Manic Street Preachers - Generation Terrorists [20th Anniversary LP]

I am the worst person I know. I bought this record nearly eight months ago and I've only just broken the seal. I sometimes wonder if I'm a record collector or just someone who likes spending money.

I'd seen this copy of the 20th anniversary double LP of Generation Terrorists a bunch of times in the Fopp in Oxford and regularly thought "I should buy that". On what would turn out to be my last visit to Fopp before it closed down in the recent HMV collapse, I finally decided to buy a copy. I guess I was feeling rich enough to finally spare £20 on an album I already had eight copies of (yes, eight. Nine if you include the Japanese Stars & Stripes mini-album version). Of course, this version is materially different to the others because it has Theme From M.A.S.H. tacked on the end. It's also remastered, but I'm incapable of ever hearing such differences - even on albums I've heard countless times over the last 20 years (wow, in October it'll be 20 years exactly since I first heard Generation Terrorists - it's funny, at the time it felt like an old album, because it'd been out seven years and they'd already been five different bands, but now to think it was only seven years old makes it seem positively recent). Does it sound nicer because it's been remastered, or is it because it's the newest vinyl copy I have (and not a shitty picture disc)? Who can say.

As well as being remastered, there's a nice 16-page booklet to go along with the release. The boxset version had an arguably nicer booklet featuring the same essay from Simon Price so I've not missed out on any exciting content by not opening it until now. As for Theme From M.A.S.H., I have it on vinyl on a handful of other releases so the appeal of hearing it on vinyl wasn't a big driver. It's interesting though that they decided to append that and not A Vision of Dead Desire like on the Japanese version. M.A.S.H. is definitely the better song, and I guess there's something nice about cramming the other single from that era onto the album.

We should talk about the fact that this incredible album has sat in my collection for so long without the needle going anywhere near the grooves. Basically, I buy more music than I have time to listen to. I'm trying to stop, but it's hard; it's difficult to overcome the habit of a lifetime. Having a baby takes up a lot of my time, and I don't have a record player in a room where I can also play with her (yet - I've got a plan for that). That leaves me with an hour or so each evening to play records. I have a strange commitment to this stupid blog, so when I do finally sit down in front of my turntable I have a choice - play an album I'm yet to play, write about an album or actually spend some time playing those pesky albums that didn't come with a download code (I play everything on the turntable for the first time, but subsequent plays often end up being from mp3s at work or on the bus). For the last eight months, this album has constantly found itself at the back of that queue - the fact I know it like the back of my hand hasn't helped push it to the top.

Huh, well this is actually a perfect example of why it's quite so hard to keep up - half way through that sentence (and the first version of Repeat) the baby woke up so I had to go and settle her. After that was done, it was a safer bet to just go to sleep and get some hours in before she woke again. Somehow yesterday passed too; it's a miracle I ever post anything any more. Update, she woke this time during Methadone Pretty.

There's no point in me actually talking about the songs here - I've done that in the links above at least once. There's also very little left to be said about Generation Terrorists, the incredible, sprawling, ambitious beginning it was. I'm still amazed at how they could go from songs like New Art Riot to Motorcycle Emptiness, Little Baby Nothing and Condemned to Rock 'n' Roll in such a short time. It's always exciting to hear these songs; I hope it always will be.

Format: Double 12", gatefold sleeve, 12" booklet
Tracks: 19
Cost: £20 new
Bought: Fopp, Oxford
When: 04/10/18
Colour: Black
Etching: none
mp3s: no

Sufjan Stevens - Enjoy Your Rabbit

This isn't the album I thought it was. It is really quite bad.

Years ago, when I was getting into Sufjan Stevens, my friend Steve told me that The Avalanche, the album of off-cuts and out-takes from Illinois was almost as good as Illinois itself, and every bit as essential (I'd not agree so strongly, but that's a topic for another day); I made a mental note to check it out. I'd got Illinois, Seven Swans and Michigan (in that order) over the course of 15 months, and thought I had a pretty good idea of what Sufjan Stevens was all about. Then I bought his debut album A Sun Came and hated it - it felt like he'd just thrown the music from countless different cultures at a wall to see what sticks. I haven't played it in years. Then he released The Age of Adz, which did equally little for me, but in totally different ways. I did however really enjoy the All Delighted People EP, so it wasn't all bad around then. The point I'm trying to get to is that I don't care for everything that Sufjan has put out and I was kinda burned out from trying by around 2011; perhaps I'd just got the best albums in my first three goes.

