The Murder City Devils - Empty Bottles Broken Hearts

The Murder City Devils are an excellent band. I swear no one quite does songs about rock n' roll, drinking and heartbreak as well and as genuinely as these guys do. Something about Spencer Moody's incredible vocals make you believe that they must live the lives that they sing about; he sounds like a trucker with an alcohol problem. And that fits the music perfectly too.

I first time I heard The Murder City Devils was nearly 12 years ago (it doesn't feel anywhere near as long) on a bargain £2.50, 17-track Sub Pop Records sampler. There were only a few tracks that really appealed to me at the time (New Slang by The Shins, Out of the Races and Onto the Tracks by The Rapture, although I wonder if there's anything I'd enjoy more now) but the highlight by far was the opening track from The Murder City Devils' last EP, That's What You Get. It was, and still is, an absolutely incredible song. A shockingly-long three years later I finally bought the Thelema EP, which more than lived up to my expectations.

A few months later I found a copy of Empty Bottles Broken Hearts on eBay (on cd) for £4.50 and couldn't get enough. I remember playing it in my university house and some friends thinking it was terrible, which is basically a sign of how excellent the band are - regular people just don't get it. It was an instant classic.

For fear of waffling too much (although I do that a lot and already have for three paragraphs here), I'll summarise: everything this band has done is brilliant. Their debut album is 20 minutes of punk-rock n' roll excellence, all their songs make me want to drink and their thanks list here reads "The Murder City Devils would like to thank rock n' roll". Pure genius. Thankfully, they've now reformed and I even pre-ordered their new album, which is something I pretty much never do - that's how much I love this band.

I sincerely hope they tour the UK sometime soon. I can't begin to imagine how excellent it will be.

Format: 12", picture sleeve
Tracks: 12
Cost: £9.80 new
Bought: Hear Again Music, Gainesville
When: 04/11/13
Colour: Black
Etching: Side A: "The Murder City Devils are dead" Side B: "Long live the devils!"
mp3s: Download code

Hot Water Music - Fuel For the Hate Game

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

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

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

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

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

Iron & Wine - Woman King

The first time I ever heard Iron & Wine was on his incredible cover of Such Great Heights by The Postal Service. I can tell you exactly where I was when that graced my ears - sat in the ANU campus theatre waiting for the Burton and Garran Hall annual theatre production to start. I have no memory of what the play was about in the slightest, but I do distinctly remember hearing Iron & Wine beforehand. I knew the original and a friend told me it was Iron & Wine singing. It was playing loud enough that it drowned out most of the pre-show chatter and in my memories everyone else was sat there in as much awe as I was. It was pretty lovely.

Two and half years later, I finally bought an Iron & Wine cd. The name had come up a bunch of times in the time between and I was frequently being recommended them. My friend Aled from work was adamant I should watch them at the Explosion in the Sky-curated All Tomorrow's Parties, but I'm pretty sure they clashed with someone else I wanted to see. When Virgin Megastore went into liquidation, the closing down sale was quite an event with hundreds of cds going for dirt-cheap. You had to rummage through boxes and boxes of shit to find anything good, but there were some real treats hidden in there. Amongst the many cds I bought over a period of a few days was Woman King by Iron & Wine. Only six songs but only £3, so worth a shot I figured.

To this day, Woman King remains my favourite Iron & Wine release. The other albums haven't done so much for me, but these six songs are perfect. The vocals float beautifully over the gentle guitar and the other instruments are superbly sparse. Highlights are Jezebel, My Lady's House and Evening on the Ground (the line "we were born to fuck each other / one way or another" always makes me smile). I found this copy in Gainesville the day after Fest last year and decided for $10 I definitely needed it on vinyl. There's nothing particularly noteworthy about the vinyl release, other than the six incredible songs cut into it.

Format: 12", a4 insert
Tracks: 6
Cost: £6.30 new
Bought: Hear Again Music, Gainesville
When: 04/11/13
Colour: Black
Etching: none
mp3s: Download code

Cursive - Cursive's Domestica

I suspect there are many other people who feel this way, but I can never quite decide which is my favourite Cursive album. Some days it's The Ugly Organ and other days it's this LP, Domestica. Their back-catalogue is pretty solid and each record has its merits, but those two are, for me, the finest examples of Cursive's music (along with Burst and Bloom, but that's an EP so it's fine to ignore it for this discussion). The best thing is that neither sounds very much like the other; The Ugly Organ is pretty much defined by that cello and an overwhelming hatred of the music industry but Cursive's Domestica (to give it its full name) is a brutal break-up album that you could possibly call post-hardcore, but defies any obvious genre.

I first heard Domestica in 2006 when I bought a relatively cheap Japanese version on eBay (along with obi-strip and all those other fun things that come with Japanese cds). I'd been introduced to them by Hugh in the form of A Gentleman Caller on a mixtape in 2004 and earlier that summer bought the b-sides and EPs collection The Difference Between Houses and Homes (again, cheaply on eBay). Domestica was an instant hit and I knew I listening to an album that would become one of my favourites. At just nine songs, there's no filler and pretty much every song is worthy of a mention. I wouldn't be able to pick a favourite, but The Martyr, A Red so Deep and The Lament of Pretty Baby would all be contenders.

I'd long thought it would be nice to have Domestica on vinyl and, seven years after buying the cd, I found the vinyl in Hear Again Music in Gainesville. The Monday after Fest this year we were flying home, so decided to hit up the two record stores in Gainesville for as much vinyl as we could carry before leaving. This is probably a sweeping generalisation, but record stores in America tend to have so much more stock than the ones over here, especially older records. I guess it's easier to get records by American bands and I suspect rent is cheaper so they have more space to stock them all too. Either way, I love buying vinyl in the US. At £14 it was one of the more expensive records I bought that week but still a bargain compared to the average price of an LP in the UK. It's on a lovely, thick red vinyl and worth every penny. I'm very glad to have this one in my collection.

Format: 12", insert
Tracks: 9
Cost: £14 new
Bought: Hear Again Music, Gainesville
When: 04/11/13
Colour: Clear red
Etching: none
mp3s: Download