The Clash - The Story of The Clash, Volume 1

Every now and again, I write something on here that is very controversial (luckily few people who read this take me up on those controversies, or maybe they're just not as controversial as I think they are). They're mostly things I'd be very wary of saying aloud in a crowd because you know at least one person within earshot will strongly disagree. Here is one such controversial thing: I don't care for The Clash.

I know I'm supposed to. My teenage years were dominated by the Manic Street Preachers who owe a lot to The Clash - all the books I read about the Manics constantly reminded me that The Clash are a band I should check out. Of course I knew the big songs from the radio - Rock the Casbah, Should I Stay or Should I Go and I Thought the Law - but for years I never made any effort to check them out properly. I'd see their cds in record stores and occasionally toyed with the idea of buying a best-of, but I didn't buy anything until 2007, when I got this second-hand, well-loved (or not, since it was in a second hand shop) compilation. It was a lot of The Clash to take in in one go.

I wonder if this collection is just too long. I know there are good songs in there - and great ones like London Calling, the highlight for me by a long way - but there's a lot of songs that I could really take or leave: Straight to Hell drags on far too long and Lost in the Supermarket is just a really bad song; I don't know if I'm missing something with that one, but every time I hear it I wonder how it made it onto an album, let alone a greatest hits album. London Calling doesn't appear until the last side, which is a long wait.

Guns of Brixton is another great song and (White Man) in Hammersmith Palais is quite fun - shows off their varied influences and you can see where Rancid stole at least half of their songs from. Tommy Gun has a good chorus and English Civil War would be an excellent way to end the album (but they don't end it there). Train in Vain I know well from the Manics cover, but I genuinely prefer their version - I couldn't tell you who is singing on any particular song, but I don't care for either Mick of Joe's voice - one has a sneer I find deeply off-putting. Safe European Home makes me want to listen to Suburban Home by The Descendents - the direction of influence is an easy one to follow there.

I wanted to like The Clash, but it just didn't work out. I feel that if you can't be convinced by a greatest hits album, then you really stand no chance with the albums themselves (Bob Dylan, a case in point, although that was another compilation that was far too long for an introduction). A lot of people would probably be amazed by the lack of "classic" albums in my record collection, but really I think I just love music from the late-80's/90's onwards (Sabbath, Zeppelin, Floyd and Springsteen being notable examples) - I get that a lot of these bands and albums from before that paved the way - I appreciate it and I'm thankful for it - but I just don't get the same enjoyment from them. That's no bad thing to realise.

Format: Double 12", picture sleeves
Tracks: 28
Cost: £6 second hand
Bought: Damaged Records, Cardiff
When: 14/04/07
Colour: Black
Etching: none
mp3s: None

Inventions - Inventions

Every now and again, I gamble reasonable sums of money on albums that I've not heard; this is one such album. Sometimes those gambles pay off, other times not so much. I always thought this album leant towards the latter, although listening to Flood Poems now I'm wondering if I haven't given it enough chances over the years.

In November 2014 I was in Cardiff and it's almost rude to go to Cardiff and not visit Spillers Records, so I did. It was the first time I'd been there since they moved location and was slightly sad to see that the quantity of stock was much lower than it used to be. Luckily, the quality was even better, so at least they downsized in a good way. The vinyl is/was hidden upstairs on a landing, but in the few boxes were many records I fancied buying. They had the newest Electric Wizard album, Time to Die, a very reasonably-priced copy of Shellac's Excellent Italian Greyhound which I'd been after for a little while and the double-cd best of The Ex; the latter resulted in a nice conversation with the staff about the fact they'd sold three The Ex albums in the last few days and how nice it is to meet other people who like that band. They were also very positive about this Inventions record.

