Fucked Up - Year of the Tiger

When I was getting into Fucked Up I was "warned" about their Chinese Zodiac series. I can't remember who it was that told me about them (it was someone I knew in South Wales), but they said that they were too weird and not a patch on the albums. Whilst they're very different to the songs they put on their albums, I think the Zodiac songs I've heard have been great and I love seeing what they do when they let themselves play on for 15-20 minutes. It's like they're two different bands, and I enjoy both in different ways.

Year of the Tiger was the first of the series I heard, finding a copy in Banquet around the time it came out in 2012. Between getting into them in 2008 and buying this 12", I'd seen the band a bunch of times and fallen in love with David Comes to Life, my album of the year in 2011. Whilst I might not have been in the right place to get into such a record four years earlier in South Wales, I was fully on board with Year of the Tiger from the off. For a hardcore band, they seem to have taken to writing very long songs well - Year of the Tiger holds my attention from the start and never feels boring or relies on repetition to pad it out. The mixture of the vocals and the piano hiding in the background add so much. It's a great song and I play it quite often. Onno (Excerpt) isn't as enjoyable on it's own - it floats through some interesting moments over its 22-minutes but does so very gradually, instrumentally and kind of hypnotically. When I was warned about the series, I thought it could be more like this, which might justify such a warning. However, with Year of the Tiger on the a-side, it's a 100% recommendation instead.

I've been meaning to buy more of the series, but I don't often find them in my local record shops - so far I only have the Japanese 7" of Year of the Pig and Year of the Snake. Part of the problem is that I have a terrible memory for which ones I have, but that's more a reflection on my bad memory than it is a comment about the series itself. I'm looking forward to hearing more of them as and when I find them.

Format: 12", insert

Tracks: 2

Cost: £4.65 new

Bought: Banquet Records, Kingston

When: 08/02/12

Colour: Black

Etching: none

mp3s: Download code

MewithoutYou - [A -> B] Life

In 2007, my last year of university, my friend Hugh posted me a mix cd featuring a load of stuff he'd been listening to at the time (and, for some reason, The Stone Roses). It was a mixture of South Wales bands he was starting to listen to, like Taint and Gunrack?, new discoveries like William Elliott Whitmore, and The Smashing Pumpkins, a band he'd finally conceded were actually very good. Another particular highlight was a band called mewithoutYou - he'd included the song Torches Together from their second album, Catch For Us the Foxes, and I was enjoying it greatly. There were some strong moments on that cd, and the demo of Young Hearts by Gunrack? remains the only version of that song I have, despite it being a truly excellent song. We'd go on to live with Nicky, the singer of Gunrack?, for a year, see Taint more times than I care to count and watch William Elliott Whitmore play an incredible, sold-out 2-hour set in The Globe on a crazy-hot night with pretty much everyone we new in South Wales under the same roof. The cd was strangely precedent of the music that would shape the next two years that I spent living in Cardiff.

In October that year, we were settled in Cardiff and I'd just started my new job. Finally with enough money to start buying music again (it'd been a tight couple of months) I went to Kelly's Records in the market to see what they had that I might like. They had on their perpetual sale of three cds for £15 - not matter what season it was, the same sale existed but with a different season-related name. I was pleased to find a bunch of albums that you wouldn't normally find in record stores (including Fantastic Damage by El-P, which for some reason I agreed to let Hugh have, a decision I still regret). Finally getting to the point, they had a cd copy of [A->B] Life by mewithoutYou, and I was very excited to finally play it.

I'd been keen to check them out more since hearing Torches Together but not had a chance. Their name came up again that summer in an entirely unrelated manner - I was on holiday with some friends and got bored of the book I was reading, so started reading the ones Nadine had brought with her - she was taking a course about time travel in literature, so had copies of Slaughterhouse Five and The Time Traveller's Wife. Slaughterhouse Five gripped me and [Spoiler alert] I was amazed to turn the page to see the words "Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt" in giant letters at a key point in the book (if you've not read it and ignored my warning, I'm sorry for spoiling that part for you). I can remember it vividly, sat on this pristine white-sand beach in Croatia reading about horrible details of WWII. I spent a lot of time on the rest of the trip thinking about that book and that phrase in particular. When I got back I googled it and saw that it was also the name of a song by mewithoutYou from their first album. I was even more keen to check them out to hear that song. Of the six cds I bought that day in Kelly's, this one was at the top of my listening pile.

The song itself is an anomaly on the album, it starts quietly with sung vocals and swiftly moves into a wall of noise with the song title signally the break. The vocals remain in the background with the rest of the band dominating the sound over the top, unlike anything else they've ever recorded. Initially I was a bit disappointed that a song with such a strong title would sound so different to what I was expecting given the other songs I'd heard, but now I love it for the oddity it is. The rest of the album provides countless examples of the brilliant shouty hardcore I'd come to expect from the song I'd heard beforehand. I’ve always enjoyed bands with unique takes on vocals, and was listening to a lot of post-hardcore and screamo bands (as much as I hate that term, it is appropriate), so was in the perfect place for mewithoutYou. Bullet to Binary was a perfect opener and Nice and Blue, Gentlemen and Silencer are incredible songs (the first of the three with the excellent line "I'm not the boy I once was, but I'm not the man that I'll be"). The Ghost panicked me at first with it's sung-vocals at the start - I was worried that the spoken-word style was a rare treat and actually they sung most of the songs, I was pleased to be proven wrong by the time the chorus hit.

