Two things happen this week: I'm going to see The Bouncing Souls again, and the list of Record Store Day 2013 releases gets announced, so it only seemed fitting to write about The Bouncing Souls' RSD2011 record. To make all this even more inter-related, this is a recording of The Bouncing Souls acoustic set in Generation Records on Record Store Day 2009, the very shop where a year and one week before I'd heard about Record Store Day for the very first time (I'd been in New York on the way to Boulder and ended up spending RSD in Bart's CD Cellar and Albums on the Hill). I've been a fan of RSD since I first heard about it; a lot of people have varied opinions about it, but I love standing outside Banquet at 6 in the morning each April and buying loads of great music (even if some of the records are a bit over-priced!).
Anyway, RSD2011 I'd bought the Deftones and Piebald records I was after, but they hadn't got in the Explosions in the Sky LP I wanted so I had a little cash to spare. Banquet are pretty good at getting in some of the cool US-only releases (like the Piebald one) and I think this was one of those so I picked it up on a whim. Part of it was definitely because I liked Generation Records so much, and it seemed like a nice RSD release. Because the album is acoustic, it's quite different to a regular Bouncing Souls album but most of the songs work brilliantly (Ghosts on the Boardwalk particularly; Here We Go less so). I ended up seeing The Bouncing Souls play an acoustic set in Banquet later that year, which was very cool too (furthering the list of RSD/BS/Banquet connections). None of my previously-favourite Souls songs appear here, but Gasoline has become one and it's a fun record despite that. It certainly captures the event nicely.
For a while I was thinking more record shops should put out records of the in-stores they have - everyone wins because the band gets a low-cost mini-live-album to put out, the record shop gets loads of exposure and you can pretty much guarantee that everyone in the audience at least will want a copy (it's probably not a huge number, but I reckon a lot of Bouncing Souls fans had never heard of Generation Records before this came out). Banquet Records has countless in-stores and I was chatting to JT about the idea a few weeks back, but he explained that mostly the bands (or, more likely, the record labels) don't want to license out the recordings so freely, so it just can't happen. It seems a shame, because I've seen some incredible shows in that shop and would happily pay for a record of some of them. Sometimes they're just nice memories, but some shows are genuinely incredible and would make great records in their own right (the recent Chuck Ragan in-store comes to mind).
Anyway, very excited about The Bouncing Souls and Cheap Girls in Kingston on Saturday!
Format: 12", picture sleeve
Tracks: 11
Cost: £16 new
Bought: Banquet Records
When: 16/04/11
Colour: Black
Etching: none
mp3s: no