I knew there was another early album, but I made no effort to search it out. I can't remember if I'd heard bad things about it or not, or even what it was like, I just couldn't be bothered to check it out at that point. Fast forward to 2016 and Fopp had just opened in Oxford, filling a city-centre-shaped record shop void that had existed since HMV closed down just after I moved here. I went in there and bought a few things, my loyalty still leaning towards Truck Store down Cowley Road. In the racks of vinyl I saw this album and a few things happened: I remembered there was a Sufjan album I didn't have that Steve had said was really good, and I was pleased that there was a double vinyl that I might enjoy for only £11. Somewhere in my mind, I thought this was The Avalanche, despite it clearly not being that record; that is, I thought the album Steve had said was good was this album. I forgot entirely that there was another early Sufjan album I didn't have. This album wasn't the interesting out-takes from a great album; this was in fact 80 minutes of instrumental, electronic ramblings.

How does anyone start their career like this: album of multi-cultural folk songs, album of electronic wank, excellent album of songs about Michigan? It baffles me. The trio of albums I started with - Michigan, Seven Swans and Illinois have so much in common and something you might consider to be the "Sufjan Stevens sound". It's crazy to think that he bounced around wildly for two albums before settling on exactly that sound for the next three.

I must admit, there is the distinct possibility that this is only the second time I've heard these songs. The album came with a download code, but I don't think I've ever hit play on them. There is literally no point in my day when I want to hear this music. Year of the Boar sounds a bit like the crazy and (intentionally)-uneasy listening moments in Clint Mansell's Requiem For a Dream soundtrack, but at least there they're mostly brief moments that you're rewarded for by the way of the incredible music around it. There is no reward on Enjoy Your Rabbit. Every now and again, there are moments or hints of things that are almost enjoyable, but they're hidden deep and don't stay around for long. OK, The Year of the Dragon is quite good, I'll give it that, but that's one song in 80 minutes - a very long 80 minutes

The sticker on the front says this album might be "Sufjan's magnum opus", but the clue should have been that I've never heard of the institution giving the quote. The back of the record says "programmatic songs for the animals of the Chinese Zodiac", where the first word should have been another clue. This album isn't for me.

Format: Double 12", 12" booklet
Tracks: 14
Cost: £11 new
Bought: Fopp, Oxford
When: 01/08/16
Colour: Black
Etching: none
mp3s: Download code

Deftones - Around the Fur

I've been gradually buying the Deftones back-catalogue on vinyl. A couple of years ago they all became very readily available, which took away the pressure to buy everything straight away. I've had White Pony on vinyl since it came out and I'd always thought it'd be nice for it to sit there amongst their many other excellent albums, something that is now nearly the case.

Fopp in Oxford has had them all in pretty much since they opened, so every now and again I buy one. Every time I get served by the same member of staff and each time we have the same conversation about Deftones - it's a perfectly nice conversation, and I'm all for conversations with people who work in record shops, but I'm finding it increasingly hard to take as much interest as I did the first time. She saw them at Reading, Chino is awesome, the White Pony is an incredible record. Luckily, I can chat happily about Deftones for hours - I also think Chino is a great frontman and I have endless amounts of time for White Pony. My main worry is that one of these days she'll realise that this isn't the first Deftones album she's sold me, that I've been having the same conversation back each time and that I'm odd for not mentioning that we've already had that conversation. Two albums to go, it might not happen.

Anyway, recently I bought Around the Fur, Deftones' second album. When I got into them they'd only released this and Adrenaline, and I'd started with Adrenaline. I paid a surprisingly pricey £9 for a second hand copy of this album on cd at a record fair in 2001, just over a year after White Pony had come out. I'd heard the album a bunch of times beforehand, but was pleased to finally have my own copy. The songs with brackets in the titles, My Own Summer (Shove It) and Be Quiet and Drive (Far Away) had been on heavy rotation on MTV so I was even more familiar with those two, here opening up each side of the vinyl. The album came out twenty years ago, and I've been listening to it for most of those; in particular I've heard those two singles an unfathomably large of times and they still sound great. Both are instantly recognisable from the off and have sent a shiver down my spine each time I've heard those first few notes live. The whole album makes me wish I was still young and fit enough to throw myself around the way Chino does.