Roll back a few minutes and I was making some very tough choices about what records to take downstairs to the counter. I made a fairly long short-list going through the racks and left behind some albums that I'm sure would have been very welcome in my collection (including Run the Jewels 2, an album I already loved but hadn't yet bought a copy of, something I later rectified). A curious addition was this record. I was on a huge Explosions in the Sky trip at the time (and still am, to be fair), so a collaboration between one of the guys in Explosions and Eluvium (who I didn't really know at the time - I've since become a fan after hearing Shuffle Drones (in endless different ways)) sounded quite interesting. Spillers have always been great at writing little reviews on the sleeve and this was very positive. £20 was a lot to gamble on an unknown, but the review was very convincing and I choose this record to add to my pile of records, at the expense of at least one other.

Now having listened to a bit of Matthew Cooper's music as Eluvium, this album sounds exactly like what you'd imagine a collaboration between Explosions and Eluvium would do. It has more in common with The Wilderness and their soundtracks than it does the earlier EITS albums, but that experimental edge is very welcome. Compared to Eluvium, there are these very EITS-esque guitars just floating somewhere in the background, occasionally coming forward, that really make it work (not to say Eluvium is difficult, but it's certainly not music you could put on in a crowded room). Peaceable Child is a perfect example to what they do and well worth a listen.

I'm enjoying Inventions far more right now than I ever remember doing so before; I possibly wrote them off unfairly. In my defence, Hugh gave me a copy of Nils Frahm's excellent Spaces that weekend, so as far as neo-classical/ambient post-rock music goes, it was up against a truly stunning album. On top of that, Time to Die ended up being number 3 in my top ten that year, and Excellent Italian Greyhound has The End of Radio on it, so competition for my ears was tough around that time. However, the point of this blog was always to rediscover and re-appreciate hidden gems in my collection, so this last 45 minutes has been very productive - I'll be playing this one much more often.

Format: 12"
Tracks: 8
Cost: £20 new
Bought: Spillers Records, Cardiff
When: 15/11/14
Colour: Black
Etching: none
mp3s: Download code

Jane's Addiction - Nothing's Shocking

In 2018 it's easy to be dismissive of Jane's Addiction - on the surface, there's a lot that hasn't aged well, but probably no more than most bands from LA at the same time. Sure, the reunions and reunion albums (yes, plural, apparently) probably didn't help, but if you ignore all of that, they released two landmark albums. I wrote about Ritual de lo Habitual five years ago, but kept forgetting to write about Nothing's Shocking.

There's a very good chance I've not listened to this album in the years in between; if I had I would have remembered how great it is and written about it straight away. The second those amazingly uplifting guitars hit in Up the Beach I would have been mentally writing paragraphs after paragraphs about it. Over the 15 years I've had this album I've periodically had this same thought: Ocean Size might be the biggest riff ever. I mean, literally the-size-of-an-ocean huge. The production is incredible (this was recorded in 1988) and it does everything to possible to make you focus on the sheer size of that riff. I like Up the Beach as an opener, but can you imagine if they'd just opened it up with Ocean Song? People wouldn't have known what hit them.

Nothing's Shocking is a funny one - there are songs that in my mind are less essential, but actually all have their charms - Summertime Rolls takes a little too long to get going but I do love where it ends up - I think I even used to put it on mixtapes; Idiots Rule ends up being this jazz explosion but starts as something almost throwaway; and Ted, Just Admit It builds in an almost post-rock style that was a world apart from anything they'd written before. Of course there's also Mountain Song and that bassline - a song that would dominate any album that didn't already have Ocean Size on it. Snapcase did a cover of it which worked well. I think Sepultura covered it too. It's a classic.

Jane Says was, as mentioned before, my introduction to Jane's Addiction, although I was used to the live version from Kettle Whistle being played on MTV. I was excited to hear the original version when I bought this album - I'd found a copy of Kettle Whistle a few months beforehand, which quenched my thirst for the song (and introduced me to demos of Ocean Song and Mountain Song). I like it, but not as much as the live version - the steel drums are far quieter in the mix. I'm still a little bitter that I've never seen them play it live - at Reading in 2002 they had the steel drums by the side of the stage but didn't play them; they cancelled their set last minute at Reading 2011 and when I saw them in Brixton they were playing Ritual in whole. I might have to accept that I'll never see it.

