Before grunge became a marketing concept it was a pretty good way of describing the fusion of suburban metal and urban punk. And in Seattle’s summer of ’88, Blood Circus (Doug Day, Michael Anderson, T-Man and Geoff Robinson) vied with Mudhoney, Soundgarden and Mother Love Bone to see who might fill arenas first. (Sub Pop also got in the habit of booking a scared trio from Aberdeen as their opening act.) For a time Blood Circus even seemed likely to win, as theirs was the simplest, least ironic and most ferocious sound in town.
The MC5-like band was never quite able to live up to the promise of its debut single, “Six Foot Under,” though it was once a landmark of equal weight to Mudhoney’s “Touch Me I’m Sick.” The Primal Rock Therapy EP was released to horrendous reviews and general apathy in the winter of ’89 (nearly a year after it was recorded), and the quartet broke up. In 1992, Sub Pop recklessly re-released the entire Blood Circus oeuvre (one single, one EP), plus five previously unissued tracks from an aborted album recorded in the spring of 1989, as the full-length Primal Rock Therapy.