It's hard to talk about the other highlights of the album because there aren't any songs that I don't think are great. That said, Lhabia, Around the Fur, Lotion and Headup are all incredible. Dai the Flu is the most White Pony-esque song on the record and wouldn't have sounded too out of place on that record. Headup was, of course, the song that introduced us to Max Cavalera and Soulfly (being a few years too young for Sepultura's peak), which isn't particularly worth noting; it is a great song though. MX is a fun closer to the album with a strong riff. The cd version is actually a bit ruined by the long wait in silence for the bonus track Damone, one I can’t remember too well off the top of my head. I should make an effort to listen to it soon.

Format: 12", insert
Tracks: 10
Cost: £16 new
Bought: Fopp, Oxford
When: 10/01/18
Colour: Black
Etching: none
mp3s: Download code

Deftones - Deftones

Deftones released their fourth album in my last year of college. I'd been a fan for a few years and had already found myself with six different versions of their incredible third album, White Pony (the limited edition red and black versions, the US reissue with the large pony on the cover, the original, a promo and the double LP); suffice to say, I was very excited for the self-titled follow-up.

The week beforehand I'd rushed into town to buy the Minerva single (on cd and 7") and did the same the following week for the album. I had some free periods on Mondays, so took the bus back home, played the album very loudly and returned to college after lunch. They were an important band to me and still are now, which is one of the things I love them for the most.

Deftones is a brilliantly heavy record - I still remember being pummelled by it on that first listen. In hindsight, I love that it wasn't like White Pony even if at the the time I kinda wished it was. The singles Hexagram and Minerva are both huge. Minerva had been plastered across MTV that early-summer and walks a thin line being being a fairly poppy single but also having Stephen Carpenter's guitar beating you down. It's stood the test of time remarkably well. When Girls Telephone Boys is a highlight too - it has obvious parallels to Elite but is more listenable - and Bloody Cape could easily have been a single with that chorus. Lucky You should have come as more as a surprise as a odd-ball song on that first listen, but I'd been reading the sleeve notes and could tell it was going to be more experimental by the additional writing credit to DJ Crook. I've since learnt my lesson to not read the details in advance lest I spoil the surprise. Overall, it lacks the epics that they'd begun writing on White Pony, but is an album of huge songs, which is all anyone really wants.

Recently, their back-catalogue has become quite readily available on vinyl, so it seems rude to not have the other LPs sit alongside White Pony in my collection. However, I've been fairly rubbish at actually buying them - the fact that they're always in record shops takes away the fun a bit and there's usually more urgent purchases to make. However, I have bought a few and will round out the collection in due time.

Format: 12", insert
Tracks: 11
Cost: £15 new
Bought: Fopp Oxford
When: 07/07/17
Colour: Black
Etching: none
mp3s: no

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

Low - C'Mon

The other week week I discovered that the shop I used to live above in Oxford had been turned into a Fopp. Needless to say, I was pretty pleased - central Oxford has been without a music shop since HMV closed down and, whilst I try to do most my record shopping with independent record shops, it is nice to have somewhere to get cheap dvds (especially around family birthdays and Christmas). I still plan to take regular trips to Truck, but it's going to be hard to not spend too much money in Fopp - the convenience is one factor, but the surprisingly good selection of vinyl will be another (metal was a bit slim on the ground but the general rock section had some healthy back-catalogue stuff).

Since it was my first visit, I couldn't help buying a few records and one of the ones I picked up was C'Mon by Low for a very reasonable £10. In a lot of ways, this was the first Low album I really got. I think seeing them live around the time it came out helped - I've seen them live a bunch of times since and their set-list is often new-song heavy. I'll probably never hear as many of these songs played live as I did that first time, which is a shame but I'm very glad it happened.

Anyway, a couple of years ago I was occasionally contributing to a music website and one such contribution was a review of C'Mon by Low. I didn't have the vinyl at the time and since this blog is about my vinyl it was nice to have a chance to write about an album I only had on cd. The rest of this post is then what I had to say about C'Mon a couple of years ago:

I started listening to Low in a fairly round-about way. A couple of years ago I discovered the Daytrotter sessions online and spent hours pouring through the music on there. I listened to the session by Retribution Gospel Choir solely because I liked their name, and from there made the natural jump to Low as they share the same singer. Low's session really blew me away and immediately went into the top 3 of bands I'd discovered through Daytrotter (I wrote a crazed email to my friend Aled telling him how much I thought he'd love Low, only to discover he was already a huge fan). Anyway, I picked up a couple of their albums, but the problem with bands with huge back-catalogues is that the scatter-gun approach to buying them rarely works - I had no idea where to start and maybe didn't hear the best ones first. So, for a while they remained a band I quite enjoyed, up until I saw them play Jeff Mangum's All Tomorrow's Parties festival when I fell in love again. Turns out Low are truly amazing live.

