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