Snapcase - Designs For Automotion

For me, there are two distinct periods of Snapcase - everything before End Transmission and End Transmission itself (which I guess includes Bright Flashes). I've written before about how much I love that album at length, so I'll not gush too much now. I'm a fan of the first three albums too, but they're different and share far more in common with each other than they do with End Transmission. Sure, there are huge similarities, but the ways in which End Transmission differs is what makes it so excellent.

On Designs For Automotion, and the first two albums, Snapcase are a much more straight-forward hardcore band and they do it well. Designs is a great record - it's full of energy and the vocals, one of the things that I always felt separated them from most hardcore bands, are perfect. Songs like Are You Tuned In? and Twentieth Nervous Breakdown are brilliant examples of their sound and style. The album barely pauses for a moment, which is great but I guess also is what separates it from End Transmission; those moments on the last record where the wall of sound breaks down to just one or two instruments is one of the things I enjoy about it the most.

I fund this copy of Designs For Automotion in Borderline Records in Brighton, which I'm not sure still exists. I was back from Australia for Christmas, visiting some friends and squeezed in a little record shopping. The fact that this record cost me a mere £4 still amazes me. I think it was new and had, presumably, been sitting on their shelves for six years. I also picked up Adore by the Pumpkins and R.I.P. by the Murder City Devils for very little each, so it was a good haul.

I knew the album well by this point as a year beforehand I'd bought all of Snapcase's albums on cd for tenner on eBay. My cd copy of Designs came with a bonus disc featuring an extra song (Less Than Convenient), two live songs from Progression Through Unlearning (Caboose and Zombie Prescription) and three of the worst remixes I have ever heard in my life. There's not much to Snapcase's music that lends itself to late-90's remixes so I really have no idea what the fuck they were thinking. One of them is so (intentionally) glitchy that it's basically impossible to listen to. I rant about my dislike of remixies of rock songs regularly, but I think those three might be the very reason I have such strong feelings. I've gone off-tangent, but my memories of this album are entwined with my memories of those terrible remixes.

So that rant aside, a great album and an excellent find.

Format: 12", 24x12" insert
Tracks: 11
Cost: £4 new
Bought: Borderline, Brighton
When: 11/01/06
Colour: Transparent yellow
Etching: none
mp3s: no

Pop Will Eat Itself - Very Metal Noise Pollution

If you wanted a quick introduction to Pop Will Eat Itself, I think the Very Metal Noise Pollution EP would be a perfect place to start. It may only contain four songs, but they sum up everything the band was doing at their peak and each one is brilliant in it's own way. PWEI-zation might as well be an introduction to the band, 92'F was one of their greatest singles and the backing vocals on this version are incredible, Def.Con.One was the Poppies doing hip-hop in a way only they could and Preaching to the Perverted was the token rock song. Four sides of an interesting band and not a dull moment.

This feels like an appropriate time to tell the story of how I got into PWEI. Readers of a certain age will remember the ill-fated and short-lived Sega Saturn, a strange console that started the decline of Sega. (As a side note, it had the curious feature that when used as a cd player you could mute the vocals of any song. I still don't know how it did that.) Anyway, a friend at school sold me his and a bunch of games for very little. I mostly wanted it so I could play Alien Trilogy and because I heard you could play the games in a cd player and listen to the soundtrack; he had Quake and I was keen to hear the Nine Inch Nails soundtrack (long before Trent became an award winning film-score composer). Also in the bundle of games was the impossibly-difficult game Loaded which featured two songs by a band I'd never heard of called Pop Will Eat Itself. The two songs were great (Kick to Kill and RSVP from their final album) and I was happy because I'd discovered a band that I may never have heard of until much later (and I doubt an older-me would have given them so much time). It would be ages before I read anything about who the band were or found out anything more about them. Such were the days before the internet.