If I had to say which Jane's album was the best (no one is asking, but I like to ponder these questions) I'd be torn. Ritual was the first I heard and I spent a lot if time listening to it in the two years before getting Nothing's Shocking; I love it and all its strangeness. On the other hand, Nothing's Shocking has the big stand-alone songs - Ocean Size, Mountain Song and Jane Says; when I think of the best Jane's songs, I think of those songs. But maybe that answers the question itself - Ritual is the better album, but Nothing's Shocking has the songs. Either way, both are important and excellent.

Format: 12"
Tracks: 10
Cost: £9 new
Bought: Selectadisc, Nottingham
When: 20/02/03
Colour: Black
Etching: None
mp3s: None

The Mars Volta - Frances the Mute b/w The Widow

Frances the Mute - the album - gets a lot of hate, but it's always been my favourite Mars Volta album. I remember being knocked over by it the first time and I still listen to it often now. The way they bring Cassandra Gemini around at the end was perfect; I remember telling my dad that they were a modern-day Led Zeppelin, a ridiculous claim but what I felt at the time. I once saw a copy of the album on 4LP glow-in-the-dark vinyl in a record shop in Melbourne for $400 or so. I wasn't remotely tempted, but I knew I'd never see a copy in the wild again and, so far, I was right.

This isn't Frances the Mute the album, but Frances the Mute the single. The cd case for the album had lyrics beneath the cd tray for a song that wasn't on the album. Those lyrics are the lyrics to this title-track that didn't make the cut, since the album was already pushing the limits of a single cd. I can remember the excitement of finally being able to hear a song whose lyrics had been so mysteriously left behind on the packaging. It's a good song and would have fit the album, but I don't think it suffers for missing it. It's 14 minutes long, but really only about 8 or 9 of music. Had it been on the album with all the ambient noise either side, I think it would have harmed the flow. The hint of Cassandra Gemini through the static at the end always makes me want to put the album on.

The b-side is a live acoustic version of The Widow, which mostly sounds lovely and works far better than those words suggest it will do. To account for the almost-screamed chorus (which would struggle over the gentle acoustic guitar), Cedric messes around with his voice through all sorts of effects pedals and boxes, which isn't as good as the original but interesting nonetheless.

I found this copy in Selectadisc in London the day before I flew out to Germany to visit my friend Matt. From Germany I went to Austria to see some friends in Vienna, then back to Lancaster to see some other university friends followed by a quick trip back to Winchester before flying back to Australia for my second term over there (my carbon footprint at that time was substantial). That means I didn't actually get to listen to this until I was back in Winchester a few weeks after buying it, and then not again for another 6 months. I recorded a couple of records I bought that winter onto tape to take back to Canberra, but this one didn't end up anywhere. It's slim sleeve means I've routinely overlooked it in my collection (especially surrounded my The Mars Volta's other album in their double gatefold sleeves). I've not listened to it enough.

Format: 12"
Tracks: 2
Cost: £6 new
Bought: Selectadisc, London
When: 13/01/06
Colour: Green
Etching: Side B: "The Widow live at the Wiltern"
mp3s: None

Miracle of 86 - Every Famous Last Word

There's a joke in Parks & Recreation that I always really liked - Ann makes a passing comment about Diddy being on Instagram and Mona-Lisa replies "How did I not know Diddy was on Instragram, you jagweeds?" - "Who are you yelling at?" - "The jagweeds"; the intonation on the last line is what really makes it (and doesn't remotely work in written form). A few months ago I found this reissue of Miracle of 86's incredible album Every Famous Last Word and I felt what Mona-Lisa was feeling - how did I not know this had been reissued? Why did no one tell me? Surely I follow all the right Twitter accounts to know about such things? Clearly not.

