Attack in Black - The First and Second Efforts of a Band That Died Before You Could Kill Them

 

I have a strange relationship with eBay these days. I don't use it much, and when I do it's almost entirely buying Manic Street Preachers or Jason Molina records. But sometimes I just browse it a bit when I'm bored, and type in the names of bands that pop into my mind whose records I might like to buy. I still long to own a copy of Attack in Black's Marriages LP on vinyl (any version will do, and there have been some nice reissues since the original that I didn't buy when we saw them blow us away supporting Far in TJ's), so I mindlessly typed their name into the search bar one evening. Somewhere near the top of the results was this LP which I don't think I was even aware of, and for only £8 (£10.35 with postage). I put in a-slightly-over-starting-bid offer and waited until the clock ran out.

The record is, as the title describes, the first two releases from the band pressed onto one (45rpm) record - their 2005 debut, self-titled EP and the 2006 Widows EP that preceded Marriages. Apparently there are 750 copies in total, and only 200 on yellow, so I was lucky to find a copy at all, let alone for just over a tenner.

I have a copy of the debut EP from a trip I took to Canada in the spring after I'd seen them in Newport (they were touring, but the dates didn't work with our trip around the east of the country, which is a shame). I found a record shop in Toronto called Criminal Records and bought a lot of music, including two Attack in Black LPs and the debut EP on cd (the only format it was released on). Later that same day, I found a copy of Hum's You'd Prefer an Astronaut on cd; it was a good day. When I got back to Cardiff I popped the cd in and was amazed to hear five scrappy hardcore punk songs thrashed out in under 15-minutes. In hindsight, the inclusion of a cover of Depression by Black Flag should have been a clue, but I definitely expected them to be doing it more in the style of the band I knew from Marriages (as it turns out, it is very faithful to the original). I'd already been caught off-guard by their change in sound between Marriages and The Curve of the Earth, so hearing their hardcore beginnings added to a ridiculously fast change in style. We saw and listened to a lot of hardcore bands when I was in Cardiff, and this version of Attack in Black sounded like pretty much every band we were into at the time. But there were hints of the melody they'd eventually find in the choruses.

I'd not heard Widows before getting this record, but was very familiar with the songs Broken Things and The Love Between You and I from my over-playing of Marriages over the years. However, these recordings are different, and different enough to make the arc from the debut EP to Marriages more understandable. Broken Things is one of my favourite songs (in general, not just by the band), and this version is a bit looser, a bit thrasher in places and feels less polished (in a good way). The bare drums and group vocals in the chorus are every bit as perfect as they are on the later version. Something about the guitars in The Love Between You and I have much more in common with the debut than the album version. Similarly, there's a hint to the vocals that's a bit more hardcore, despite the fact that Daniel's signing is actually singing now. The link between the two eras is much clearer on the other two songs, Cut and Run and 1950, which both would have been the least hardcore thing on the debut, but not sounded out of place - the hints of melody almost doing battle with the older style within the songs themselves. It's nice when those linking pieces fall into place and you can see better how a band's sound developed. If I'd heard this before the debut, I wouldn't have been quite so surprised putting that cd into my player back in 2009.

Format: 12", numbered (50/200)

Tracks: 9

Cost: £10.35 new

Bought: eBay

When: 16/01/21

Colour: Transparent yellow

Etching: none

mp3s: none

Pitch Shifter - The 1990 Demo

I probably didn't need to buy the demos of Pitch Shifter's debut album, but here we are. On one hand, the band meant a huge amount to me for a good and important period of time, and despite not being a fan of their earlier industrial stuff when I first heard it I've found I quite enjoy it now I'm older. On the other hand - and I say this as something of a compliment I guess - I'd honestly struggle to tell you whether I was listening to the demos or the album itself, and I already have that album on vinyl and on cd; this LP feels pretty redundant. I was vaguely aware of the band putting the record out via Kickstarter but I didn't go out of my way to buy it, only picking it up a while later when it found it's way into the Record Culture sale section (where I think there is still at least one copy). I can't turn down a good offer.

Of the eight songs on Industrial, six of them have demos here (Gravid Rage and New Flesh are missing), and we instead have Behemoth, an unreleased song from the era, originally called Mouthscape. Musically, the quality of the demos is on a par with the album itself. I wouldn't necessarily call either "good", in fact part of the charm of Industrial was the bleak, imposing wall of sound and lack of frills. Mark's barked vocals might be different, or they might be exactly the same - there are only a few moments when you can really tell what he's saying anyway. I'm sure someone somewhere would have noticed if they'd just pressed six of the exact same versions of these songs in a different order, but I can't help but wonder if this is just some elaborate prank - that maybe they did just put out the exact same mixes but call them demos (possibly even by accident). Or maybe I should listen to the actual album again to be more sure. The vocals on Landfill do sound different (a bit more echo, perhaps?) but I've not listened to the album in a while, so maybe I'm just mis-remembering. I still love the simplicity of those lyrics. Behemoth is the only thing that really sounds like a demo - it fits perfectly onto the album musically, although the vocals are much cleaner than anything else from the era. It's a nice addition, but not worth the entry cost on it's own.

