Bear Vs. Shark - Right Now / Terrorhawk

I love both these albums and I listen to them a lot. I found an unmarked cdr in the car a while back that had both of these albums on back-to-back - I have no memory of burning that cd or even thinking that I should do, but I evidently did and I'm very pleased that I did; every time I see it and think "what's on that unmarked cd", I smile when it starts to play.

For a long time, and partly because of that cd, I couldn't really distinguish between the two albums (maybe it's just because I've not been driving so much recently, I couldn't even tell you which is first on there). I don't mean that to be a bad thing - both are incredible albums, truly unique together - by which I mean I have nothing else that sounds like this, which itself is a shame. A lot of bands can only strive to write two excellent albums then break up.

It strikes me as strange that I can't tell them apart better, especially considering that I bought Right Now You're in the Best of Hands back in 2012, and a full three years passed before I finally got Terrorhawk. I got the reissue of Right Now that Big Scary Monsters put out and eventually loved it - it was a bit of a slow-burn at first, because I don't think I was listening to it loud enough. I remember thinking that it'd be nice to have Terrorhawk on vinyl too, but didn't fancy paying the second-hand prices it was going for; in the end I decided I'd be happy enough to just have it on cd, and then picked up a copy for very little on eBay (during a short-lived period of buying very cheap second cds on there). I paid £1.83 for it, a bargain for sure. (I think sometime between those two events, I found a cheap copy of Right Now on cd in San Francisco, but gave it to my friend Sarah after copying the mp3s - she described it as sounding "like Hundred Reasons", a comment I still think a lot about - what was she hearing?)

A while later the two albums got re-issued together as a double vinyl, and I ended up picking one up from Specialist Subject. The last year I subscribed to their year-long subscription they ended up releasing fewer records than expected, so gave everyone a voucher at the end of the year. I'd already decided against renewing for the next year (breaking a very long run of subscriptions) as they were drifting further away from the music I was into (or I was drifting further away from the music they were releasing), so I put it towards this pair of albums. I hadn't even noticed they'd had it stock before that point. There are more interesting colours out there, but this is just the plain black version. To add to my confusion between the albums, the sleeve lists Right Now as LP01 and Terrorhawk as LP02, but Right Now plays on sides C and D, and Terrorhawk on sides A and B (the matrix numbers suggest that the labels aren't wrong too). I began making notes about the wrong album when I first started writing this.

However, I have now firmly come to the conclusion that Terrorhawk is my favourite - over those 15 songs there are so many huge, huge moments and brilliant songs. They manage to write incredible fast songs (like 5, 6 Kids) and equally incredible slow songs (like Song About Old Roller Coaster), which is quite a skill. But the real gem of Terrorhawk is the pairing of The Great Dinosaurs With Fifties Section and Baranga Embankment on the first side - the former starts off so strongly and builds to a truly mammoth ending, and the latter brings in horns and keys perfectly and is so wonderfully slow. When those two hit, I always think "yeah, this is my favourite of the two".

But Right Now can't be faulted - Ma Jolie has one of those rare moments you can actually sing along to, and I love the "yo yo yo" breakdown in The Employees. The lines "Pull yourself out of the gutter, motherfucker" in Broken Dog Leg are another great moment. This pressing doesn't have the bonus tracks that a lot of others include - to be honest, I'd forgotten my BSM-reissue did have the extra songs.

Format: Double 12"

Tracks: 27

Cost: £29.75 new

Bought: Specialist Subject Records website

When: 21/11/18

Colour: Black

Etching: none

mp3s: no

Max Richter - Nosedive

I've been trying to stop buying so many of Max Richter's soundtracks, not because they're not nice - they almost always are - but more because he releases them at such a pace I can't keep up (not just in effort, but also financially). However, this one was an immediate purchase.

Max Richter provided the soundtrack to the first episode of the third season of Black Mirror, a show I'd been watching from the start (having been a fan of Charlie Brooker's work for many years). The third series saw the show move from Channel 4 to Netflix, and with that came a huge increase in production values, and that first episode, Nosedive, was possibly the peak of that - Bryce Dallas Howard as the lead and Max Richter providing the soundtrack. If anything, I think the effect of all that gloss was a huge part of the plot - the shiny, perfect, Instagram-styled existence at the start had to be so, such that the fall the story brought felt even more dramatic. It was a great episode, and the soundtrack definitely added to that. I remember hoping it'd get pressed on vinyl, because I really enjoyed the pieces as the time.

