Public Service Broadcasting - The War Room

I saw Public Service Broadcasting supporting the Manics a few years ago and was blown away. I bought a copy of their debut album as soon as I found a copy afterwards and enjoyed it. It was a bit lighter than I remember them playing - that night it was like watching early Therapy?, an influence I could hear on the album but it was not so strong as it was live.

A few months later I found their debut EP in Fopp and decided to pick it up. It's a strong selection of songs and heavier than the album ended up being - the guitars on If War Should Come are particularly crunching and the drumming is great throughout. Spitfire ended up on the album, although either of the first two would have fit equally well.

My criticism of The War Room is something that seems to plague the band increasingly - by having such a strong theme (war, space travel, the Welsh valleys - although I can't judge the new album yet) they lack the variety that the debut album is filled with. The huge mixture of topics on the debut really added a lot to it, and made it much easier to get into. Still, as an EP this works and I like that it's heavier on the guitars than they've been more recently.

Format: 12", insert
Tracks: 5
Cost: £8 new
Bought: Fopp, London
When: 23/05/14
Colour: Black
Etching: none
mp3s: Download code

Jesu - Everyday I Get Closer to the Light From Which I Came

I have a few Jesu albums and, in all honestly, I struggle with all of them. I have the self-titled and Conqueror on cd and neither of them get that much play - they're long and hard work and I don't feel I get much out of them. Lifeline, however, is incredible and whenever I want some brooding showgaze, that record is where I go. Perhaps it's just that I can enjoy his music for shorter periods of time only.

Luckily, Everyday I Get Closer to the Light From Which I Came is a much shorter album. Sadly, it didn't come with a download code, so I've not listened to it as much as I'd like to have. I bought it on something of a whim one day in Banquet - they don't tend to get much stuff like this in, so I think that was a part of it. I think the fact it was only five songs long appealed to me too, given the above. Plus it's on coloured vinyl, which I'm a sucker for. I also find I'm willing to give bands chances beyond the normal limits if they've done at least something that I loved - Lifelines was that for me with Jesu.

It's a nice album - certainly more listenable than Jesu or Conqueror in my opinion. Homesick feels weak lyrically, but Comforter and the title-track are musically far more interesting than I've been used to from Justin. The lengthy The Great Leveller has a lot going for it too - a stretched out intro followed by the first heavy guitars in the album plus a string orchestra. The only thing I don't particularly care for is the hint of auto-tune in the vocals.

Format: 12"
Tracks: 5
Cost: £17 new
Bought: Banquet Records, Kingston
When: 25/01/14
Colour: Gray
Etching: none
mp3s: no

The Front Bottoms - Talon of the Hawk

Very little time past between me first hearing The Front Bottoms and thinking they were the greatest thing - I heard The Beers on a compilation, then Banquet released their album in UK, got them over and I saw them play three times in a week. It was a whirlwind of excitement and great to watch - in that week they went from being these meek guys playing the UK for the first time, sitting on the floor in an in-store at Banquet, to hosting huge sing-a-longs in east London. I saw them a few more times in the months that followed and continued to have a good time.

Then, nearly as quickly as I became a fan, I drifted away from The Front Bottoms. They lost some of the momentum (or so it felt) and released what I thought was a weak follow-up. Talon of the Hawk is a fine album, but I had such high hopes after the self-titled debut. I'd heard Au Revoir (Adios) for the first time at a gig in Kingston and enjoyed it - the jokes worked well on the first listen. Twin Size Mattress was the single released ahead of the album and the best song on there by a long margin (which didn't help with the high expectations). It's proof they can write a great song, which is something I believed on the first record but I've struggled to feel since.

The rest of the album I find hard work. On the first album, I felt I knew all the songs as individuals and they all had something to separate them from the rest; here I find it hard to remember any of them (other than the two I mentioned) and if I do remember much abut them, it's usually negative (Santa Monica is just terrible). I don't like to be so critical, but I had high hopes that didn't work out.

Format: 12", picture sleeve
Tracks: 12
Cost: £11 new
Bought: Banquet Records, Kingston
When: 07/09/13
Colour: Coke
Etching: none
mp3s: Download code

Radiohead - There There

There was definitely a time in my life when I bought vinyl simply because it was there. Back in the early 2000's, it wasn't commonplace to find anything good on vinyl in high street record stores - HMV and the like typically had a small section that was mostly dance 12"s and the occasional good 7". With the HMV in Winchester I thought that by buying all the 7" records they got in that were remotely my taste, they might get more. I wanted to start the vinyl revolution myself, but I suspect it took a lot more than one long-haired dude buying vinyl in Winchester to reach the point we're at now.