Thinking about it, it's a rather major criticism of a record - the idea that it really doesn't need to exist because it sounds identical to one that I paid the grand sum of £2.85 for on eBay (including postage!). A bigger criticism is the artwork, which looks like someone bashed together in about 3 minutes in a Word doc. The font is definitely the first one they found in the dropdown menu. It bothers me that there's a white square before the word "Pitch" and one after, but not one after "Shifter" - it makes sense when the two words are written one above the other - as on the Industrial artwork, but makes no sense in one line. Mostly it's one of the least interesting looking record sleeves I own, but that aspect is just infuriating. The italic version of the font on the centre label is even more horrific. I'm no design snob, but it looks terrible.

Some nice things to say about it - it's a really heavy, thick vinyl (but why you'd want the demos (allegedly) to be pressed on nicer vinyl than the album itself I don't know), and it's on clear vinyl which is more interesting than just black vinyl. Etched into the run-out grooves are the coordinates of a location in Bristol, which I think is where they hid a "Pitch Shifter skull", although I remember a tweet that no one had discovered it for a good while; I don't have much time to spare, let alone in Bristol, so even if I had noticed these earlier, I doubt I'd have made the journey. It didn't come with a download code, but I'm pretty sure I could just shuffle around the tracks from Industrial in iTunes and have six-sevenths of the experience digitally. 

Format: 12", numbered (462/500)
Tracks: 7
Cost: £18 new
Bought: Record Culture
When: 26/01/21
Colour: Clear
Etching: Side A: "51°26'33'' N - 2°32'10'' W" Side B: "Seth-Wynn-Seth Forever"
mp3s: no 

Nine Inch Nails - Hesitation Marks

I don't have many particularly strong memories of Hesitation Marks. So much so, I remember getting this LP recently and looking quite hard at the tracklisting before really recognising any of the songs at all; for a short moment I wondered if I'd not even heard the album before. For some reason, I kinda lost my way with Nine Inch Nails after Year Zero - that was 2007 and my last year of university. I loved that album and everything that went along with it (and I loved With Teeth, which came out in my second year of university even moreso). That summer I saw NIN play an incredible set at Sziget Festival in Hungary (we happened to be in Budapest when the festival was on, but that was partly because I'd suggested dates that meant I'd be able to see NIN there). But the end of 2007 marked the move to Cardiff and the immersion in the punk scene. Nine Inch Nails weren't punk.

I downloaded The Slip when it came out (as we were encouraged to do), but somehow still haven't bought a real copy of that album (which I do occasionally feel guilty about). It was fine, but it didn't do much for me. Maybe the fact I never had a real copy to prompt me to play it meant it never got the time it deserved. There's still a scratched cdr copy of it in my car, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't play. Then, five years later, Hesitation Marks came out and for whatever reason I waited a whole year to buy a copy (and probably only did so because the cd was a fiver in Fopp). In the time in between Year Zero and then, I'd started and finished my PhD and moved to Oxford. A couple of years later I'd rediscover the band and my enjoyment of them, and I got back into them properly; I even found myself quite enjoying the trilogy of EPs they put out. But Hesitation Marks remained this strange album in a 10 year gap of not caring about the band.

Looking at what else I bought that day, I can remember clearly bouncing around the central London record shops spending a good whack of money, but don't remember adding this one to my pile of cds and records (and one tape - Shellac's At Action Park). I spent £65 on music that day, and another £43 the next day in Banquet (having been to see the excellent La Dispute show that Banquet had put on in the All Saints Church, later immortalised on the Tiny Dots LP/dvd). I suspect Hesitation Marks suffered from not standing out sufficiently against the large amount of competition (and wasn't flat out terrible, like the Soulsavers album with the guy who isn't Mark Lanegan - I tried to listen to that again recently and still found it terrible).

So when Nine Inch Nails put the Quake soundtrack on vinyl up on their webstore, I ordered this one along with the reissue of With Teeth - they'd reissued enough of their albums to make having a complete collection of NIN LPs a realistic goal, so I figured this would be in fine company. On listening to it, the songs kinda came back, but with no strong connections. Copy of A and Come Back Haunted must have been singles, or at least songs that had some life outside of the album, because I recognised them, but that's about it. If you'd told me that there were NIN songs called Various Methods of Escape or I Would For You I'd have said "huh?" and "no, that's Jane's Addiction", respectively. The former has a great hook in the chorus, but plods through the verses; the latter has a huge, soaring chorus and probably would have been a hit had it not been left as song eleven on a 14-song album. All Time Low is a straight-up banger and Trent Reznor doing perfect pop, so I'd like to think I'd have remembered that one too. The saxophone on While I'm Still Here is amazing but totally wasted as a curio on the penultimate song.