In fact, I think it remains the only Max Richter soundtrack I own where I've actually seen the film it was written for, although that should be seen as more a reflection of how much television I get the time to watch these days (very little), which was another reason to buy it. As with a lot of soundtracks, there are few things you could call "songs" - over the 25-minutes, there's the 7-minute opener On Reflection which sets the scene at the start perfectly, the 4-minute The Journey, Not the Destination relying on some fast-paced electronics to soundtrack the demise, and the 5-minute The Consolation of Philosophy echoing the opener in a reflective way. The other four pieces are around the 2-minute mark and, whilst vital to feel of the episode, not very exciting as an album. But those three main pieces are all excellent, and not only do they provide a great example of what Max Richter does so well (merge classical music with electronics in very emotive ways), they also soundtrack the story arc brilliantly. If the three ran consecutively as one song, you could draw easy parallels between the structure of the song to early-Mogwai or Godspeed songs; I think that's the appeal of Max Richter's music to me - it's basically post-rock but played on entirely different instruments.

A strange note to end on, but I was very surprised when Max Richter's soundtrack to Nosedive wasn't the musical highlight of the series, however I'll save that for another time.

Format: 12", picture sleeve

Tracks: 7

Cost: £17 new

Bought: Bear Tree Records website

When: 09/04/18

Colour: Black

Etching: None

mp3s: Download code

Dälek - Asphalt for Eden

I've got a few Dälek albums and would definitely buy more if I ever saw them in shops. In fact, all four Dälek albums I have are because I stumbled across them in record shops, and every single time I've seen a Dälek record in a shop I've bought it, so I guess I'm doing a reasonable job. Despite it sitting fairly far from the usual fare that Truck Store in Oxford stock, they've had the last two Dälek albums in stock when they came out, and I bought both. This is the former of those two.

As I mentioned before, Dälek play a very distinctive style of hip-hop, one that I enjoy in a number of ways - it's very dark and often minimal, but shares ideas with post-rock in how a song should grow and subtly work to overcome you, rather than relying on verse-chorus-verse. The rapping is key, but mostly as an instrument more than as words - half the time you'd be pushed to pinpoint exactly what he's saying. Masked Laughter (Nothing's Left) is a highlight - musically it reminds me of some of the soundscapes that Frank Delgado adds to Deftones, and the rapping is at the exact right point in the mix - lower than the music, but still loud enough to do justify to the fact that MC Dälek is rapping with far more vigour than usual. It Just Is finishes the album with the same energy.

At seven songs and just under 40-minutes, it's a good deal shorter than Abandoned Language and Endangered Philosophies, but these days I'm increasingly thinking that 40-minutes is the right length for an album and, to be honest, the fewer songs in that time, the more likely they are to appeal to my post-rock leanings. I have no idea if they have one album that everyone agrees is their best, but if I was recommending Dälek to anyone, of the four records I know, this would be the starting point I'd suggest.

Format: 12", picture sleeve

Tracks: 7

Cost: £16 new

Bought: Truck Store, Oxford

When: 09/06/16

Colour: Black

Etching: none

mp3s: Download code

Art of Burning Water - Between Life and Nowhere

I never expected to enjoy Art of Burning Water's Love You Dead anywhere near as much as I did. In fact, it ended up being one of the best records I heard that year and so, when my brother text me asking if there was anything I wanted for Christmas, I sent him a link to this record which he kindly bought for me. It might be the least festive record I own.

I never quite got into this album as much as I did Love You Dead, I'm not sure why. There are certainly fewer doomier, sludgier moments here - Between Life and Nowhere has a lot more thrash and hardcore going on. At 20-minutes long, they don't leave themselves much time to do anything slower, although Voivodian Solutions to Die Kreuzian Problems does get a bit of a groove going towards the end, as does the follow-up, Alesha. I say that, but I can't say with any certainty which song is which, as they decided against putting any spaces in the grooves between tracks - something I can't decide is awesome or really annoying. I certainly think "that's badass" when I look at it, but curse them when trying to work out which song I'm listening to; the former happens more than the latter.

I still only own two AoBW records, but I'd definitely buy more if I ever saw them. I guess I'm just going to the wrong shops.

Format: 12", insert

Tracks: 10

Cost: free, new

Bought: Gift

When: 30/12/16

Colour: Black

Etching: none

mp3s: none

Nine Inch Nails - Broken

In a lot of ways, Broken represents exactly what I want (and wanted) from Nine Inch Nails. Despite that, I don't think any fan could say it was the band's "best" release – on paper, it's only six songs, and two of those don't really count, although the bonus tracks put it back up to six songs – but more importantly, how could it ever be fairly compared to the two giant albums that followed it? In any discography that contains The Downward Spiral and The Fragile, the odds are really stacked against every other recording.

