This is a strange record. Frank Turner and Jon Snodgrass spent a few days together in Colorado in 2010 and decided to hammer out a record. They'd written a song on the Revival Tour a while before and wanted to follow it up with a record. That song and nine others make up this record.
Some of the songs are pretty good - Buddies and New Orleansy are definitely worth a listen. The Ballad of Steve is fun too, but exactly the sort of song that comes from this sort of writing scenario (Steve was that flight attendant who was very briefly in the news). On the other hand, there are also some songs that aren't very good at all - Shut the Chicken, Mosquitoz and the unnecessary Remember That Time We Wrote This Record (I think there's a lot of irony in their use of the word "hits"). But then does any of that really matter? I guess the point was to document what came out of their few days regardless of whether either of them would consider the songs their best (having seen both of them, I'm going to say they're not, although New Orleansy is a genuinely decent song). I've heard a few records recorded in a similar way, and they're rarely my favourites (although Curve of the Earth by Attack in Black and The Rescue by Explosions in the Sky were both pretty nice). These ten songs are certainly enjoyable enough from a "documenting a time and place" perspective, and maybe that's enough.
A final, small point - it seems the insert was thrown together equally half-heartedly (or possibly equally drunkenly?) because the text about songs 4 and 5 seems to have been deleted or replaced with one of the photos. The front side finishes half way through a sentence about The Ballad of Steve but the following text on the other side appears to be about Old Fast Songs.
Format: 10", insert
Tracks: 10
Cost: £12.30 new
Bought: Banquet Records website
When: 22/12/10
Colour: Transparent green
Etching: none
mp3s: no