I eventually sought out a cheap best-of (Wise Up Suckers) and then found more and more of their records in second hand stores over the next couple of years. I even travelled all the way to London from Lancaster to see them on their 2005 reformation tour, which was an excellent show. Most of my friends thought PWEI were terrible and I guess they had their reasons. In the early 2000's, PWEI weren't a cool band and it seems I'd missed the boat on their music by a good ten years, but I still dug their music. They were a fun band to get into.

Format: 12"
Tracks: 4
Cost: £8 new
Bought: Record Fair, Southampton
When: 26/10/02
Colour: Black
Etching: Side A: "Audie Murphy's Saddlebags" Side B: "Size of an elephant"
mp3s: no

Manic Street Preachers - La Tristesse Durera (Scream to a Sigh)

Gold Against the Soul was a great album. It took me a while to get into it when I was younger, but it's probably the Manics album I go to most these days. It has many highlights, and La Tristesse Durera is certainly one of them. The version on this 12" is the album version, but it sounds different somehow. Maybe it sounds better on vinyl, or maybe I'm just playing it much louder than normal. Either way, it sounds excellent; fresh, despite being 20 years old. I picked up this slightly-knackered second-hand copy in Selectadisc in London (before it became Sister Ray) nearly ten years after it came out.

There's a full selection of treats as the three b-sides too. Patrick Bateman is probably the most Guns n' Roses the Manics ever sounded - riffy, glossy and screamed vocals (the GATS-era must have been hard on James' vocals but it also contains some of his finest moments). It ended up being years after I bought this single that I saw American Psycho and made the connection. Without knowing the book or the film, the lyrics are even more shocking.

The third song is a live recording of Repeat which they hammer through at break-neck speed. Finally we get the b-side to their impossible-to-find, first-ever 7", Tennessee (I Get Low). This would have been even more exciting had I not bought one of the many bootleg copies of the Suicide Alley 7" on eBay a few months beforehand. I wouldn't normally buy a bootleg, but I wanted to hear those two songs badly (more on this when I write about that record). The recording is comically bad, but excellent at the same time.

Format: 12"
Tracks: 4
Cost: £7 second hand
Bought: Selectadisc, Soho
When: 07/03/03
Colour: Black
Etching: none
mp3s: no

Piebald - Volume I-III

There is a lot of music in here.

When I bought this record, a collection of Piebald's first three LPs, I'd never heard Piebald. We all have people whose musical opinions we trust and when they talk fondly of a band, you know you've got a decent chance of enjoying them too. When a whole bunch of these people all adore a particular band, it's almost rude not to give them a listen. That's basically what happened here; over a few years I became aware of more and more people talking about Piebald and they all got very excited when this record was announced for Record Store Day 2011. A triple LP for £26 is certainly a bargain on RSD, so I knew what I had to do.

Turns out all those people were right - Piebald are a band I'm glad I got into. To me they sound like Hum as an late-90's emo band, which is a pretty cool sound. You Won't be Seeing Me Again, for example, has that excellent combination of a quiet build up and crunching guitars whereas a song like Long Time is far more Saves the Day. On paper it would be hard to take Piebald seriously, with their equally ridiculous album titles and song titles. Even some of the songs steer slightly towards the comical side, but musically it's pretty consistent and pretty brilliant. There are also countless huge choruses, Part II: The Noreaster, Grace Kelly With Wings or The Monkey Versus the Robot being prime examples. Finally, the outro to Sex Sells and (Unfortunately) I'm Buying also deserves a mention.

The package here is pretty lovely too. Each of the albums is on a different colour record and housed in a great triple-gatefold. Inside there are lengthy pieces by the band members about each record which, being the terrible person I am, I haven't read yet (it's a very small font and a triple-gatefold sleeve doesn't make for the easiest book to read). Everyone has gone to a great effort to make this a lovely collection.