If I'm being critical (or, perhaps, just reviewing things like a reviewer might), I'd say that Hesitation Marks is too long, lacks focus, is neither a guitar album or a synth album, and has too few memorable moments. I don't think those are very negative things to say, because they're all very true statements. Maybe they're all fair in isolation but sound damning when strung together like that. There's a strong eight or nine song album, but really I'm just including some fodder to make it an album - there's a great EP for sure.

As part of my NIN collection, I'm glad to have this one, and it's good that I've finally given it some attention, but even shelling out £35 wasn't enough to make me actually get much from it. 

Format: Double 12", picture sleeves, insert, gatefold

Tracks: 14

Cost: £34.80

Bought: Nine Inch Nails website

When: 19/09/2020

Colour: Black

Etching: None

mp3s: cd included

Nirvana - Nevermind

Like basically everyone on the planet, I own a copy of Nevermind by Nirvana. The only slightly remarkable thing about that is I didn't until April last year. As a grown man of 35-years, I bought a copy of Nevermind.

It's important to note that this wasn't my first copy of Nevermind. That album shares an interesting honour of being one of two albums I've bought and then sold (along with Back in Black by AC/DC). I think I'd bought a second hand copy from someone (but I can't remember who - I certainly hadn't bought it in a shop), but then ended up swapping it with a guy I sat next to at school called Johnny in exchange for A Perfect Circle's Mer de Noms - a good album, but let's not pretend it has anywhere near the significance of Nevermind. My spreadsheet has Mer de Noms as costing £6 (in November 2000), so I must have paid £6 for my copy of Nevermind. 

Of course, I didn't get rid of Nevermind because I didn't like it (the same can't be said for Back in Black - for some reason they never struck as a band I should really give two shits about), but somehow, at the age of 16, I already knew Nevermind well enough that I didn't need to listen to it. In the short time between getting into music and giving my copy of Nevermind to Johnny, I'd heard Nevermind for the first time and then played it to death. 

In the nearly-20 years between copies of this in my collection I'd listened to and seen live countless covers of the songs, and demos of most of them on the With the Lights Out boxset (and Kevin Devine's remarkably faithful cover of the whole album - I was definitely expecting it to not sound exactly like the Nirvana version), so it wasn't like the songs hadn't graced my ears. Plus, I've heard Smells Like Teen Spirit at basically every rock club night I've ever been to (plus as part of the seemingly essential "rock trio" of songs at the middle-of-the-road club nights at uni - Lancaster's speciality was this, The Day We Caught the Train and Seven Nation Army).

All that said, I have since found myself playing this quite a lot. It's album so closely linked to being a teenager that it's quite nostalgic, probably more-so for the fact I couldn't play it over the years. I hope Nirvana are still considered an important band when my daughters are teenagers - I like that these songs were such a staple of the life of every teenager-getting-into-rock for at least a few years around when it was for me. No matter what people say about Smells Like Teen Spirit, or how over-played it might be, it is just a very exciting song; it still makes me want to throw myself around in a mosh pit like I'm not a slightly-tired man in his mid-thirties with a perpetually sore back. I like music that reminds me I used to be youthful.

There's really not much else to say about the album itself. It's an incredible record in isolation, let alone in the bigger picture. It's not the greatest album of all time, but I can understand why it gets considered one of them (again, in isolation, but as well as the bigger picture). The only people I've ever met who have said otherwise have always found themselves endlessly singing the praises of Bleach or (more often) In Utero instead; I always felt they were being unnecessarily obtuse - even if you think In Utero is the better record, it doesn't make Nevermind a bad one. If anything, the fact that the only criticism I've ever really heard of it is that the album either side of it was better speaks to what a solid record it is.

Format: 12", picture sleeves

Tracks: 12

Cost: £11.98 new

Bought: Resident Records website

When: 04/04/20

Colour: Black

Etching: none

mp3s: download code

Deftones - White Pony (20th Anniversary Deluxe Edition)

Oooh, this is going to be a long one. I've been actively avoiding starting this blog post.

Luckily I've mostly calmed down now and I think I can finally listen to Black Stallion without the rage I had the first time I heard it. In fact, if you skip the terrible, tossed-off, barely 2-minute-long "remix" of Feiticeira, it's not a bad album. Now, that's not the praise it could be - "not bad" is a pretty low bar, especially given the source material here. There's a fair amount to unpack here, and I'm still not sure where to start.

Let's go back to the beginning. When Deftones started talking about the 20th anniversary of White Pony, there was talk of "Black Stallion", a plan they always had to get people to remix the album - not a revolutionary idea, but certainly not one that many metal bands could have pulled off in 2000, and still quite interesting in 2020. When the re-release got announced, I got very excited, even though few of the remixers meant anything to me (five of the eleven were names I knew, or had at least heard of). There were a few options, all very expensive - for £55 you could get the 4LP version, or for double that you could get the 4LP version with the albums on cd too, and a fancy book. It'd just been my birthday, and between my parents and my in-laws I had precisely £110 in birthday money (partly in the form of a Norman Records voucher). Despite knowing that I didn't need to go for the more expensive version, I went for it anyway. Hilariously, I remember thinking "if Black Stallion is awesome, I'll be pleased to have mp3s of it"; little did I know. 