But Broken is, for me, what Nine Inch Nails were always about – punishingly heavy industrial metal but with Trent Reznor's unique ability to somehow mix that with pop and give it a groove that you'd never normally hear alongside guitars. Happiness in Slavery is a perfect example of this, although also one of the sloppier combinations – the verses are brutal and the instrument break is pure noise, but the chorus could be a pop song in the way it's sung (if not in lyrical content). The back story to Broken was that Trent's anger at the label's handling of Pretty Hate Machine caused him to write these blistering songs, and if that's the case I'm kinda glad it all played out as it did; I like the songs on Pretty Hate Machine, but to me that album is the odd-one-out in the NIN back-catalogue – there are hints of industrial, but really there's a lot more 80’s goth and synth-rock going on. Who knows how Nine Inch Nails would sound now if they'd followed that trajectory! (The fact that this EP contains a secret Adam Ant cover is probably a clue.)

Of course, the order in which I got heard the NIN albums is probably why I'm not a PHM fan, and why I think Broken is such perfect NIN material – I got the albums in this order: Downward Spiral, The Fragile, Broken, All That Could Have Been and then Pretty Hate Machine – I'd heard epic-NIN, industrial-NIN and the industrial live versions of PHM songs on the live album before I'd heard that record; I love hearing those pop-moments soundtracked to savage guitar work and drums that are being beaten more than they’re being played (and a lot more than to a drum machine). Despite that, I never really got into industrial as a genre – I think the pop was part of the enjoyment, as much as it surprises me to say it. I know lots of people wouldn’t call NIN an industrial band, and that's fine, but to me they are and they're at their best when they commit fully to their version of it.

And that's exactly what they did on Broken. All four of the actual songs are brilliant (Gave Up and Wish particularly) and every time they're played live they go down amazingly well. It's impressive how many of their best songs came from a bitterly recorded EP. When With Teeth came out I remember describing it to a friend as being the closest thing they've done to a full length version of Broken, a comment based around the fact it was heavy but didn't have a narrative or concept - I'm not sure I agree with 20-year-old-me entirely, but I still love the relative simplicity of that album.

I first heard Broken in December 2001, just over a year after getting The Downward Spiral and a few months after getting The Fragile. I'd been to a record fair but found disappointingly few records I wanted, so picked Broken up in MVC for £6. They would have had that cd in stock every single time I'd ever been in there, but I guess I decided that was the day to finally get it. I was already a fan of the band, but those songs hit hard and made me a bigger fan. A few months later I rushed out to get the And All That Could Have Been double cd for an at-the-time expensive £17. When the band started reissuing their albums I figured it'd be nice to pick them, and gradually did so. After I'd seen the care and attention that'd gone into The Downward Spiral and The Fragile reissues (bought with my World Cup sweepstake winnings), I picked up Broken the very next time I went into the record shop. The package is lovely, in particular the scratched-out lyrics etched into the b-side, the 7" and the booklet. It' worth the money for the songs alone, but the details makes it even more enjoyable.

Format: One sided 12", 7", booklet

Tracks: 8

Cost: £22 new

Bought: Truck Store, Oxford

When: 31/08/18

Colour: Black

Etching: Lyrics etched into b-side

mp3s: Download code

Far - Water & Solutions

Whilst I've always been a Tin Cans man, I still have a lot of time for Water & Solutions and I get why people rate it so highly. It took me a long time to get there though - I got Water & Solutions only five months after getting Tin Cans With Strings To You, but I'd been sold on Tin Cans' slightly rougher edges and doomier moments. On top of that, I knew that Water & Solutions was the one that was meant to be the better one, so maybe I went in with higher expectations - I'd read (and still have somewhere) a Kerrang! article that listed Water & Solutions as the third best post-hardcore/emo album of all time, which is a pretty big claim (and a solid list to be in at all - I remember Fugazi's Repeater and At the Drive-In's Relationship of Command also being in the top ten, but not necessarily above Far).