Recently, the band have been touring playing this album and I was a bit gutted I didn't get to see them play it. As it was my entry point to the band, I'd have loved to have made it to one of the shows. I gradually bought all their other albums over the years, mostly on vinyl and had been thinking about completing the collection eventually. I was pleased to see that they reissued this one and picked it up along with the reissue of their debut EP I Never Said I was Brave (featuring far heavier versions of a couple of songs from here). I got screwed on customs fees by the post office, so they ended up costing me way more than I was expecting - it went from "on the pricey side of reasonable" to "expensive". I need to find a better way of getting records from the US. The colour of the vinyl looks absolutely lovely, which made up for the customs blow. As a nice bonus, the acoustic version of I Never Said I was Brave from the end of the cd is included (without the long, silent wait!).

Format: 12", picture sleeve, insert

Tracks: 13

Cost: £31.70 new

Bought: Band's webstore

When: 27/01/18

Colour: Half gold / half black

Etching: none

mp3s: Download code

Manic Street Preachers - Know Your Enemy

Know Your Enemy is 16 songs and over an hour long, but somehow they managed to squeeze it onto one piece of vinyl. It was released in 2001, which was probably the lowest point in vinyl's popularity, so it was presumably something of an afterthought. I stumbled across this copy in Selectadisc in Nottingham three years later, where it had been sat neglected all that time, for an incredible £4 (vinyl still wasn't that popular in 2004 either, it seems). It was in perfect condition and I was very pleased to add it to my collection, especially at that price. It has since been reissued on 180-gram vinyl, but I can't help but wonder if that adds nothing when the songs are so tightly packed; the grooves have to be so shallow to accommodate the runtime. Ideally I'd say it needs a double LP reissue - fingers crossed. The cover of McCarthy's We Are All Bourgeois Now is sadly, but understandably, omitted. It's a shame, because it's a great bonus track.

Know Your Enemy was the first album that came out after I became a huge Manics fan - the previous album being the one that got me into them. I was a pretty nerdy teen, so wanted to hear the album as a complete album on the day it came out - I'd daydreamed about how cool it would have been to sit down and play Generation Terrorists or The Holy Bible in whole the day they came out and wanted that for this album at least (I can't say I've done the same for every album since, but most). I walked into town after after school on Monday 19th March 2001 and bought my copy on cd for £12.99. Somewhere I still have the receipt. I paid in exact change, because I somehow thought that was important. Like I said, nerdy teen. I then got the bus home, went up to my room, lay on the bed and placed the left speaker of my hifi next to my left ear, the right next to my right and hit play.

I'd made a point of not hearing the singles Found That Soul and So Why So Sad before the album came out. There was a small piece in Kerrang! Magazine about the album that I purposely didn't read until I'd heard the album. I wanted nothing to possibly alter my enjoyment of the record as a complete work. Friends had heard the new singles and had the fairly-standard opinions that Found That Soul was great and So Why So Sad wasn't, but I couldn't really avoid hearing something about it.

At the time, I enjoyed it. I remember hearing songs I thought were really good, and the band showing more sides to their songwriting style than they had previously. I wasn't blown away, which in itself was something of a let down. Perhaps I'd built up too much anticipation for it - it's worth noting that White Pony came out the year before so had given me the excitement of the first new album from a band I loved that had proved to be seminal. Given how strong The Masses Against the Classes had been, I think I was justified in hyping it up so much. The influence of that song was strong throughout - the album had far more fuzz than they'd ever used and it was a world away from the clean production of This is My Truth Tell Me Yours, probably intentionally. I suspect that change wrecked havoc with their career, at least in the eyes of the record label; a slick, clean follow-up would have been so easy, but so un-Manics.

17 years later, I can't say it's gone down in history as one of their greats. There are some really strong songs (Found That Soul, Wattsville Blues, Freedom of Speech Won't Save My Children - seems that I love the songs where they found their inner grunge band), but none that have become absolute classics in my opinion; when I see the band and they don't play anything from this album, I don't walk away wishing they had. There are some singles that did little for me initially but have become songs I do really enjoy (Ocean Spray, Let Robeson Sing) and some oddities that I quite enjoy (Royal Correspondent). There are also a lot of other songs - I'd struggle to even say whether there was a Manics song called Dead Martyrs or The Convalescent let alone tell you they were album songs and not b-sides. The funny thing is that Dead Martyrs has a huge chorus that I'd completely forgotten about.

I don't think culling any songs would have saved it. It's probably the most inconsistent Manics album (Nicky and the fuzzed-up Wattsville Blues being followed by the faux-70's Miss Europa Disco Dancer might be one of the strangest pairing of songs on any album). Over the years that followed, they tried being a few different bands but the albums stuck to those individual themes more consistently. I feel Resistance is Futile might by the first time in the 20th century that they've fully committed to doing what they do best without trying to do/be anything else (and it works - more on that another time). This album is the polar opposite of that.

A lot of this sounds negative, but I do like this album. I don't play it often, but it's an interesting moment in their history. 

Format: 12", picture sleeve

Tracks: 16

Cost: £4 new

Bought: Selectadisc, Nottingham

When: 15/03/04

Colour: Black

Etching: none

mp3s: no