Format: Triple 12", gatefold sleeve
Tracks: 36
Cost: £26 new
Bought: Banquet Records
When: 16/04/11
Colour: Green, transparent blue and transparent yellow
Etching: none
mp3s: no

Glassjaw - Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Silence

In the grand scheme of things, I certainly didn't need to buy this record. However, when Banquet announced they were getting the reissue in, I jumped at the chance. I bought a copy of Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Silence on cd when I was 16 and it's been an absolute classic ever since. The first 30 cds I owned included a lot of dubious choices (I was young and nu-metal was very much a thing) but there were some wise choices; the Manics and The Verve back-catalogues, White Pony, The Downward Spiral and Superunknown were all up there and records I still hold very close to my heart. Glassjaw were somewhat of an anomaly - a non-mainstream, "cool" record, but one I've loved for nearly 14 years now.

A few months beforehand, Pretty Lush appeared on a free cd that came with Kerrang! magazine (the infamous and excellent Devil's Music, Vol. 1) and was followed up with a lot of excitement (I still have the copy of the magazine that claims "Glassjaw: the band of 2000!" on the cover). A short while later I heard When One Eight Becomes Two Zeros on a Metal Hammer free cd, which I enjoyed even more than Pretty Lush. Then, one afternoon in Bournemouth, I found the cd in a record shop for £13 and bought it. This might not seem like a particularly odd series of events, but £13 was a lot of money back then and spending that much on a new cd was quite something (I'd only spent more on a cd twice before that, and the average up to that point was less than a fiver per cd!). On top of that, it was the only cd or record I bought that day and Bournemouth, at the time, was over-flowing with excellent second-hand record shops (a lot of the aforementioned cheap cds had come from there). I don't remember the day very well now, but I suspect this was because I didn't have a great deal of cash at the time, making £13 even more luxurious. I suspect the surprise of seeing this album I'd heard so much about in a record store finally made me decide it was a good investment.

Nearly 14 years later, it's still an incredible album. There's no point picking out highlights because the whole thing is excellent; there's certainly not a moment I would choose to remove. Mostly it's crushingly heavy (especially compared to the other records I had in my collection at the time) but there are moments of relative calm (Her Middle Name Was Boom, EYEWTKAS and the strange hidden track all provide some respite). I wouldn't say it got me into hardcore (that came via Gorilla Biscuits, although Sammy Siegler connects the two) but it certainly opened my ears to heavier music. Looking back at it, it probably led me more to metal than it did to hardcore, but maybe these things were going to happen anyway.

Like I said at the start, the vinyl doesn't give me much that the cd didn't. I've played this album so many times I barely need to any more; I know it backwards. It's an enjoyable listen but after 14 years of playing the cd, it feels a bit like I'm cheating on it by playing the vinyl. Ordinarily I'd always consider vinyl the superior format, but this wasn't originally pressed on vinyl and I didn't spend years lusting after elusive copies. Strangely, the cd feels more important to me, and that isn't the case for very many albums at all.

Format: 12", picture sleeve
Tracks: 12
Cost: £19 new
Bought: Banquet Records
When: 22/03/14
Colour: Black
Etching: none
mp3s: no

Manic Street Preachers - Roses in the Hospital

Here we have five of Roses in the Hospital. There's no denying, that's a lot of remixes of any one song. The song itself is a great one. Over the years I came to love Gold Against the Soul. It didn't have so much to offer when I first heard it, but there are some great songs. One of the greatest things about it is that it contains some of James Dean Bradfield's best vocals - somehow everything was right for that record him to really belt the lyrics out.

Roses in the Hospital is certainly one of the highlights for both those reasons - it's a great song and James sounds excellent (and that drum-only section before the outro is excellent - it feels like a precursor to the incredible outro to A Design For Life). One of the things that really comes through when you hear five remixes of the same song is just how good his vocals are. These mixes strip away a lot of the rest of the song, so what you're left with is some fragments of the song, a very 90's sounding, semi-hip-hop beat and James' vocals over the top (although the first version does call out the whistling at the end, which is great). I shouldn't really complain that it sounds dated - this record is over 20 years old - but they all sound an awful lot like House of Pain. Of the five, the first and fifth remixes are the most enjoyable, but after all of them it is a welcome relief to hear the album version.