A good example of this rampant vinyl buying is this 12". I was a fan of Radiohead (and still am), but was fine with just having the albums. However, this 12" single was a mere £2 in HMV (£1.80 with my student discount!) so I didn't even think twice about buying it.

First thing to note is that There There sounds incredible on 12" at 45rpm; the deeper grooves really benefit and I've never enjoyed the song as much on the album as listening to it here. Worth the price by itself. However, the things I was most excited about at the time were the b-sides - Paperbag Writer and Where Bluebirds Fly. The former is a nice song, and very indicative of where Thom Yorke's solo career was heading, as well as Radiohead to a certain extent (most recent album excluded). It's nice, but definitely not an album-candidate. The latter sounds like what I imagine a stroke is like at the start, and the glitches continue throughout whilst Thom sings some things that might at certain points be words (but mostly aren't). Again, another fine b-side, but I'm glad it wasn't on the album.

Hail to the Thief was a funny album - after the excitement of Kid A (and my inability to get into Amnesiac) I was excited to hear it, but it took a long time to get into. The trick, it turned out, was to listen to all the songs individually, rather than the album as a whole. I stumbled across this trick by accident, after my mp3 player kept playing me great songs from it when I had it on shuffle - eventually I realised there were 14 great songs on that album. A 12" single of one of the (many) highlights then seems incredibly appropriate.

Format: 12"
Tracks: 3
Cost: £1.80 new
Bought: HMV Southampton
When: 08/06/03
Colour: Black
Etching: none
mp3s: no

Rage Against the Machine - Renegades

Rage Against the Machine's last LP was never in the running for the position of "Best RATM album" - being a collection of covers it had no chance of even really comparable. In a lot of ways, that was lucky, the three albums they did write have all gone down in history as being great in their own ways. Renegades makes for a curious addition, albeit a very enjoyable one.

I found this copy of Renegades in a record shop in Bournemouth about 2 years after it was released (for a bargain £9) and a few months after picking up their debut on vinyl. I hadn't bought the cd of Renegades when it came out but remember borrowing a copy from my friend Johnny. It was a good album, but I wasn't into it anywhere near as much as I was their actual albums. A lot of the covers are of old-school hip-hop songs, which I didn't know the originals of (in fact, I don't think I knew any of the originals that well the first time around - a lot have fallen into place since). On top of that, Zach's rapping is great on RATM songs, but not always brilliant on more traditional hip hop.

Microphone Fiend is huge and the whole band shines on it - there isn't a song on the rest of the album that could open it as well as Microphone Fiend does. Renegades of Funk got a lot of play on MTV around the release, so is effectively the single. It starts strong, but all the band are too low in the mix - it could easily be a great RATM song, but the funk aspect is too strong; I miss the metal. Devo's Beautiful World is lovely and thoroughly unexpected. I'm glad Rage didn't write any songs as slow and touching as this, because it wouldn't have worked on any of the albums, so this is a great chance to hear how it might have turned out. Under any other circumstance, I'd love to hear these musicians write and play more songs like this, but not as Rage; it's brilliantly brooding. I'm Housin' has one of the best riffs on the album (closely followed by The Ghost of Tom Joad).

I hadn't heard much Minor Threat when I first heard Renegades - just a few covers - but by the time I got the LP I was a big fan of Minor Threat. I've heard a lot of Minor Threat covers in my time, and this sits somewhere in the middle - not great but not bad. Zach does a good job of Ian's "what the fuck have you done?", but it doesn't hurt anywhere near as much as when Ian sings it. The flow from that to Cypress Hill's How I Could Just Kill a Man doesn't work in my opinion - it's moments like that that remind you you're listening to a collection of songs, not an album.

One final note, I love the poem on the picture sleeve (and spread across a number of pages in the cd booklet) - it's just brilliantly simple and concise. I'm not much of a poetry fan, but I like that one a lot.

Format: 12", picture sleeve
Tracks: 12
Cost: £9 new
Bought: Bournemouth
When: 29/10/02
Colour: Black
Etching: none
mp3s: no

Great Cynics - Like I Belong

Like I Belong is Great Cynics's second album, and it's a perfectly fine record. I've been keeping up with the band since before they were a band of more than one person (and before the "Great"); their first album was brilliant and I routinely found the songs in my head for a year or so after it came out. For reasons I can't remember, I bought the cd rather than the vinyl (I think it was simply that Banquet only had the cd that day, or maybe it just cheaper and I was feeling thrifty that day. It came with a fridge magnet, but at some point I lost that. I'm not often so careless with memories or belongings).

About two-and-a-half years later, Like I Belong came out. I was excited - I'd seen the band play an incredible set at Fest and it felt like all the songs from that first album had become stand-out tracks. I enjoy Like I belong, but I've never made the same connection with it. The songs are all nice, but few have those moments that really grab you - Younger Than Everyone, Back to Hackney and One Like You are all highlights, but they don't appear until the second side. The albums that followed were more adventurous in different ways, and it worked (more on those another time).