At some point towards the tail end of 2020 Black Stallion was released on streaming services (I know this because my desk was in the sitting room, but it hadn't got so cold that I moved it nearer to the radiator - during a monotonous pandemic, the various locations of my desk are really the only way I can distinguish within the passage of time). I frantically dug out my long-forgotten Spotify password and gave it a listen. My heart sank almost instantly. What the fuck was that remix of Feiticeira? How could DJ Shadow not focus the entire remix of Digital Bath around Chino's "I feel like moooore", instead of letting it drift off into a blur of noises? Even Robert Smith's remix of Teenager was thoroughly underwhelming. The only remix that I didn't hate on first listen was Mike Shinoda's remix of Passenger - I read some comments about the album on the internet afterwards (a dangerous thing to do, and not recommended in general) mostly to see if I wasn't the only one who hated it. One person made the interesting comment that the mixers didn't "respect" the band or the material enough to do a good job, and I see what they mean. Mike Shinoda is the exception to that rule - I suspect he is the only one who looks up to the Deftones (Robert Smith is a fan, but the admiration goes the other way there). Then I read a review where someone said that remix was the low-point of the album. I think I agree with the offended metalhead more than the artsy-reviewer though.

I'm now going to dedicate a whole paragraph to ripping into the remix of Feiticeira, so if you've already had enough of my rage about that particular song, you can probably skip this one. If you've not heard the remix, it starts off with a few lines of the original guitar, before falling away to something that barely resembles anything from the original song. One or two of Chino's lines are somewhere in the background, and the whole finishes before it even really starts. Feiticeira is one of the greatest openings to an album ever, and is a huge song. How Clams Casino thought they could spin it into a half-baked interlude I don't know; how it got onto the album is a bigger mystery. The "respect" comment from before feels particularly apt here - how could anyone who actually enjoys that song, that album and the importance it plays turn in something so half-hearted? It's making me angry all over again. Utter garbage. I'm nearly tempted to buy that over-priced Record Store Day 12" just to have a better remix of Feiticeira (the b-side), and I've not even heard that one. But I can't see how it could be any worse.

But, if you just skip that song (in what world do you "just skip" Feiticeira? Argh!) then there's less to get angry about. Once I realised that was the solution, I have played Black Stallion a few more times. I couldn't say I've enjoyed it - it's not a patch on White Pony - but I've seen some of the appeal. In fact, in places it becomes an album you could play in polite company and people might enjoy (hang on, I'm trying to say the positive is that they've turned one of the greatest albums of all time into generic background music? What have I become?). The exception to that of course being Blanck Mass's remix of Elite, which somehow manages to be even heavier. I almost wish they'd gone the other way - I'd love to hear a non-brutal version of that song. A few of the songs really have few redeeming features - I'd be hard pushed to tell you anything about the remixes of Korea and Change (in the House of Flies) and I'm literally listening to the second one right now. It feels like a fucking relief when Squarepusher doesn't do away with the guitars in Pink Maggit - I'm always desperate to hear a guitar ever since they disappeared in Feiticeira (of course, he punishes us by distorting Chino for no reason other than he had to do something to get his fee I guess).

So those are my thoughts on Black Stallion. I keep thinking back to when it announced and how naïve I was to have high hopes about it, which is ridiculous because it was a year ago, not something that happened in my youth. I should have known I'd hate a remix album, I hate almost all remixes of rock music. With very few exceptions, they're all terrible. I guess that remix album of Explosions in the Sky's All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone was good, but I feel like the remixers were peers, rather than intentionally different. Why did I think this was going to be good? Maybe because the original album was so great, I figured how could anyone make it sound bad. Well, now I know.

I never thought I'd be writing about the 20th anniversary version of White Pony and have had such bad things to say, let alone to have written six paragraphs without talking much about the eleven songs that changed my life back in the year 2000. As written about on here many years ago, I have an original pressing of White Pony on vinyl, so I didn't need to buy this to have a copy of the album I love so much on vinyl. I love that album, I think I always will. It was special, unique and the peak of so many things. I still love Deftones, but I don't think I've loved them more than when this album came out. It felt important and we were lucky enough to be right there at the right time to watch it unfold.

So, original White Pony and dubious-at-best Black Stallion aside, what else is there to say? Well, still more! For one, there's amazingly little here for a 20th anniversary version. For the prices they're charging, you'd want more for sure - would it have killed them to throw in The Boy's Republic from the limited edition cd? They could even have put the Back to School EP on vinyl and that would have been exciting (although I appreciate their animosity to that particular release). Demos, live songs, literally any other material would have been welcome. In all the various versions of this release, you just got the same 22 songs. I can't believe there aren't fascinating curios from the era that fans would have lapped up (and all of them would have been better than Black Stallion). The deluxe edition includes a book with some notes from the band about the songs (well, one comment per song. Again, more would've been nice) and a lot of photos. 