After that I bought C'Mon (safely opting for the £5 CD rather than the nearly £20 LP) and it is far and away my favourite Low album. I may not be an expert on the band, and others may disagree, but if you're thinking about getting into Low, I'd say start here. The ten songs are undeniably Low in their minimalism and atmospheric feel, but for me there's a whole load more going on. Uplifting and painfully dark are there side by side and whilst my personal favourites are the darker songs (like Witches and $20) the others work to balance the mood out. My criticism of the other Low albums I have is that the songs are often brilliant build-ups that stop before they reach where I want them to go, but that's not the case here.

However, the true highlight of the album for me comes on track nine with the epic Nothing But Heart. If I wasn't here writing about the whole album I could probably write an entire piece about this one song. I recommend C'Mon as a whole, but I can't encourage you to listen to this song enough - it's been one of my favourite songs since I first heard it and a year later I still can't get enough of it. The brief intro never fails to remind me of Answering Machine by The Replacements (another incredible song. My old housemate Nicky once said of it that he was always waiting for the drums to appear but loved that they never did). But we just get a fleeting glimpse of this guitar before Alan's vocals take over with four lines of lyrics that carry us for the next 8 minutes; there's a hint of Mimi backing him up as we hear "I'm nothing but heart" over and over again, but it's the instruments that appear from nowhere and float hauntingly to the front of your mind that bring the song to life. The build-up is beautifully slow giving you time to appreciate each subtle change. The finest moment is how the wavering electric guitar somehow changes into Mimi's incredible and almost indistinguishable vocals that have come out of nowhere. The guitars and drums are streaming ahead but they're now sat on this cloud of floating vocals and before you know it the 8 minutes have passed, the song is over and I'm left back in the real world that Nothing But Heart dragged me away from.

The final song, Something's Turning Over, and it's gentle strum mostly serve to give me 3 minutes to re-adjust and get myself together before I have to change the CD. I usually need the whole 3 minutes.

Format: 12", picture sleeve
Tracks: 10
Cost: £10 new
Bought: Fopp Oxford
When: 01/08/16
Colour: Black
Etching: none
mp3s: Download code

Godspeed You! Black Emperor - Yanqui U.X.O.

Yanqui U.X.O. was the fourth Godspeed record I nbought. I'd had F# A# for a couple of years and 'Allehujah! since it came out. I very quickly became a fan of Godspeed but took a while to pick up all their older albums. I got Slow Riot for Zero Kanada and Yanqui U.X.O. within a month of each other. I was worried that I'd struggle to distinguish between the two without having a long time to get to know them individually, but Slow Riot very much has an EP-feel to it, which helps.

09-15-00 explodes into huge violins then falls away to a marching drum, but then spends a lot of time drifting (nicely) without going anywhere again - the hope is that it'll go mental again but it doesn't. Rockets Fall on Rocket Falls starts much spookier and keeps its calm for quite a while despite itself, and eventually explodes into something truly magnificent with layers upon layers of instruments and a swirling guitar/violin/something. Motherfucker=Redeemer straddles two sides of vinyl and spans about 35 minutes. It's instantly beautiful. The second half takes a while to get going again but it's hugely exciting when it does start building up and then reaches its peak. George Bush Cut Up While Talking feels a bit unnecessary but is easily skipped.

I hadn't planned to go record shopping on the day I bought this - I was visiting my wife's (although she was my girlfriend then) relatives in Cambridge and we were exploring the town centre. I stumbled across a record stall in the market and found a couple of albums I fancied there whilst everyone else was browsing other stalls. Later I popped into Fopp whilst Vicky and her aunt were in another shop and found this album and Mr Beast by Mogwai. Not only were they albums I hadn't seen in shops often, both were reasonably priced, so I picked them up too. I certainly hadn't left the house expecting to buy four LPs that day, but it was a nice way to return.

Format: Double 12", gatefold sleeve, insert
Tracks: 4
Cost: £16 new
Bought: Fopp Cambridge
When: 05/10/13
Colour: Black
Etching: none
mp3s: no