Atmosphere - Godlovesugly

The first time I heard Atmosphere was in my friend Jon's car as we drove across the Severn Bridge. I can't remember where we were going mind you but it was definitely on the bridge as we crossed from Wales into England. I didn't know Jon very well at the time, but he was in a band with a friend and had an interesting taste in music - a mix of punk, 90's rock and hip-hop. I have no idea what Atmosphere songs we listened to, but I enjoyed the strange beats and intense rapping.

A short while later I found this second-hand triple-LP copy of Godlovesugly in Reckless Records in London and figured it was worth picking up - I hadn't seen any of their albums about and it was in pretty good condition and well-priced at £10.

My feelings about Atmosphere have been fairly consistent over the 8 years since I bought this album - I enjoy them but find them hard work. I bought a couple of other albums and found the same thing time and time again - each album has some incredible songs - here you have really great songs like The Bass and the Movement, Fuck You Lucy and One of a Kind which really stand out. On the other hand, there are some really cringe-worthy moments, especially around Slug's rather low opinion of himself (or, at least, his assumption of others' low opinion of him). And then there are just loads of other songs - this album has 18 songs, which is crazy long. I'm very familiar with the start of this album, but find I often can't make it through all six sides.

The highlights really are great - Fuck You Lucy is exactly what I want from these guys - the rapping is aggressive and interesting and they do that really well. If there was a best-of that contained just those songs I'd probably be all over that. As it is, I don't have the patience for the majority of their output a lot of the time.

Format: Triple 12", gatefold sleeve
Tracks: 10
Cost: £10 second hand
Bought: Reckless Records, London
When: 15/09/08
Colour: Black
Etching: none
mp3s: no

At the Drive-In - Acrobatic Tenement

Nearly three years passed between me hearing Relationship of Command and Acrobatic Tenement. I was a little late to the At the Drive-In party as it was, so finding any of their albums wasn't trivial. I bought them in an unusual order: Relationship of Command, In/Casino/Out, the best-of, Acrobatic Tenement and then finally Vaya a full three years after the first. As the albums got reissued on vinyl, this was the last one I picked up, for no other reason than I didn't see any copies of it around until I found this one in Rough Trade; I was pleased to finally have all their albums on vinyl.

I was familiar with Initiation from the best-of album (where it is strangely wedged at the end of the otherwise chronological album, between two covers) when I bought the album on cd (a £2 bargain from eBay); the rest was all new to me. The most defining feature of Acrobatic Tenement is its scrappiness - the albums that would follow had much higher production value and generally better musicianship too. But I love this album for its less-rounded edges - it adds a lot of charm. There's also a jazz influence that the later albums don't have (take the end of Paid Vacation Time for example). Given that some of the band members would dabble in a wide variety of influences later on in their careers, it's nice to hear those moments in their earlier days too.

The album is also a much more basic variation on post-hardcore than their later albums would be - the songs here sometime remind me more of Sparta than they do ATD-I. There are exciting moments throughout the album - Starslight, Initiation, Communication Drive-In and Porfirio Diaz all have huge choruses and the first two make use of multiple singers in ways they would never really do as well - the lyrics on Starslight are basically unintelligible and I love that about it.

Format: 12", picture sleeve
Tracks: 11
Cost: £14 new
Bought: Rough Trade East
When: 25/10/14
Colour: Black
Etching: none
mp3s: no

Audioslave - Audioslave

Can you remember the excitement around this album when it was announced? Good lord, it was crazy. Let's forget about how the album actually turned out for a moment and focus on that excitement. Rage Against the Machine had been the biggest name of the late 1990's and Soundgarden were one of the biggest names of the the early part of that decade. Chris Cornell had long been one of my favourite singers and still has one of the best voices in rock. The music Rage Against the Machine had put out was hugely important and I still get that same feeling when I listen to them now, more than 20 years after they started. How could a band consisting of Chris and Rage (minus Zach) not be great?

Before the album came out the video for Cochise did the rounds on MTV and it was awesome - the band playing on top of some structure in the desert with fireworks going of all around them. If the excitement levels weren't already raised high enough then that video pushed them even higher. I rushed out and bought the cd the day it came out. I was at college then so I used my free periods to go home, turn the hifi up dangerously loud and play the album. (I picked this copy up a few months later - I was still into it enough to spend £15.50 on it, which was a lot for an LP back then.)

It started with a great opening duo, the single Cochise and Show Me How to Live, which is still huge - the lines "Is this the cure or is this a disease?" is one of the greatest pre-chorus breaks that hard-rock did in the 2000's. There are some slower, heavier songs like What You Are which work well - think Mailman from Superunknown - and some slower ones like Like A Stone, Shadow on the Sun and I am the Highway which I think could have easily been culled. They're nice enough songs and show off Chris's voice well, but aren't what I (or most other listeners I suspect) were wanting to hear from this band. Had it been a Chris Cornell solo album then it would have been great (and would have shat all over his actual solo albums). There are late-album treats like Exploder and Light My Way but they often get forgotten in the expanse of the album.