One thing that particularly bugs me about this release is that the regular 4LP version looks so much better than this one. I saw it in a shop the other day and thought "I wish I'd bought that one instead" (regardless of the price and content). The black and white art looks so much cooler than the silver and white here - it's really bold and impressive. I ordered this long before images of each one were available, so I wasn't to know. I don't like the idea of "regret" in general, and I certainly don't regret buying this one, but in hindsight I kinda wish I'd spent my money differently - I have White Pony on vinyl, so I could've just bought the cd version to hear Black Stallion; if I'd loved Black Stallion (ha!) I could've then bought the 4LP and still have money to spare. Oh well, you live and you learn.

Format: 4x12", book, picture, picture sleeves

Tracks: 22

Cost: £110.99 new

Bought: Norman Records website

When: 26/02/21

Colour: Black

Etching: etching on side H

mp3s: cds

Pink Floyd - Wish You Were Here

I remember my dad buying a copy of Wish You Were Here on cd when I was a teenager. I'd been properly into music for a little while and remember thinking how strange it was that he'd just go out one day and spend £15 on a new cd when I'm sure he could have found it cheaper with a bit of hunting. But I guess he was just in the mood to hear the album again and fancied buying it. Pink Floyd had always been a favourite of his, probably more-so than Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath, the other two bands I'd assumed were his top-three from back in the day, based on his record collection. He'd shared a place with some friends when he was younger, and they took turns buying new records, hence his patchy collection. Wish You Were Here was one of the ones his friends had bought, so he'd gone a good number of years without playing it (I think this all happened after the release of the Pink Floyd best-of, Echoes, so perhaps hearing two of the songs on there made him want to play the rest).

I borrowed the cd and had a listen in my room at some point afterwards and enjoyed it. I've always had a bit of a soft-spot for middle-era Pink Floyd (the early days do nothing for me, not that familiar with the tail end); Black Sabbath are my favourite of the three "dad bands", and Led Zeppelin have their moments (and in the right time and place can sound amazing), but Pink Floyd just had something about them. In my rough memory of the timeline, I'd bought myself a live recording of The Wall in early 2001, and Echoes was November 2001, so this would be after that. 

I enjoyed Wish You Were Here. I loved how long Shine On You Crazy Diamond was, and how (almost obnoxiously) long the song is before any vocals come in; the saxophone was amazing and the way the guitars nearly sing the chorus was brilliant. Welcome to the Machine and Have a Cigar felt angry, or as angry as you could expect from a band that weren't metal. The title track was just a truly incredible song, a little pool of normality in a sprawling (in song length, not quantity), quite difficult album (in a lot of ways). I don't know if there is any generally accepted ranking of their discography, but I can imagine this one is number two or three in most cases. I didn't know that going into it at the time (I knew Dark Side of the Moon was number one, I'd always assumed The Wall was number two. It was years before I heard Animals).

Like my father before me, I also went for years and years without hearing Wish You Were Here again. He certainly went longer; the gap for me would've been about 16 years. I found this copy in one of the greatest charity shop hauls of all-time (18 albums by Floyd, Zeppelin, Dylan and REM for £6, all in incredible condition. It was like someone had discarded the record collection of someone as anal as me, but marginally younger than my dad). I couldn't believe my luck as I flicked through the records, ignoring my infant daughter in her pushchair as I pulled out classic record after classic record. I don't remember which album I found first, or when I realised I was onto such an incredible find - after a while I stopped being surprised to find great albums and was even eventually a bit disappointed there weren't more Floyd and Zeppelin. I certainly don't remember thinking "yes, Wish You Were Here!", it was more likely "another Floyd, great". The sleeve is in amazing condition given its age, and the previous owner used to keep the records in paper sleeves rather than the picture sleeves, so the inner sleeve looks new.

This Christmas just gone, between waves of pandemic, I visited some more charity shops and was very pleased to find a copy of Wish You Were Here on cd (meaning I'd have mp3s of it too), along with a standard version of a Manics album on cd that I needed. I think I was actually more excited to find those than I was the vinyl, mainly because the rest of the haul that morning was a bit shit. I plan to buy all the Pink Floyd albums in time, but I see them more of a cd band than a vinyl one. That said, I'm of course pleased to have a handful of their best on vinyl.

Format: 12", picture sleeve
Tracks: 5
Cost: £0.33 second-hand
Bought: Blue Cross charity shop, Kidlington
When: 01/12/18
Colour: Black
Etching: none
mp3s: none

ONSIND + Ghost Mice - Split

 

I have a huge amount of time for ONSIND. As soon as I got into them I started listening to all their songs on Bandcamp - that was around 2011 so this 7" would have been on there (although isn't there any more). I started buying any of their records I could find, and this was a very pleasant surprise on my first trip to All Ages. As a side note, I should have visited All Ages much sooner into my time living in London, but I was rarely that far north except in the evenings for gigs; I later realised that it was worthy of dedicated trips on its own. I've also not been there anywhere near enough - not only do they stock all the punk records you could possibly want, but they also have a good selection of metal and obscure heavy stuff (two genres I'm leaning more into these days).

