklisting for Return Of Grasshopper is as follows:
1. Grasshopper
2. Chinning
3. Valetudo
5. Energy
7. Numeros
8. Shower
9. Setunai
10. Great Men
11. Far
12. Grab Your Own Shit
As a neat bonus, inside one of the digipak's flaps comes an 8cm CD copy of the Grasshopper EP! As far as I know, this was only previously released on 7" vinyl on July 15th of the same year. Not only is it amazing that this was included at all, on a format it wasn't previously released on, but Toy's Factory actually went to the effort of reproducing the 7" packaging for the smaller package. (At least, I would assume so. I've never seen in-depth pictures of the original 7" release itself, but it seems like this would be it.)
Click to enlarge
The tracklisting for the Grasshopper EP is as follows:
1. Grasshopper
2. Cocobat Crunch
3. Apocalypse Now (Final Conflict cover)
4. Die Die My Darling / We Bite (Misfits covers)
5. Far
Hey, a postcard! Never got one of these inside of a Japanese album before.
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