When I want to listen to Great Cynics, I feel like I choose fairly arbitrarily between their albums (although perhaps less-so the first one, because I know I'll have those songs in my head for weeks). But when I choose Like I Belong I come away less satisfied than when I choose the others. Like I said, it's a good album, but I've just never hit a stride with it. Maybe one day I will.

Format: 12", insert
Tracks: 13
Cost: £15 new
Bought: Banquet Records
When: 25/01/14
Colour: Black
Etching: none
mp3s: Download code

The Evens - The Odds

The Evens had released two albums before I'd ever even heard of them, which I still find odd. I'm a big fan of Minor Threat and Fugazi and so are many people I know - I have no idea how so much time passed before I heard that Ian MacKaye was releasing new music. The strangest thing was that the friend who finally introduced them to me was mostly into dance music, but happened to also enjoy The Evens. He'd put a song on a mixtape for another friend that he was playing on a ski trip a few years ago - in amongst a lot of minimal techno, there was this song by The Evens. Given the music around it, it made even more of an impression.

A while later I found this copy of their third album, The Odds, in All Ages in Camden. I was excited to finally hear more of the band. It sounded roughly how I remembered - relaxed but interesting. Ian's voice is so distinctive that I recognised it on the song on the mixtape and I love that it fills a Fugazi-shaped hole in my life. Amy Farina's voice is great too and absolutely soars on Warble Factor. The relative simplicity that comes from only having two instruments adds a lot somehow - it makes the songs more inviting somehow.

I've got a lot of enjoyment from The Odds over the years. It doubles as one of those rare records that is genuinely a great listen, but also you can play in polite company (which is hard to find in my record collection). I can't imagine how anyone could not enjoy songs like King of Kings or Competing With the Till. I've not picked up The Evens or Get Evens yet, but I plan to. It's only that I haven't seen them in shops that has stopped me from getting them so far. I'm looking forward to the day I find them very much.

Format: 12", picture sleeve
Tracks: 13
Cost: £11 new
Bought: All Ages, Camden
When: 04/10/14
Colour: Black
Etching: Side A: "Fred, Cath and beyond"
mp3s: Download code

Gnarwolves - Fun Club

By the first time I saw Gnarwolves, there was already a buzz around them. I'm not sure how long they'd been together by that point, but I remember reading their name a lot before seeing them support Lemuria in The Peel in Kingston in 2012. I also remember tweeting about how impressed I was whilst on the bus home afterwards; they'd clearly lived up to their hype and more that night.

Nearly a year later, I picked up the reissue of their Fun Club 7", having missed out on their already-sold-out 7" CRU (I think I ordered this a long time before May but it took a while to actually get pressed). It was released on four different colours, and the most limited (black with silver glitter) had already sold out. This copy is the orange and blue swirl, of which there were 200 copies, and it is a very attractive colour vinyl indeed, as you can see in the pictures below.

An added part of the appeal here was the bonus 7" of covers. I've enjoyed Converge live on a few occasions, but I've never really enjoyed them on record. The Gnarwolves cover doesn't add much for me, but it's nice hearing them play something that heavy. The sleeve lists the second cover as Green Day's Pulling Teeth, but the song they play is very much Basket Case. It's a fine cover of a good song. They also cover Black Flag's Gimme Gimme Gimme (because everyone loves a Black Flag cover), although the break between the experimental guitar and the hardcore is less clear than on the original (and the highlight of the song, to be honest), and finally an AFI song that I don't know much about (but has that same AFI style about it). Overall, the covers seem to represent a good selection of the music I imagine the band listen to and are influenced by, so it's a nice addition. Also, given Gnarwolves improbable reach, I imagine a lot of their fans first heard of Converge and maybe even Black Flag because of these covers (that said, these songs didn't make it onto the compilation LP, so maybe haven't been heard that widely).

As for the original 7", the songs are pretty great. Highlights are Decay (with its doom bass-line before the break) and Reaper (with the chanted vocals). Impressively, they fit five songs into a 7" played at 45rpm, but then again, that's what I was expecting after that set in Kingston. I've mostly kept up with the band and their unexpected levels of success, so there'll be more records to talk about at some point in the future.

Format: Double 7", gatefold sleeve
Tracks: 9
Cost: £11.50 new
Bought: Dog's Knight website
When: 20/05/13
Colour: Orange with blue swirl
Etching: none
mp3s: Download code

Godspeed You Black Emperor! - Slow Riot for New Zero Kanada

I'm a big fan of Godspeed and I have a lot of time for them, which is lucky because it often takes a lot of time to listen to them - a lot of their albums are long. That's why this EP is such an interesting release - it's the Godspeed album you listen to when you don't have two hours to spare. At 27 minutes long - one 10-minute song and the other 17-minutes, it's certainly not a normal EP either, but that's kind of the charm.