The second ONSIND song, That Takes Ovaries, also ended up on their superb second album, Dissatisfactions. They've stopped playing it after taking some criticism for the blunt lyrics, but certain lines aside the point they're trying to make remains as valid as ever and is often one that comes to mind when watching some bands. The first song, Call Me If You Ever Feel Too Old to Drive, is a perfect ONSIND song and worth the price of the record alone.

Ghost Mice are on the second side of the record and that's really about the most I know about them, other than that they're from the USA. To sum them up very briefly, they're too nasal and high pitched for me to really find them enjoyable. I do love their energy though. They sound a bit like a Chuck Ragan song played 50% too fast, which you can either choose to take as a compliment or not, depending on how that summary lands with you. Their third song, Exit #2, paints a nice picture.

Format: 7", insert

Tracks: 4

Cost: £4 new

Bought: All Ages, Camden

When: 03/10/12

Colour: Black

Etching: no

mp3s: no

The Draft - The Fest 12 Edition

 

I don't have mp3s of these songs, so they've had a fraction of the number of plays as The Draft's excellent, only album has had. Devil in the Shade is worth digging the 7"s out for alone, and Hard to Be Around It is pretty strong too. I really should play this much more often.

I wasn't aware of what this record was when I bought it - I'd been buying the "Fest Edition" version of any records I was into that weekend and they're all pretty cool. At the end of the weekend I found this in Arrow's Aim, the No Idea record shop in Gainesville and added it to the stack of records I was buying (before we jumped in the car, realised we mis-calculated our timings a bit and had to drive very fast back to Tampa to catch our flight home). I'd seen The Draft for the first (and only) time at Pre-Fest a few days earlier, but not seen the record there. If they'd played the main event too they must have clashed with someone else, otherwise I'd have watched them again.

The strangest thing about this record is that it's a double-7" version of a triple 7" they'd released for a separate tour (which Discogs refers to as "Tour Edition"). That record comprises all three 7"s they released in 2007, the year after In a Million Pieces came out, but this one is only two of those records; I've not heard the other two songs. I should probably check them out one day.

Format: Double 7", Fest edition

Tracks: 4
Cost: £7 new
Bought: Arrow's Aim, Gainesville
When: 04/11/13
Colour: Purple
Etching: Side A: "Mini soccer? Are you kidding me?" Side B: "I like grown up JB even better" Side C: "Draft beer, not me" Side D: "Draft is a fine cleaning product"
mp3s: no

Radiator Hospital + Martha - Split

 

I should really like Martha more than I actually do. I love ONSIND and have done for years, but this is the only Martha record I own (and that's only really because I got it as part of the Specialist Subject subscription I had for a couple of years). I've listened to all their albums and each time thought "yeah, it's nice, but I don't love it". I'm clearly missing something because everyone I know loves them way more than ONSIND and they've had what appears to be far more success as a foursome too.

I can see the appeal for sure. Chekhov's Hangnail has a huge chorus and a big full sound. Mendable is actually much closer to ONSIND territory and I like it more. I guess what I always quite liked about ONSIND was that weren’t a rock band, but wrote songs that definitely worked as rock songs. The last time I saw them was effectively the Martha line-up (I think) playing an ONSIND set and it was incredible. Maybe I just need to see Martha for it to all fall into place.

I don't really remember having any opinions on Radiator Hospital before, but I'm quite enjoying them now. I can’t put my finger on what it reminds me of (frustratingly) - the singer's very nasal voice is very reminiscent of something, but for the life of me I can't think who. The final song, Dark Sand, has some extra vocals which do break things up quite nicely and adds a lot to the song. Good effort squeezing three songs onto one side of a 7" playing at 45rpm - I don't think I've ever put this record on at the right speed the first time - I always think "three songs must mean 33rpm".

Format: 7", insert
Tracks: 5
Cost: £5 new
Bought: Specialist Subject Records
When: 08/10/15
Colour: Mint green
Etching: Side A: "Put the kettle on" Side B: "Sexy willy riff"
mp3s: Download code

Muncie Girls - Picture of Health

 

I only own this 7" because it was included in my Specialist Subject subscription. I like Muncie Girls, but not enough to bother buying 7" singles of theirs. That said, it turns out I have nearly everything they've released, so maybe I am a collector? The a-side is from their last album, Fixed Ideals. It's a strong song with a huge, catchy chorus. But it'd be more than sufficient for me to enjoy it on the LP  alone (which was also part of the subscription, although I would have bought that regardless). The b-side, Rain, is a perfectly nice song, but less memorable. Nice poster sleeve.