My introduction to Kevin Devine's music came about from two potentially related events - we saw Kevin supporting Lucero in Le Pub in Newport and at some point, a copy of this album appeared in our kitchen. I don't know which happened first - the Lucero gig was the same night as my work Christmas party and being sober felt like a distant memory at that point; similarly, the four of us were routinely adding cds to the collection in the kitchen - but I'm pretty sure it was a while before I made a connection between Miracle of 86 and Kevin Devine (we also had a copy of Circle Gets the Square, seemingly unrelated and equally vaguely-owned). Damaged Records in town always had copies of this and Circle amongst a collection of very cheap cds that often found their way in raffle prizes at charity gigs so that might be how we ended up with them.

What I do know is that on March 28th 2009 I bought a copy of this album on cd for £2 in Damaged (along with Milloy's excellent More Than a Machine), and already knew I was a big fan of the album; I was pleased to have my own copy. Nearly ten years have now passed and I still play it often; the title track has made it onto countless mixtapes and I play it to anyone who'll listen. In those years, I saw copies of the LP appear on eBay every now and again, but never bought one - they were often in the US (expensive postage) and in poor condition. The prices weren't horrifying though.

Fast-forward to ArcTanGent festival this year and my "jagweeds" moment. We were browsing the records in the Big Scary Monsters distro (a local label who have put out a lot of Kevin's albums over here and been very supportive of his music) and as I got to the back of the second box I saw this record and got very excited. I've browsed their online distro many times and never seen this on there, and had zero idea that it had been reissued. Part of me wondered if it was an original that had somehow been found stored away, but Sarah pointed out the Devinyl logo on the back, Kevin's new label, so I concluded it was a reissue. Either way, I was very happy with my purchase and rushed back to the car to store it away safely for the rest of the weekend.

A few years ago I saw Kevin Devine play an incredible acoustic solo set in Kingston's lovely All Saints' Church. Banquet had started putting on shows there around the time I left London but I was lucky to see a few shows there (the Survival Tour just before I left, the La Dispute show that ended up on the Tiny Dots LP and Kevin Devine). It's an incredible venue and shows there work really well. I travelled from Oxford for the Kevin Devine show because I knew it would be a special show. Anyway, at some point during the show he asked if there were any requests and the words "Every Famous Last Words" came out of my mouth before I even realised. He obliged and it was incredible. I'd seen him play it once before (in Birmingham supporting Cursive) but this time was perfect - the echo of the church adding so much as he screamed out the chorus. Between that and Brother's Blood I could have left happy.

There are other great moments throughout the album too - Southern States is a highlight, Knife has a great lead-up to the chorus and the duo of Nice Shirt, Salvador Dali and Keep on Charging the Enemy provide some great late-album energy. I love this album. I think in the right circles there are plenty of other people who love it too, but I also think that there are huge swathes of people who have never heard of the band, let alone heard the album and it's been a mission of the last ten years - and many years to come - to educate people otherwise. Progress is slow, but I'll get there.

Format: 12", picture sleeve 
Tracks: 12
Cost: £15 new
Bought: ArcTanGent festival
When: 17/08/18
Colour: Black
Etching: none
mp3s: Download code

Palace Brothers - There is No One What Will Take Care of You

In 2006 I bought I See A Darkness by Bonnie 'Prince' Billy, which was the perfect introduction to his work - by complete chance I started with one of Will Oldham's best albums. Over the years that followed I continued to buy albums of his pretty much at random. The second album was this one, his first and recorded under the name Palace Brothers.

It was the sixth week in my Tuesday-record-from-Spillers week and the week before I'd just heard In the Aeroplane Over the Sea for the first time, so we were on a good roll. I can't remember much of what the description on this sleeve said, but it would have mentioned that it was a Will Oldham album and probably said some other things that drew me in. I was certainly keen to hear more and £9.50 now sounds ludicrously cheap for an LP.