It was probably pretty forward-thinking back in the day for a rock band to put a bunch of remixes on a single, so you certainly can't knock them for trying.

Format: 12"
Tracks: 4
Cost: £6 second-hand
Bought: Lancaster market record stall
When: 19/02/03
Colour: Black
Etching: none
mp3s: no

Battles - Dross Glop 4

We've all been there - it's Record Store Day, the shop hasn't had all the records in that you wanted to get and you find yourself thinking "well, I haven't spent as much as I thought I would, maybe I'll see if there's anything else I fancy". I think that's the main reason I own this Battles remix EP. There were a few things that year that Banquet hadn't got in, so I thought spending another £7 on a 12" EP might be a good idea.

There's nothing wrong with this record, but if it wasn't in my collection I don't think I'd be too upset. At the time I thought it might be neat to have all four EPs in the Dross Glop series (the remixes of Battles second album Gloss Drop) but I never got round to buying the others. I never even got round to buying Gloss Drop itself. I've seen Battles a bunch of times and quite enjoy their first album Mirrored, but I've just lost enthusiasm for them entirely. I'm not sure why. Maybe I got caught up in all the excitement when Mirrored came out, but just didn't care that much.

I'm not sure what to say about these songs. I can't say how they compare to the originals, but if the originals sound much like these I'd say Battles took a very different direction on LP2. I know that one of the remixes in the series was done by the main guy from Boredoms, which could be interesting. Sadly, that isn't on this 12". The third song here features Gary Numan, which is something no song really needs. I'm still quite shocked that this record isn't on yellow vinyl. Seems like the most natural colour given that sleeve.

Format: 12", picture sleeve
Tracks: 3
Cost: £5.11 new
Bought: Banquet Records
When: 21/04/12
Colour: Black
Etching: none
mp3s: no

Pop Will Eat Itself - Get the Girl! Kill the Baddies!

The story of how I got into Pop Will Eat Itself is a long one, and I can't be bothered to tell it now so I'll save it for another day. The key point of that story is that Pop Will Eat Itself were a pretty exciting band to discover as a teenager. They'd long broken up by the time I heard them, but it was great fun stumbling across their records in second hand stores in the early 2000's.

This record is a prime example of that. Two days after Christmas in 2002 I decided to head into Reading for the day to see what the record shops had to offer. I went on the Yellow Pages website and noted down the addresses of each shop in town (remember, it was 2002) and jumped on a train. I came home with a nice stack of records (including one of my all-time best finds, Manic Compression by Quicksand), three of them by Pop Will Eat Itself. In one record shop, upstairs in the old shopping centre to the west of town, I found this 12" single and the picture-disc of The Pop Will Eat Itself Cure For Sanity. Whilst I'm largely uninterested in remixes, there were was no way I wasn't buying this record. Look at that cover! It's possibly one of my all-time sleeves. It's not one that comes to mind when I think of great record covers (it's no Spiderland), but it's still awesome. One day I'll get round to framing the poster that came with it.

The film poster style of the sleeve certainly adds to it's charm, in more ways than it just being a novel idea. The title of the song is a reference to Total Recall ("Get the girl, kill the bad guys and save the entire planet!"), which is fun in itself. The reason it's even more amusing now is that the singer, Clint Mansell, has gone on to have a huge career in composing film scores. I've recently bought two of his scores on vinyl and, ever since seeing Requiem For a Dream many years ago, I've struggled to believe that the man singing here also composed Lux Aeterna, a piece of music who'll have definitely heard even if you don't think you have. It's really quite incredible.