Format: 7", poster sleeve

Tracks: 2

Cost: £5 new

Bought: Specialist Subject Records

When: 14/06/18

Colour: Black

Etching: None

mp3s: Download code

Pale Angels - Strange Powers

 

I genuinely wasn’t sure what speed to play this record at just now - it didn’t sound right at either. Turns out it was 45. I guess this record came out after the Four Live Songs 7", although both were in 2014 at some point. I think this is a live EP recorded at a studio in Amsterdam - none of the songs are on the albums. It's far faster and more punk-rock than anything else they've recorded - the grunge vibes are barely apparent at all.

The final song, Romantic Depression, is the best by far and worthy the cost of the 7" alone. La Esquina is so short that it’s nearly taken me longer to write this sentence than to listen to the song. It's a nice enough record, but probably not essential

Format: 7"

Tracks: 4

Cost: £5 new

Bought: Specialist Subject Records

When: 05/12/14

Colour: Black

Etching: None

mp3s: Download code

Pale Angels - Four Live Songs

 

When I bought the first Pale Angels album, I figured I'd pick up the two 7"s that Specialist Subject had as well. It'd been nine months since I'd seen them and been really pleasantly surprised at how good they were, and the fact they were basically a grunge band and not a punk band. I'm not sure why it took me so long. I've got a feeling I had a discount to use with Specialist Subject so put in an order for a bunch of things. Either that, or I was just in the mood to spend some money.

The four songs here make up nearly half of the songs on their debut, but these were recorded live on a UK tour in December 2013. The quality, as you'd expect (for a number of reasons) varies from charmingly shit to just shit - Mama sounds like it was recorded on a dictaphone cassette, and it sounds like Reza was playing drums on a table; the "woo-oohs" near the end sound amazing though. I get the desire to get some songs out there, but I can't believe these were the best four live recordings from that tour unless they were the only four live recordings from that tour. Slow Dance is great though - pure Nirvana, but brilliant for it. Slow Jangle has a nice build up to a satisfying beat.

Anyway, it's a nice little package - white vinyl and the sleeve is printed on black card and numbered (mine is 124/143). It also comes with a zine of tour photos, which is nice. I hadn't realised that the cover of the Strange Powers 7” was shot in the Exchange until looking through there. 

Format: 7", zine, numbered (124/143)

Tracks: 4

Cost: £5 new

Bought: Specialist Subject Records

When: 05/12/14

Colour: White

Etching: None

mp3s: None

Run, Forever - A Few Good Things

 

For a short while, Run, Forever felt like a really important band. Then they just sort of vanished. It happens a lot I guess, and there's probably not always a dramatic end; a lot of bands just fizzle out. I assume that's what happened here, but I have no idea really. 

Between 2011 and 2015 I bought a bunch of their records. Not quite everything they put out, but most. I even bought all four colours of their second album Settling, although I think that was more because the option was presented to me by the record label than a real desire to actually go deep on collecting them. Even the bands I love the most I don't go down to colour-variant-level of collecting. Those for records are something of an anomaly in my collection with their identical spines all next to each other, but a nice reminder of that brief period when Run, Forever seemed like a really important band.

This 7" came out between their first and second albums. I've not played either in a while now, but this feels like a good mixture of the two, possibly more in common with the first, but I'm only saying that because two of the songs here are huge, and in my memory the first album had more stand-out songs like that. Those two songs are the first on each side - Letters and Get Better. The former probably ranks among their best songs, and both are earnest, eager punk-rock songs, full of energy and hard-hitting. Growing Pains is a nice reflective closer, which is a perfectly normal sort of song to write, but an unusual one to put on an EP when you have fewer songs to play with. Fall Hard is a nice acoustic song, but feels unfinished.

I bought this 7" when I saw them play at Fest in 2013, although I don't particularly remember the set - I couldn't tell you which venue it was in, unlike the first time I saw them at Fest 2011, which is firmly etched into my mind. It was the fifth day of the festival and they were the ninth band I saw that day, sandwiched between 1994! (who I do remember seeing) and Restorations (who I think I remember seeing, like 80% sure which venue they were in). I had the other albums they were selling, but picked up this and a t-shirt. Two years later they released another album and then sort of disappeared. More on that when I get round to writing about the final, self-titled LP.

Format: 7", folded sleeve, insert

Tracks: 4

Cost: £3.15 new

Bought: Fest

When: 02/11/13

Colour: Purple

Etching: Side A: "Better step aside home school, there's a new sheriff in town! Side B: "They’re break dance fighting!"
mp3s: download

Jena Berlin - This is Yours as Much as it is Mine

I bought this record having never actually listened to Jena Berlin. I was, and still am, a huge Restorations fan and they added a bunch of old releases to their website a while back, so I took the opportunity to stock up on a few bits. Most excitingly, they had the Little Elephant session 12", but they also had this 7" and the album by the band that a few of them were in before Restorations by the of name Jena Berlin. I figured it was worth a punt, so I bought both.