I struggled with this album a lot at the start - there were moments I really enjoyed but it didn't hit anywhere near as hard as I See A Darkness. It's a difficult listen, and I strongly suspect that's intentional. There are simple-sounding songs that remind me of Daniel Johnston (like (I Was Drunk at the) Pulpit and I Had a Good Mother and Father) but I always thought Will was trying to create that persona of naivety and simplicity rather than actually having it; the fully rounded songs like Long Before, the title-track and King Me fly in the face of that, and are some of the stronger moments.

A while later I bought the Bonnie 'Prince' Billy Sings Palace's Greatest Hits cd, which was the nail in the coffin for the Palace albums for me. I really should try the others properly (Days in the Wake has some songs that I know to be great from other records) but it's not happened yet. My scatter-gun approach to his back-catalogue has been more miss than hit, but that could be bad luck. It's been fun dabbling though.

When I was buying a record every Tuesday from Spillers, I made an effort to record them all onto cd to play on the kitchen hifi - that stack of cds ended up in my car and I tried to play this one recently. I don't think we made it to the end of Idle Hands before my wife suggested we listen to something less abrasive.

Format: 12"
Tracks: 12
Cost: £9.50 new
Bought: Spillers Records, Cardiff
When: 12/02/08
Colour: Black
Etching: none
mp3s: None

Deftones - Around the Fur

I've been gradually buying the Deftones back-catalogue on vinyl. A couple of years ago they all became very readily available, which took away the pressure to buy everything straight away. I've had White Pony on vinyl since it came out and I'd always thought it'd be nice for it to sit there amongst their many other excellent albums, something that is now nearly the case.

Fopp in Oxford has had them all in pretty much since they opened, so every now and again I buy one. Every time I get served by the same member of staff and each time we have the same conversation about Deftones - it's a perfectly nice conversation, and I'm all for conversations with people who work in record shops, but I'm finding it increasingly hard to take as much interest as I did the first time. She saw them at Reading, Chino is awesome, the White Pony is an incredible record. Luckily, I can chat happily about Deftones for hours - I also think Chino is a great frontman and I have endless amounts of time for White Pony. My main worry is that one of these days she'll realise that this isn't the first Deftones album she's sold me, that I've been having the same conversation back each time and that I'm odd for not mentioning that we've already had that conversation. Two albums to go, it might not happen.

Anyway, recently I bought Around the Fur, Deftones' second album. When I got into them they'd only released this and Adrenaline, and I'd started with Adrenaline. I paid a surprisingly pricey £9 for a second hand copy of this album on cd at a record fair in 2001, just over a year after White Pony had come out. I'd heard the album a bunch of times beforehand, but was pleased to finally have my own copy. The songs with brackets in the titles, My Own Summer (Shove It) and Be Quiet and Drive (Far Away) had been on heavy rotation on MTV so I was even more familiar with those two, here opening up each side of the vinyl. The album came out twenty years ago, and I've been listening to it for most of those; in particular I've heard those two singles an unfathomably large of times and they still sound great. Both are instantly recognisable from the off and have sent a shiver down my spine each time I've heard those first few notes live. The whole album makes me wish I was still young and fit enough to throw myself around the way Chino does.

It's hard to talk about the other highlights of the album because there aren't any songs that I don't think are great. That said, Lhabia, Around the Fur, Lotion and Headup are all incredible. Dai the Flu is the most White Pony-esque song on the record and wouldn't have sounded too out of place on that record. Headup was, of course, the song that introduced us to Max Cavalera and Soulfly (being a few years too young for Sepultura's peak), which isn't particularly worth noting; it is a great song though. MX is a fun closer to the album with a strong riff. The cd version is actually a bit ruined by the long wait in silence for the bonus track Damone, one I can’t remember too well off the top of my head. I should make an effort to listen to it soon.