My main complaints with the album was that it was far too long. It's funny, but as I've got older my"ideal album length" has changed. It used to be twelve songs in 45 minutes, but these days I'm finding the nine songs is strong length. Either way, 14 songs and an hour long is too much. As I've realised is often the case with super-groups (a term I don't think existed in my vocabulary in 2002) is that no one will tell them when to stop, or that maybe some of the songs aren't that great. The result tends to be album that are too long and don't really reflect any of the artist's best work.

Is Audioslave as good as Soundgarden? No, of course not. Some of the songs could make it into a top 20 Chris Cornell songs, but not the top ten. Is Audioslave as good as Rage? Again, not a chance. The musicianship is as good here, but it's more traditional hard-rock, which isn't what people listened to Rage for. The band are still tight as hell, but I don't think any of the guys really shine here (Tom gets some very short solos on What You Are and Bring 'em Back Alive).

I saw Audioslave at Roskilde Festival in 2005. I remember it fondly, although mainly because they played a bunch of Soundgarden and Rage songs. Chris even treated us to a solo performance of Black Hole Sun which was incredible. I hadn't seen Soundgarden at that point, so it was really special. Needless to say, his ability to rap like Zach de la Rocha was sub-par, but I'd seen Rage before so I'd already had my fix of hearing those songs how they're supposed to be played.

As is often the case with these blog posts, I've not listened to Audioslave for a long time before putting the needle on the record today. I'm surprised how well it stands up. I mean, I don't find myself wanting to listen to this sort of music much these days, but it's good. Plus, it's so deeply rooted in nostalgia (for itself but also for Soundgarden and Rage) and that early excitement it's had not to smile a little and have a little headbang.

Format: Double 12", gatefold sleeve, picture sleeves

Tracks: 14

Cost: £15.50 new

Bought: Selectadisc, Nottingham

When: 20/02/03

Colour: Black

Etching: none

mp3s: no

Above Them - Water Lane

I've been a fan of Above Them for a long time. Back when I lived in Cardiff we saw them all the time and it was always great fun. I saw them a handful of time after moving to London, but shows became less frequent as, I suppose, real life started catching up. The last time I saw them was in 2014 (at the Deadpunk all-dayer) and before that was 2012 in Brixton. The fact that they made one last album is something of a treat then; they could have easily just drifted away. I'm very glad they didn't.

Water Lane is a great album, even better than the second in my opinion. It even made my end of year list for 2015. As we've come to expect there are huge choruses and great songs. I enjoyed it from the start, although it was Young & Petrified that really turned the album from being a good album into a great one - sometimes I just need a song to kick me into really listening and that song was it on Water Lane. The rest of the album has some great moments too, like We're All Going Down and Sink or Gin.

I got this copy as part of my Specialist Subject Records subscription, which has been great. I tend to buy most records they release anyway, so it's nice to have them sent to me every time. There have been some nice discoveries from other bands that I didn't know too (which I'll write about in due course).

On hearing Water Lane my friend Sarah asked if it was a compilation of other songs because it sounded familiar. I see that as praise for the album - Above Them have written an album that sounds so perfectly like Above Them that it sounds like a best-of, which is all I ever wanted them to do.

Format: 12", picture sleeve
Tracks: 12
Cost: £10 new
Bought: Specialist Subject Records subscription
When: 21/09/15
Colour: Mint green
Etching: none
mp3s: Download code

El-P - Collecting the Kid

As soon as I heard El-P's I'll Sleep When You're Dead on Hugh's kitchen hi-fi in Swansea I knew I wanted to hear more of his music. The next opportunity I got was from this copy of Collecting the Kid which I found in Bart's CD Cellar in Boulder, Colorado (worth noting that the LPs at the time were on the first floor; I'm not sure there even was a cellar. Or a Bart). I had no idea what was on the album, but the words "Limited Edition" helped convince me further that it was worth buying.

Collecting the Kid is, as the name implies, a collection of odds and ends from around the time of Fantastic Damage. The songs are mostly instrumentals, but some are beats El-P made for other rappers, so we get their vocals too - Jukie Skate Rock and Oxycontin are great examples of the latter, featuring my introduction to Central Services. The instrumentals vary from quite good to absolutely amazing. Intrigue in the House of India from High Water is quite possibly the highlight of the album and is one of the finest instrumental hip-hop tracks I know. One of my favourite raps on Run the Jewels is when Killer Mike drops "Producer gave me a beat / Said it's the beat of the / I said El-P didn't do it / get the fuck out of here". This album is further testament to Mike's words. Slow Sex, Constellation and The Dance are all great too.