It's impossible to listen to without comparing it to Restorations, which is probably unfair - everything about it sounds so much more naive and scrappy; Restorations always sounded so sure of their sound and somehow older because of it. I don't want to use the words "mature" and it's loaded negative "immature" because it'd be doing Jena Berlin a disservice, but it's hard for those words to not pop into your mind. Restorations always felt (to me, at least) as an older-person's punk band. Jena Berlin sounds like the music they made as teenagers in comparison - there's so much energy and a slightly metal-tinged edge in places (Motion Sickness on the album jumps through a bunch of different styles, but kinda works; Oh God on this 7" is even more unexpectedly metal). For reasons I can't quite put my finger on, it reminds me of a lot of the bands we used to see in South Wales - not even in musical style, maybe it's the cheaper production or youthful energy. But there are hints of Restorations in there, along with about a hundred other influences.

As a result, I always think "I'd rather be listening to Restorations" when I play it, so I can't say I've ever listened to it purely on it's own merits. If you've thought "I wish Restorations played faster punk with a hint of metal" then you should probably check out Jena Berlin.

Format: 7", folded screen-printed sleeve
Tracks: 2
Cost: £7.70 new
Bought: Band's website
When: 03/08/17
Colour: Red
Etching: none
mp3s: download code

Mogwai - Central Belters

 

I feel like curating the Mogwai best-of must have been one of the easiest tasks whoever did it did that week; if you put their back-catalogue on shuffle and took the first three hours of songs that came up, you'd have a collection that was both a) uniquely Mogwai and b) full of bangers. It goes without saying that the actually-curated best-of is an amazing listen and a brilliant use of 12 sides of vinyl and well over three hours of your time.

My Mogwai collection still has some glaring holes, but I've been enjoying gradually working on it – one large hole is their debut album Mogwai Young Team, one of the first albums of theirs I heard (which I bought on cd in Spillers a week after buying The Hawk is Howling). Whilst under-represented here (on paper at least - do we count the original version of Summer separately? Does it's 16-minute runtime balance out the multiple shorter songs from other albums?), it is great to finally have Mogwai Fear Satan on vinyl. There's still something really pleasing about seeing one song take up a whole side of vinyl and Mogwai Fear Satan does that perfectly. It's then quite surprising that the other song that takes up a whole side of vinyl never made it onto an album, despite being a live favourite and ridiculously huge song – it takes a lot of sides of vinyl to get to My Father My King but it is absolutely worth it every time. I suspect at some point after getting most of the LPs on vinyl I'd have got round to seeking out the single, but I'm glad I've been listening to this for the last six years, rather than waiting for the point in my life when I got round to seeking it out. I love that you can see the quiet part in the grooves of the vinyl.

Mogwai have been around long enough to have a number of different eras, and I think I'm firmly a circa-2010 era guy. It might help that The Hawk is Howling was the first album of theirs I heard, but I also love Hardcore Will Never Die and I think Les Revenants is the greatest soundtrack they've done by a good distance – it’s a contender for the "best soundtrack that actually works even better as an album", running against The Fountain, which they were also involved with, although I'm never very sure how much was Clint Mansell and how much was Mogwai. Anyway, as a result I think the selections from those albums are great. The songs from Mr Beast also sound amazing, more-so than I remember them sounding on the actual LP. We're No Here sounds particularly great. The early era has some highs and some lows for me – Summer is a huge way to start (I love the way it races ahead of the xylophone) and Christmas Steps is the highlight of Come On Die Young. I've never really loved that album as much as everyone else seems to, and Cody feels like a bit of a downer here. Similarly, Stanley Kubrick from EP (or EP+6, as I know the release) is a bit nothingy. 

The odds and ends that make up the final two discs are interesting - Hugh Dallas is always good (classic slow build) and Devil Rides with it's vocals from prolific musician Roky Erickson is unexpected and a bit bizarre, but great to hear. Strangely, we get one song from Les Revenants in the usual chronological section as well as one in this section - not sure why. Personally, Hungry Face is the one I associate more with the show, but Wizard Motor is probably the better song in the usual sense. Earth Division is another nice one I wouldn't have heard. I didn't realise until just now that the song itself isn't on the Earth Division EP (which I regret not buying when I saw it in Banquet around the time it came out - I can't remember why I didn't buy it).

It'd be wrong to not dwell on just what a nice package this boxset is too. Each record has one letter from the word "Mogwai" on the cover and a selection of incredibly brightly coloured sleeves, contrasting the grey, fabric-lined outer box. The booklet is brilliantly detailed and a good read - the concert tickets and set-lists from over the years are particularly nice. All this for just under £50 is a ridiculous bargain - they could have charged twice as much and I'd still have bought it and still have been raving about how great it was.

Format: 6x 12", boxset, booklet

Tracks: 34

Cost: £49 new

Bought: Norman Records website

When: 23/10/15

Colour: Black

Etching: None

mp3s: Download code