People absolutely adore Mother Mary and I suspect it's the Far song that Jonah plays the most. It is an incredible song, there's no doubt about it. Do I love it more than Job's Eyes or Joining the Circus? No, but I'll agree that it probably is the better song in a traditional sense. The title-track is pretty great too - the whispers of "Soon, a light on" before the chorus is brilliant - you can imagine the comparisons to the Deftones that drew, despite musically being pretty far removed. Nestle and Wear It So Well are highlights too. Man Overboard is the only one that that has those same hints of doom and sludge that my favourite songs on Tin Cans have; it's the only one that would have comfortably fit on that album (it feels bad to constantly compare the album to its predecessor, but I'm not sure I've ever listened to it without thinking about how much I never got it as much as I did Tin Cans).

I saw Jonah play Water & Solutions in full in 2018 to celebrate its 20th anniversary. To play the shows, he toured the UK (and possibly Europe) with the band Witching Waves, which was unusual, but made for an interesting twist on the usual anniversary tour. I was lucky enough to see Far in 2008, so I didn't mind it not being a full-band thing. Given the history of the band, I'm not surprised they couldn't get back on the road together and I'd much rather watch one quarter of the band play these songs than not at all. Strangely, Jonah changed the tracklist entirely, playing the gentler songs first, before exploding into the heavier ones. I guess people don't write album tracklists and setlists in the same way at all - so few albums save the best song for last; it's a fundamental flaw in the whole "playing an album in full" tour idea. Ironically, Waiting for Sunday is a huge song (but not Mother Mary-huge).

Around the time that Tin Cans got reissued, they reissued Water & Solutions too. I had the chance to buy both at Fest, but opted for just Tin Cans because it was a few days before payday and I had to hold back a bit. I'd never really minded having just one in my collection, and I had the one I cared about the most. But over the years I did occasionally think it'd be nice to have both albums on vinyl. Last year at some point I read an email from Jonah that mentioned a new German reissue of Water & Solutions, so I immediately headed over to their site to pick up a copy. In the email Jonah said the last reissue sounded shitty, but this one he was on board with, so I figured it was worth picking up. It also came with a bonus flexi-7" which was a nice added bonus. Annoyingly, the coloured vinyl had sold out by this point, so I snapped up this black vinyl copy (more annoyingly, they did a second run on a different colour of vinyl, which is a pet-peeve of mine - first pressings on coloured and black vinyl then subsequent on coloured - means if you're a bit slow off the mark you get stuck with a boring colour of vinyl, but then you'd have been rewarded with a nicer colour for waiting. It happens far too often. I guess it helps sell records). It is a nice pressing, although the faded colour of the sleeve makes it look cheaper somehow - like a shitty photocopy, even though it's not. The 7" has a home demo of Mother Mary, which is nice, even if hearing Jonah play Far songs on his own is the norm rather than the exception these days. 

Format: 12", square 7" flexi disc, insert

Tracks: 13

Cost: £25.60 new

Bought: Thirty Something Records bandcamp

When: 11/12/19

Colour: Black, transparent blue

Etching: none

mp3s: Download code

Bars of Gold - Wheels

Bars of Gold released their second album, Wheels, a couple of years after I'd got into them. The song Coffee With Pele came out in the August and got me very excited; the album followed in October. I'd been meaning to buy their debut, Of Gold, for two whole years by that point and still hadn't managed to. I came very close once, but was worried they hadn't set up the international postage rates correctly, and felt bad that I might be screwing them over by making them pay the rest of the postage. Anyway, when Wheels came out, Of Gold had sold out on Bandcamp and I couldn't find anywhere to buy them both from at the same time to save on postage and customs fees. Six years later, these reissues came out, and were crippling expensive, but I'm just glad to finally have copies.

Coffee With Pele was a huge song to drop before the album came out - the shouts of "Howling like wolves" in the chorus are brilliant and exactly what I wanted from the band. But the great thing is that it's not even the best song on the album. Connected and Blue Lightning are probably the highlights though - the addition of some smooth backing vocals added a depth I wasn't expecting but was thoroughly into, and the chorus of the former is huge. On their third they stepped it up even further in terms of unexpected sounds for a punk band, but here it was a total surprise and I loved it then and now. Hey Kids starts the album off quite jangly and constantly feels on the brink of falling apart (but in a good way) and 22180 is another highlight.

As you can see in the pictures, the colour of this album is amazing; it's up there amongst some of my favourite looking vinyl. Splatter vinyl always looks great, but the choice of colours and the way the splatter doesn't reach the middle is just lovely to look at. 

Format: 12"

Tracks: 10

Cost: £33.74 new

Bought: Equal Vision website

When: 23/03/19

Colour: White with yellow, orange and green splatter

Etching: none

mp3s: none