I got into Godspeed in an odd order, but this was my third purchase, swiftly followed by Yanqui U.X.O.. It's probably most similar to the debut in a lot of way - the songs don't mess around so much and it fits onto a single LP. Moya has a slow build up (and a very enjoyable one - it has a very full sound from the start) but quickly begins rushing and reaches an excellent break - it's everything you want from a Godspeed song. BBF3, which plays at 33prm rather than 45, features a very memorable rant either side of these guitars and violins that seem to take turns in building up to another huge peak (and just for good luck, there's another huge crescendo at the very end, where the drums get to shine alongside the violins).

If you were trying to get into the band, I'd say this could be a strong starting point - it certainly displays everything the band are known for, but at their most concise. It's a very rewarding half-an-hour.

Format: 12", picture sleeve, insert
Tracks: 2
Cost: £7 new
Bought: Banquet Records
When: 07/09/13
Colour: Black
Etching: none
mp3s: no

The Mountain Goats - Get Lonely

Get Lonely was the first Mountain Goats record I heard. I've not been listening to the band for long and only have a few albums so far, but it's been very rewarding getting to know the band's work and I'm excited for the many, many albums I've not heard yet.

I'd never really heard much about the band until I met my friend Aled's friend, Criddle, who was a massive fan. We met at the Jeff Mangum-curated All Tomorrow's Parties festival; The Mountain Goats had been due to play but couldn't make the rescheduled dates so had to cancel. Criddle was pissed but still had a great time. A while later he posted a link to a song on Facebook and I listened to it and very much enjoyed it. Right now, I can't remember what the song was, but if I tried I could work it out from what I remember of the video. After that point I decided I should make an effort to get into the band.

The first opportunity I was presented with was in Arrow's Aim, a small record shop in Gainesville that predominantly sold the punk records the town was well-known for. I can't remember if they had any other Mountain Goats LPs, but I added Get Lonely to my stack of purchases and was very eager to hear it on my return to the UK. About a month later I found Transcendental Youth in Banquet (their most recent album at the time) and quickly expanded my collection.

I like Get Lonely, but I have no idea where it stands in the generally-accepted ordering of their albums (or even chronologically, either, for that matter). It didn't blow me away on the first few listens - the first highlights don't really appear until tracks three and four, Half Dead and the title-track. Moon Over Goldsboro, In Hidden Places, Woke Up New and If You See Light are really great too - it seems my favourites come in pairs. Woke Up New is definitely my highlight of the album - lyrically it's as sombre as the rest of the album, but musically it's almost the exact opposite.

However, what was instantly evident was that the songwriting was incredible and that even if I wasn't a fan of every song, it'd be worth getting further into the band for the ones I do like. So far it's been going very well and I imagine there'll be many more posts about The Mountain Goats over the coming years.

Format: 12"
Tracks: 12
Cost: £11.20 new
Bought: Arrow's Aim, Gainesville
When: 04/11/13
Colour: Black
Etching: none
mp3s: no

One Last Wish - 1986

I bought this album towards the end of the Tuesday-record-from-Spillers year. I almost certainly had never heard of One Last Wish before going into the shop that day (were they mentioned in Our Band Could Be Your Life? Even if they were, I doubt that registered at the time). I can't remember perfectly, but I strongly suspect the sticker Spillers had written on the sleeve said something about them being a legendary hardcore/emo band featuring members of Fugazi and Rites of Spring, which was definitely sufficient to get my interest.

1986 was recorded in 1986, released on cd on Dischord in 1999 and then got reissued on vinyl in 2008, which is when I got it. I'd got the Rites of Spring album two years before (after hearing a song on an NME compilation (!) that my friend gave me - the theme was bands that Kurt Cobain liked) and was pleased that One Last Wish sounded similar. That said, over the years, I've found myself turning to Rites of Spring more often than One Last Wish. 1986 is a solid record, but has fewer stand out moments (Loss Like a Seed is strong, as is One Last Wish). Guy's vocals are a highlight in general - they're very distinctive and passionate, which I like.

Very broadly, there feels like there's a few less-heavy influences mixed into their sound. It almost feels at times like someone took 95% Rites of Spring and 5% Beach Boys, if that's not a completely ridiculous thing to say; it works quite well.

Format: 12", picture sleeve
Tracks: 12
Cost: £9 new
Bought: Spillers Records
When: 02/12/08
Colour: Black
Etching: Side A: "R.I.P. Rodrigo Rjoas de Negri" Side B: "O.L.W. = B.W."
mp3s: Download code