Whilst Collecting the Kid wasn't the best album to hear after becoming a fan on I'll Sleep When You're Dead, it's a great listen. It also showed me a hugely different side to his work that I might not have discovered so quickly otherwise. A short while later I found a copy of Company Flow's Funcrusher Plus, which might have been a more obvious sequel for me. Over the years I've listened to El's work in various form and all of it has been mind-blowing in some way - it's impressive that one man can excel in so many areas of music.

Format: Double 12"

Tracks: 11

Cost: £9.21 new

Bought: Bart's CD Cellar, Boulder

When: 18/04/08

Colour: Black

Etching: none

mp3s: no

Thursday - War All the Time

War All the Time was the beginning of the turn against Thursday for a lot of people I knew. They'd blown us away on Full Collapse and Five Stories Falling but I remember everyone disliking War All the Time. I think the general thinking was it was too polished and smooth; one acquaintance particularly hated the single Signals Over the Air with quite some passion.

Whilst it didn't grab me as much as Full Collapse, I still thought War All the Time was a great album. I concede that it's smoother in places, but that kinda works for Thursday - they didn't need to be the heaviest band in that genre for me. What War All the Time showed was that they could write great songs without them needing to be overly-shouty screamo/post-hardcore. And those moments were still there - Division St. could have fit just as easily onto Full Collapse as it does here. The piano-led This Song Brought to You by a Falling Bomb would sound thoroughly out-of-place on any earlier album but works beautifully here. Other highlights include For the Workforce, Drowning and Asleep in the Chapel and the title track in particular. As an aside, I had a Thursday t-shirt with some artwork for For the Workforce, Drowning which eventually became my running t-shirt. It almost soured a relationship before it even started because the girl in question thought less of me for being a Thursday fan (but she liked to think of herself as very cool - her Les Savy Fav t-shirt helped).

I got a copy of this album on cd for Christmas one year (the same year I got Waiting) and a few months later found this LP in Selectadisc in Nottingham for a very reasonable £10. I still listen to it a lot - it has a lot of fond memories for me.

Format: 12", booklet
Tracks: 11
Cost: £10 new
Bought: Selectadisc, Nottingham
When: 15/03/04
Colour: Black
Etching: none
mp3s: no

The Murder City Devils - R.I.P.

When I got this record I only had two Murder City Devils album - Empty Bottles, Broken Hearts and Thelma. I was just getting into the band so it felt a bit wrong to hear their last-ever show next, but I knew copies wouldn't be that easy to find at any later point. Plus, at £8 it was a steal. I bought it in Brighton just before returning to Australia for my second semester out there; I made time to record it onto cassette before going back but after getting there was disappointed to find that I'd managed to not hit record on the second record, so for the first six months of owning this album I could only listen to the first half.

I love The Murder City Devils. Not enough bands I listen to sound anything like them - there's such an energy and power and sense of a good time - they're the sort of band that make you want to get drunk and throw yourself around to punk-rock bands (although the band will almost certainly not be as good as The Murder City Devils). This album captures their live show in a raucous and fairly shambolic way - the notes in the sleeve concede to this point but also imply that it couldn't really be any other way for a band like this. I never saw them live (something I still long to correct now they're playing shows again) but I think I would have enjoyed it greatly. As a live album, this is fairly terrible and as a final show it's also a strange one, but all that adds to its charm.

A lot of the album sounds great - the band had such a good sound - but there are some weaker moments. One Vision of May and Midnight Service suffer from what sounds like a combination of exhaustion and bad timing, which is a shame because they're great songs; Spencer has some mic issues during That's What You Get and Idle Hands, although someone steps in for some very deep backing vocals, which works well . I Want a Lot Now, Dancing Shoes, Boom Swagger and Broken Glass all sound fantastic; 18 Wheels gets played with such incredible energy that I'm impressed every time I hear it. Strangely, (for a final show) they play two new songs, Waltz and Grace That Saves, the latter of which gets the prime place of being the last song they'd ever play (until they reformed). It's not only strange because you'd typically go out on a familiar high, but also because it's just not a very good song - it drones and feels half finished, which is a shame. Had they gone out on 18 Wheels it would have been perfect.

There are a few really touching moments of stage chat throughout - at the end of Bear Away one of the band announces that it's the last show they're ever going to play with a real tremble in his voice; "these boys love you more than you will ever imagine" at the end of Boom Swagger; and when Spencer announces the last song. Each makes you feel really sad that they're breaking up, but glad they existed in the first place.

Format: 12", gatefold sleeve

Tracks: 19

Cost: £8 new

Bought: Borderline, Brighton

When: 11/01/06

Colour: Black

Etching: none

mp3s: no