Anyway, Get the Girl! Kill the Baddies! was amongst the first few PWEI songs I heard (on the budget compilation Wise Up Suckers!) and it's a classic in their discography. None of these remixes adds a great deal in my opinion (especially when the line "Yeah, you motherfuckers" gets changed to "Yeah, you brothers and sisters" for the radio edit), but this record was always more about that awesome sleeve. They always joked that they sold more t-shirts than records and, given the strength of the artwork, I can believe it.

Format: 12", 20x20" poster
Tracks: 4
Cost: £3 second hand
Bought: Second hand store, Reading
When: 27/12/02
Colour: Black
Etching: none
mp3s: no

Manic Street Preachers - This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours [Picture-disc]

As a bonus post to the earlier one on the regular LP of This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours, here is the probably-bootleg Mexican picture-disc I mentioned. Back in those early days of record collecting, I found this picture-disc at a record fair in Southampton. The most notable thing about it is it's abridged tracklisting, finishing on Be Natural and skipping the final trio of Black Dog On My Shoulder, Nobody Loved You and S.Y.M.M. (the break appears after Tsunami rather than after I'm Not Working). I assume this is because picture-discs have less groove depth so require more width to sound better (or at least sound not-shit). The second most note-worthy thing is the Spanish writing in yellow around the edge of the second side giving some details about the release.

When I saw it at the record fair, I thought it was a strange release (mainly for the two reasons above), but I was quite keen to have the album on vinyl and thought it would be a nice addition to the collection (I also bought four MSP cd singles that day). Upon getting it home I discovered two more things - the edges had been well-thumbed and were incredibly crackly, and it was the most warped record I'd ever seen. My record player at the time was a smaller one that had 12" records hanging over two edges when playing and a lid that sort of sat over them when it was closed; this record was so warped that it touch the lid. Over a period of weeks I gradually laid more and more books on top of it and it eventually played fine. Twelve years of being in my collection has probably helped keep it in shape too.

Format: 12" picture-disc
Tracks: 10
Cost: £11 second hand
Bought: Record Fair, Southampton
When: 26/01/02
Colour: Picture-disc
Etching: none
mp3s: no

Manic Street Preachers - This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours

I say this on here quite often, but this is a pretty significant record for me. The very first cd in my collection was Urban Hymns by The Verve and the second was This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours by the Manic Street Preachers. On my fourteenth birthday I received a copy as a gift from my parents. The album hadn't long been out and they'd noticed me enjoying If You Tolerate This... when it came on TV or the radio. Also, my mum had seen a documentary about the band, which had captured her attention more than a documentary about a rock band normally would because of Richey Edward's disappearance. It was an unexpected gift, but one I very much came to appreciate.

Of course, at that age, a lot of the lyrics and ideas went over my head - I had no idea what a "facist" was, I'd never heard the word "tsunami" before and I was pretty shocked by the closer, S.Y.M.M.. The strangest thing about that song, whilst we're on the topic, is that despite having had this album for 15 and a half years I've only just discovered the mass-murder the song speaks of. And by "just", I mean in the time between those two sentences when I finally decided to Google it. In 1998 we didn't have the internet and I don't think it would have even crossed my mind to search for what the song was about (was Google even a thing?). I had absolutely no idea until this evening that S.Y.M.M. was about the Hillsborough disaster. It's incredible that one song can continue to shock and surprise me after so long. Listening to it now, those lyrics are taking on new meanings.

I've never considered This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours to be my favourite Manics album but there's no denying that it is an incredible album. Somehow the others had more to offer me over the years - Generation Terrorists had it's youthful punk, The Holy Bible was dark and intentionally difficult, Everything Must Go was just a great indie album with some incredible songs and I even eventually found myself loving Gold Against the Soul. TIMTTMY felt more polished and grand but the songs were still uniquely Manic Street Preachers. The singles were instantly familiar and played repeatedly on the radio, but there were other highlights too; Ready For Drowning, My Little Empire, Nobody Loved You. It's hard to believe that a song like Born a Girl wasn't penned by Richey.