Format: 12", insert
Tracks: 10
Cost: £16 new
Bought: Fopp, Oxford
When: 10/01/18
Colour: Black
Etching: none
mp3s: Download code

Nine Inch Nails - The Downward Spiral

Nearly exactly 18 years ago, I came home from a record shopping trip to Bournemouth with a second-hand copy of The Downward Spiral on cd, which I was very pleased to have bought for £6. I'd not heard any Nine Inch Nails at this point, but knew I wanted to get into them - everything I'd read in Kerrang! and heard about them made me think they were a band I wanted to be a fan of. On listening to it, I remember thinking at the time that I was glad I hadn't got into them sooner, when I was younger and wouldn't have got it; a very precocious thought for a 16-year-old to have, but not an entirely surprising one, all considering.

My thinking was that the younger-me would have been put off by the instruments that weren't guitars and drums, and would have considered it too far from rock music, the very broad genre I had decided was for me; there are records in my collection today that 14- and 15-year-old-me would be very shocked to see indeed.

As it was, I decided I was "old enough" to appreciate the things Trent Reznor was doing musically and decided it was fine to branch out from traditional instruments to the industrial noise this album contained. In hindsight, I suspect part of it was that I'd spent money on it - had I been leant a copy there's a very good chance I'd have dismissed it as "not rock" and spent years ignoring the band, a mistake I'm glad I didn't make. I think part of me really wanted to like it despite everything else because everything I'd heard about the band had made me really want to be a fan. Whatever it was, I got into it and it became a huge album for me. 18 years later, I still think it's a landmark album and enjoy that it's been part of my life for more than half of it.

I can still remember the feeling of pressing play that first time, not really knowing what to expect and hearing that solitary strike at the start of Mr Self Destruct. Then hearing it again and again increasingly quickly before the song properly starts - what a way to start an album - so sparse and bold. There are a lot of albums that start off strong, but none in such a unique way. The song is brilliantly abrasive and it was around that point that I decided I was going to be a fan and that I was glad I'd not dismissed them at an earlier age. I also remember loving the way the drums in Piggy drift away from the song such that they're almost playing independently from the other instruments, only to have the keys float in creating a calm over the maniacal drumming. Throughout the album the drumming is huge and forms a large part of the sound - for a long time, that drum sound was what I associated with industrial music, and the bands I liked the most were the ones that made the most of drums.

Of course, being a self-obsessed teen, I read far too much into the lyrics, despite really not understanding the intended concept very well at all. I'd like to pretend that I didn't try to read so much into them, but if I said I didn't that would be a lie; a teenager with a lyric booklet is a very dangerous thing indeed. This vinyl reissue comes with a 12" booklet giving details about the recording and production process, which was a fascinating read and an unexpected highlight of buying the record. It talks about what Trent considered the theme to be, which I got bits of but hadn't tied together quite so nicely in my mind.

The Downward Spiral was the 16th album I'd bought and furthered the idea in my mind that an album should be more than just a collection of songs, but a work intended to be heard as a whole with a beginning, a middle and an end. Of course there are albums I love that don't adhere to that, but I've certainly got a soft-spot for those that do. And what an end this album has - after 13 songs of difficult and abrasive industrial music (albeit played with Trent's astute understanding of pop, and how to apply it to the most unlikely music), the album closes with Hurt. Can you imagine what it was like for a 16-year-old to hear that, not knowing that he had such song-writing in him, let alone that finishing an album like this in that way was even allowed? Needless to say, it quickly became a favourite and one that I knew all the lyrics to by heart. In hindsight, it's laughable that I thought that I was in anyway unique in doing that - the album had sold countless copies for years and 16-year-olds everywhere around the world were doing the exact same thing. Again, the drums are brilliant.

Despite all my embarrassing associations with this album, I still fucking love it. It hits hard and hasn't aged (as far as I'm concerned), which isn't something I can say of a lot of the other music I was listening to back then. Sometimes I go years without playing it, other times I listen to it often. I look forward to enjoying it for many years to come.

Format: Double 12", picture sleeves, 12" booklet
Tracks: 14
Cost: £23 new
Bought: Truck Store, Oxford
When: 16/07/18
Colour: Black
Etching: none
mp3s: Download code