Restorations - Little Elephant Session

Tonight I should have been going to see Restorations play in London. They were playing the arse-end of London and the journey there and back from Oxford is a huge pain, but it was going to be worth it. I love Restorations; every time I've seen them play they put a huge smile on my face and I just can't get enough of them. Last time they played, I drove to Newport to see them and dragged some friends along too - the band commented they didn't know when they'd get a chance to play here again, and I worried it might be the last time I'd see them. When they announced their little tour I was so pleased. Bloody coronavirus. This show being cancelled, along with the Vile Creature and Bismuth show in the Black Heart, really hit the hardest. I miss live music, even if as a parent I don't get to go to anywhere near as many shows as I'd like in normal times.

To make up for not seeing Restorations, here are three live songs from their Little Elephant session in 2016. All are from the first half of LP3, an album I adore (number 4 in my albums of the year in 2014). A few years later I was on holiday (back when holidays were a thing) and I only had a few albums on my phone, and no iPod; LP3 was one of them and I played it to death. We'd not long found out we were expecting our first child and I remember sitting on the balcony one evening, reading my parenting book and listening to these songs. I think of that evening every time I hear Separate Songs.

All three songs are great examples of why I love this band so much - great, earnest rock songs with one moment where it all comes together into something absolutely huge - on Separate Songs it's around the lines "Imagine that focus in real life / Imagine going outside / Imagine not waiting for something to come along" (the middle line being very apt right now); on Tiny Prayers it all comes together around the lines "I don't know what's worse / No opinion or no thirst"; on Wales it's in the chorus (and the abrupt ending).

This is the only Little Elephant record I have, although I'd definitely buy more if the exchange rate wasn't so shitty and international post and customs so expensive. They've recorded a lot of great bands. The sound isn't great at the start of the record but soon clears up, so might just be this copy (each one is lathe-cut, which I don't really understand). I ordered this one from the band when they were selling off a bunch of stuff, I assume to fund the recording of LP5000. I also got the Jena Berlin album and 7" at the same time. I got stung on customs charges, so the whole lot proved expensive, but I'm glad to have this record in my collection. Right now I'm just happy to be listening to Restorations play live in any setting, even if it's just three songs and no way near as fun as singing along with a bunch of strangers in a bar in deepest south-east London.

Format: 12", one-sided, lathe-cut, hand-stamped and numbered (#35)
Tracks: 3
Cost: £22 new
Bought: Band's website
When: 03/08/17
Colour: Black
Etching: none
mp3s: none

The World is a Beautiful Place and I Am No Longer Afraid to Die - Always Foreign

Whilst Harmlessness was a grower, TWIABP's third album was far more instant and accessible. Harmlessness remains my favourite record (now, it took a long time to reach that status though), but I was a fan of this one from the off. The music is a lot poppier in places and the songs feel simpler in structure - few have multiple movements, but there are greater variations between the songs, rather than within them. That maybe doesn't sound that positive, but it all works well for them, much more-so that you'd expect.

The album starts gently, and The Future is an upbeat follow-up. It sets a tone for the album that lyrically is miles away from how it plays out - there's rarely anything heavy in the music, but the lyrics show the darker side, particularly in the back-half of the album with the trio of For Robin, Marine Tigers and Fuzz Minor. The middle of those three made it onto my end-of-year mixtape and has been played to death in the car (so much so I half expect it to go straight into Bosses Hang Pt3 by Godspeed, which was how I followed it up). I still love it - the marching drums and classic post-rock build-up/explosion full of horns.

I ordered this as soon as Banquet listed it on their website, along with a handful of other records and got it a week or so after it came out. It was definitely the first of that parcel I played and I still remember sitting down to play it. I was shocked that it was such an instant hit, but I'd been listening to Harmlessness so much since I'd finally got into it at the start of the year that I guess I was just primed for it. The record is a lovely splatter, as you can see below.