Four and half years after I first heard this album I was in Lancaster for an open day at the university and found this copy of the LP in a second hand stall in the market. This would be my fourth copy of the album (long story, but I also have the embossed-case cd and a bootleg Spanish picture-disc as well as the regular cd that I got for my birthday) but I was still thinking I might be able to collect everything they'd ever put out, so it was vital to the collection.

I've written at length about how important the Manics were to me when I was a teenager and how my love of vinyl can basically be traced back to buying a copy of Motorcycle Emptiness on 7", so I shan't bore you with that story again. However, it's worth noting that all of that probably traces back to me receiving a copy of this album for my birthday. I might have ended up in a similar place had they bought me any other cd, but you never know.

I'm still amazed that I had no idea what S.Y.M.M. was about until tonight, but I love that this album can still surprise me.

Format: 12", picture sleeve
Tracks: 13
Cost: £8.50 second hand
Bought: Lancaster Market record stall
When: 19/02/03
Colour: Black
Etching: none
mp3s: no

Hot Water Music - Fuel For the Hate Game

Fuel For the Hate Game is occasionally my favourite Hot Water Music album. It varies between A Flight and a Crash, Caution and this one, and I don't think I could ever choose one favourite. In a Desert Island Discs situation, I might end up choosing Fuel... out of those three - it's the heaviest and I think I'd appreciate that if I was stuck on a desert island; I'd probably be pretty pissed off.

I first heard Fuel For the Hate Game about 2 years after I first heard Hot Water Music. A friend's band was playing in The Barfly in Cardiff and one of the bands had brought along a distro. In amongst the cds were Fuel... and Dead Reckoning by Small Brown Bike for a fiver each, so I bought both in what is still an excellent way to spend £10. I didn't know each album was such a classic (both overall, but also for the bands in question) so it worked out pretty well.

I knew Caution and A Flight and a Crash by this point, so Fuel... was a bit of a shock, but in a very good way. There are fewer of the huge choruses (but still plenty - see Turnstile or Rock Singer) and the dual vocals are taken to a level I hadn't heard yet. To this day, I have no idea what's being sung on The Sleeping Fan despite having the lyrics in front of me. Lyrically there are repeating themes of fuel and industrial machines and a general feeling of aggression, which matches the music well. I think it's that combination of things that makes me like it so much as an album. Other HWM albums feature parts of these things, but none rely on them quite so heavily.

This copy is from the 19th (!) pressing of the album (and includes a complete pressing history on the insert), which makes it the third most re-pressed record No Idea have put out (their discography page has a very detailed list). Of course other LPs might have had larger runs, but it's still impressive and something called out on the etching in the run out groove. I picked this one up in Gainesville last year because it's definitely a record that I should have on vinyl.

Format: 12", a4 insert
Tracks: 11
Cost: £7 new
Bought: Hear Again Music, Gainesville
When: 04/11/13
Colour: Purple/red mix
Etching: Side A: "Whoa - ten years!" Side B: "How many times have we cut this thing?!?"
mp3s: Download code

Silverchair - Frogstomp

The first three Silverchair albums are all excellent and it's pretty pleasing to finally have the first, Frogstomp, on vinyl. I've been listening to this album for more than half of my life, which isn't something I can say about very many albums yet; I was 14/15 when I first started properly getting into music so now that I'm approaching 30 it is something that's starting to be true for increasingly many records. It's a curious thing to dwell on, but it's strange thinking about all those younger versions of me sat there listening to Frogstomp.

Of course, it's also worth mentioning that Silverchair themselves were only 14/15 when they wrote this record (no post about Silverchair is complete unless the young age they started out is mentioned!). It's a well-known fact that they grew out of this album much faster than I did, so much so that the one time I saw them they didn't play a single song from Frogstomp. A friend who went to the second night of four London shows said they played Israel's Son, which made me pretty gutted I'd gone the night before. I didn't expect to hear many Frogstomp songs (it was a Neon Ballroom/Diorama-heavy set) but Israel's Son was all I was really after. It's an odd song, in the fact that there's not another Silverchair song that feels very much like it. They certainly didn't write any others that sounded quite so angry or urgent. In fact, Frogstomp sometimes feels like a single with 10 b-sides (maybe it's the way that the tracklisting shows Israel's Son in a slightly larger font - something that I always found strange).

Don't get me wrong though, there are some great songs on the rest of the album and, depending on the day, I might even say better songs, but Israel's Son was always the lead, the single, the song you put on mixtapes to show people quite how cool Silverchair were. Shade is an absolutely incredible song (and the one that I sometimes consider better) but I don't think I ever put it on a mixtape. Tomorrow, Madman and Leave Me Out were always highlights too.

This copy is from the second pressing (/1000) of the recent Shop Radio Cast reissue, which I picked up at their stall at Fest last year. They've done a pretty nice job on the whole thing, the etching on side D being a particularly lovely touch. The original vinyl copy (which I remember seeing a few times on eBay back in the day, but was out-priced even then) squeezed all the songs onto one disc, but they've made it a double here. As on the original vinyl, Blind has been included between Shade and Leave Me Out. Many years ago I bought the best-of compilation in order to hear Blind and the vocal-version of Madman (which wasn't as good) so I was already quite familiar with the song. My only complaint comes with regards to that song - listening to the LP you can tell that Blind has come from a different source and was mastered differently; it just doesn't sound right. The volume and the production drops, especially on the heavier parts. The compilation version sounds fine, but I can see how it might be tough to get it to match the sound of the rest of the album. I'd love to hear the original vinyl to see how it sounds there.

Otherwise, SRC have done an excellent job on the reissue. This copy is slightly different to most in that one of the centre labels has the wrong colour frog on it (apparently - I'm colour-blind so it's quite hard to tell what's the same colour and what isn't sometimes). Side C has the green frog that appeared on the centre-labels of the first press. This misprint version cost me $2 more than a regular version, which is basically the same (I'm pretty bad at treating US currency like Monopoly money). $2 at Fest is a can of PBR (minus the tip) so spending that on a slightly different version of an LP sounded fine to me. Whatsmore, it worked out to be £17, which is still about £5 cheaper than most LP's are over here these days anyway. It was the most expensive record I bought on that whole trip, but it was definitely worth it.

Format: Double 12", gatefold sleeve
Tracks: 12
Cost: £17 new
Bought: Fest Registration, Tampa
When: 29/10/13
Colour: Transparent orange
Etching: Picture of a frog on side D
mp3s: no

Iron & Wine - Around the Well

Back in January I wrote about The Woman King by Iron & Wine. It was the first Iron & Wine album I ever heard and remains to be my favourite. The second Iron & Wine album I heard was the b-sides and rarities compilation Around the Well, which remains to be my second favourite Iron & Wine album (the fact that neither of these are "proper" albums is probably of note).

About six months after I bought The Woman King I'd just moved to London and spent a Saturday afternoon browsing the record shops of Soho for bargain cds. In one of the second hand stores I found a copy of Around the Well on cd for £7 and, having enjoyed The Woman King so much, figured it was worth a shot. I also noticed that it contained the cover of Such Great Heights (a song I've already sung the praises of twice - in the post about The Woman king above, and in this post about Give Up by The Postal Service) so I knew it would contain at least one excellent song.