Format: 12", gatefold, picture sleeve
Tracks: 11
Cost: £19.65 new
Bought: Banquet Records website
When: 05/10/17
Colour: Transparent blue with green splatter
Etching: none
mp3s: download code

The Doublecross - Keep Bleeding [Test Press]

Test Presses are a fascinating novelty. The idea of them being an essential part of a record collection is laughable - for most bands these things simply never see the light of day, and even if they do your chances of having a "complete" set of test presses are so slim it's next to pointless. It'd be very frustrating to have a complete vinyl collection for a band, but be missing a few test presses that you may never, ever see or have a chance to buy. It's a level I have no (current) plans of getting involved with.

However, they are interesting things, and whenever record labels are selling them off I always have a look. Usually they're priced for collectors only but every now and again the label is just trying to make space. That is certainly the case for Boss Tuneage, who have had a couple of test press sales now. In the most recent one, I picked up this test pressing of Jon's third album. I'm not entirely sure what made me buy it - I had the album on vinyl already - but here it is in my collection. One factor was that it was only £1 (before postage), which in fact explains two reasons - I can't turn down cheap vinyl, but there was also something sad about seeing it there for so little; a pity purchase, in part. There's also the fact I do like the album, as covered in this last post about the album itself. Finally, I was also buying the test press of the last Bedford Falls album, so I couldn't not add this to the basket as well.

Jon's first album was only released on cd, and his second was on another label, so I've never seen the test pressings for sale; this isn't the beginning of a super-thorough Doublecross collection - it's just an interesting curio to have on the shelves.

Format: 12", test pressing
Tracks: 12
Cost: £3.75 new
Bought: Boss Tuneage
When: 04/01/19
Colour: Black
Etching: none
mp3s: none

The Doublecross - Keep Bleeding

The Doublecross is the name my friend Jon has been recording under for many years now. I got to know him when I was living in Cardiff as he was in a band with my housemate. He knew pretty much everyone in the local scene, so nearly every acquaintance I had in South Wales was a friend of Jon's too. As I was leaving the country for London, he was finishing off is debut solo album - I vaguely remember him playing us a mix of some of the songs on the car down to Porthcawl for the Across the Borders festival where I was introduced to Magnolia Electric Co.

It was a great album, but there was no avoiding the fact that it had one truly great song (October Skies) which made everything else seem less good by comparison. It's a tough situation when there's one song that so clearly stands out from the rest as being the "great song" - there are many records in my collection where that is the case. Incidentally, my other housemate Nicky struggled with the same issue, because he'd written one song for his band Gunrack? that was so much better than anything else it was constantly the yardstick against which every other song was measured. Whenever I hear an album with that issue I think of Gunrack?'s Young Hearts. Anyway, I travelled back to Cardiff for a night just to see Jon's album release show with Caves that December. It was a nice night.

I've kept up with Jon's solo music since then, but for reasons I can entirely sympathise with (small children) his release cycle is slow, so this only his third solo LP. I've bought music in many strange places over the years, but from the musician's car, parked outside a Chinese restaurant in Oxford in the middle of the afternoon is one of the stranger ones - Jon was passing through Oxford on a tour and timing meant he couldn't stay for long, so when he got into town I popped out from work, met him for about five minutes, had a nice chat (partly about how great El-P's I'll Sleep When You're Dead is, as it was one of the cds he had on his passenger seat for the journey), bought the LP and let him get on his way.

In our short chat he described his second album (which I'm yet to write about on here) as being a "Marmite" album, and I can kinda understand that. Keep Bleeding is a much more consistent album and I can't see why anyone who has enjoyed his music wouldn't like it. I think the most telling praise I can give this album is this: when I saw him play last, at least two of the songs from this album stood out nearly as tall as October Skies - both My Only Friends Are Chemicals and Hurt People Hurt People sounded amazing and I think the audience enjoyed hearing them as much as October Skies. It's a solid album and hard to find fault with - it's probably the Doublecross album I play most often these days.

Format: 12", insert
Tracks: 12
Cost: £10 new
Bought: Jon
When: 24/10/16
Colour: orange
Etching: none
mp3s: download code