In amongst those 23 songs there were some other gems that stood out at various points over the years - The Postal Service-esque Sacred Vision, Hickory, The Flaming Lips' Waitin' for a Superman, Belated Promise Ring and Arms of a Theif. However, the highlight of the collection by far is the final, nearly 10-minute long song, The Trapeze Swinger. I've not listened to every Iron & Wine album, but The Trapeze Swinger must surely be one of his absolute finest. As the song rolls on the story unfolds and it never gets boring. The drums and gentle backing-vocals fill the track in a beautiful way and act as a bed for the guitar, floating lyrics and organ. If you have 10 minutes to check out a new song today, I can't recommend enough that it should be The Trapeze Swinger.

A couple of weeks ago I was record shopping in Manchester and found this second-hand, triple-LP version of Around the Well in very good condition for £12. The shop it was in wasn't the cheapest so I was quite surprised to find an album I wanted quite so reasonably. I've had the cd for nearly five years but £12 was a price I was willing to pay for The Trapeze Swinger alone. When I got home I was pleasantly surprised again to find that the F-side of the vinyl was etched (see below). A lot of record labels would have considered cutting a song to make it fit on two discs, so you've got to love Sub Pop for doing the opposite and dedicating a whole 12" to that incredible last song. 

Format: Triple 12", insert, etched F-side

Tracks: 23

Cost: £12 second hand

Bought: Vinyl Exchange, Manchester

When: 18/05/14

Colour: Black

Etching: Etched F-side

mp3s: Download code

Soulsavers - Broken

My initial disappointment with this record was entirely my own fault. I'd taken it home from Spillers the day it came out fully expecting it to be an incredible, life-changing album; it wasn't. It's a good record, but I'd let my expectations rise too high. Let's look at the reasons why:

A short while before Broken came out, I'd heard the song Revival from Soulsavers' second album and fallen in love. I have one Screaming Trees album so already knew Mark Lanegan had an incredible voice but on that song, with its subtle mix of folk, gospel and electronica, it was perfect. I knew Broken featured Lanegan on even more of the songs so I let myself dream that it was going to be an album of songs like Revival. Of course there are hints of that song or, more accurately, Soulsavers' style throughout but at no point does it come together for me as brilliantly as Revival.

The second reason was a 7" record I bought a week and a half before Broken came out. I'll write about the Sunrise / You Will Miss Me When I Burn 7" at a later date, but the short version is this: Soulsavers and Bonnie 'Prince' Billy singing a song written by Lanegan and Soulsavers and Lanegan covering Bonnie 'Prince' Billy's excellent You Will Miss Me When I Burn. There's a lot of awesome things squeezed into that small piece of vinyl. Both songs were excellent and it's almost a shame that they didn't both make it onto the LP.

Finally, I'd seen the list of other musicians contributing to the album which included Mike Patton, Richard Hawley and Jason Pierce from Spiritualized (at this point I hadn't started listening to Spiritualized yet so I didn't really appreciate his appearance or note the influence they clearly had on Soulsavers). You can see why I was getting excited.

And overall, Broken is a good record. It just had very high expectations to meet. There are a lot of great songs on - just have a listen to Unbalanced Pieces, You Will Miss Me When I Burn, or By My Side. There are some slower moments that don't quite cut it for me (All the Way Down, Can't Catch the Train) and the opener, Death Bells, came across as a slightly overcooked rock song. The gospel vocals that worked so well on Revival appear again on Some Misunderstanding and Shadows Fall, and are nice, but generally it feels a bit long, particularly on the second record.

I've since picked up the other Soulsavers albums and I enjoy them. I think they benefit from my initial disappointment with this record - I went into them expecting less and they gave me more. After I first played Broken I wrote a status on Facebook (it was 2009) about how I shouldn't go into albums expecting them to change my life. A colleague thought it was ridiculous that a record could be life-changing, but they most certainly can be. However, lowering my hopes is a lesson I mostly adhere to still and it's made it all the more enjoyable when an album has completely blown me away.

Format: Double 12", gatefold sleeve
Tracks: 13
Cost: £15 new
Bought: Spillers Records, Cardiff
When: 18/08/09
Colour: Black
Etching: none
mp3s: Download code