Strand of Oaks - Heal

Somehow this is the first Strand of Oaks record I've written about on here, which is surprising (to me) because I've been listening to them for years now. This record feels like an appropriate place to start, but it turns out this wasn't my starting point after all.

In 2018 the Songs: Molina / Memorial Electric Co shows got announced, including a show in London which I instantly bought tickets for. I love Jason Molina's music and was keen to see the songs played live again (I saw Magnolia Electric Co once, but that was the first time I'd heard them). Standing in for Jason was Timothy Showalter, who records under the name Strand of Oaks. At that point in time, I was pretty sure that was how I first heard the name Strand of Oaks. I text my friend Stubbs about the show as he was a big Molina fan too, and he told me that Strand of Oaks had released a beautiful tribute to Jason in the form of the song JM. I tried to find the song online, but struggled and listened to Pope Kildragon instead, which I really enjoyed.

But it turns out that wasn't the beginning, because I eventually noticed that I'd seen Strand of Oaks at Primavera Sound in 2015. They were the first band we saw on the last day of the festival, and I remember my friend's friend encouraging us to get there in good time such that we could see them (well, I remember him encouraging us to get there in time to see a band, and looking at the first band we saw each day it must have been Strand of Oaks). Sadly, for whatever reason, that show wasn't enough to make a lasting impression on me (but we saw a lot of bands that weekend, so the competition was tough).

Some time later I found a bunch of songs on my iPod from the Daytrotter Session Strand of Oaks recorded in 2010. This dates my first discovery of Strand of Oaks even earlier, because I was deeply into listening to and downloading Daytrotter Sessions for a few months in the spring of 2010. There was a short period between me discovering the archive of incredible music there and it becoming a paid service, but in that time I'd been a huge fan, downloading sessions from bands I loved and trying a bunch of new ones. Exactly what caused me to download the Strand of Oaks session I don't know, but it was likely a favourable write-up on the site. The songs he played that day are from Leave Ruin, an album I've never really got into, so maybe that's why they didn’t make a huge impression on me.

So after two failed starts, third time I got lucky and became a big fan of Timothy's music. The first album of his that I bought was this one, a month after the Songs: Molina show. They'd played JM that night and it was lovely. I'm pretty sure I had heard it prior to that, but it really worked well that night. It's the highlight of the album - dark and brooding - but that's not to diminish the other songs - Shut In is an incredible song too - there's something Springsteen-esque to the echo on the vocals and the guitars somehow make the song sound really uplifting. Goshen '97 is a great opener (I love the Smashing Pumpkins reference). Generally though it comes across as quite a dark album - Mirage Year and For Me are even heavier than JM; Plymouth sandwiched between them serves only to minimise the despair. All in all, I have a lot of time for this album, so I'm glad everything finally clicked with Strand of Oaks.

Format: 12", picture sleeve
Tracks: 10
Cost: £15 new
Bought: Norman Records website
When: 26/10/18
Colour: Black
Etching: none
mp3s: Download

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

Mogwai - Central Belters

 

I feel like curating the Mogwai best-of must have been one of the easiest tasks whoever did it did that week; if you put their back-catalogue on shuffle and took the first three hours of songs that came up, you'd have a collection that was both a) uniquely Mogwai and b) full of bangers. It goes without saying that the actually-curated best-of is an amazing listen and a brilliant use of 12 sides of vinyl and well over three hours of your time.

My Mogwai collection still has some glaring holes, but I've been enjoying gradually working on it – one large hole is their debut album Mogwai Young Team, one of the first albums of theirs I heard (which I bought on cd in Spillers a week after buying The Hawk is Howling). Whilst under-represented here (on paper at least - do we count the original version of Summer separately? Does it's 16-minute runtime balance out the multiple shorter songs from other albums?), it is great to finally have Mogwai Fear Satan on vinyl. There's still something really pleasing about seeing one song take up a whole side of vinyl and Mogwai Fear Satan does that perfectly. It's then quite surprising that the other song that takes up a whole side of vinyl never made it onto an album, despite being a live favourite and ridiculously huge song – it takes a lot of sides of vinyl to get to My Father My King but it is absolutely worth it every time. I suspect at some point after getting most of the LPs on vinyl I'd have got round to seeking out the single, but I'm glad I've been listening to this for the last six years, rather than waiting for the point in my life when I got round to seeking it out. I love that you can see the quiet part in the grooves of the vinyl.

Mogwai have been around long enough to have a number of different eras, and I think I'm firmly a circa-2010 era guy. It might help that The Hawk is Howling was the first album of theirs I heard, but I also love Hardcore Will Never Die and I think Les Revenants is the greatest soundtrack they've done by a good distance – it’s a contender for the "best soundtrack that actually works even better as an album", running against The Fountain, which they were also involved with, although I'm never very sure how much was Clint Mansell and how much was Mogwai. Anyway, as a result I think the selections from those albums are great. The songs from Mr Beast also sound amazing, more-so than I remember them sounding on the actual LP. We're No Here sounds particularly great. The early era has some highs and some lows for me – Summer is a huge way to start (I love the way it races ahead of the xylophone) and Christmas Steps is the highlight of Come On Die Young. I've never really loved that album as much as everyone else seems to, and Cody feels like a bit of a downer here. Similarly, Stanley Kubrick from EP (or EP+6, as I know the release) is a bit nothingy. 

The odds and ends that make up the final two discs are interesting - Hugh Dallas is always good (classic slow build) and Devil Rides with it's vocals from prolific musician Roky Erickson is unexpected and a bit bizarre, but great to hear. Strangely, we get one song from Les Revenants in the usual chronological section as well as one in this section - not sure why. Personally, Hungry Face is the one I associate more with the show, but Wizard Motor is probably the better song in the usual sense. Earth Division is another nice one I wouldn't have heard. I didn't realise until just now that the song itself isn't on the Earth Division EP (which I regret not buying when I saw it in Banquet around the time it came out - I can't remember why I didn't buy it).

It'd be wrong to not dwell on just what a nice package this boxset is too. Each record has one letter from the word "Mogwai" on the cover and a selection of incredibly brightly coloured sleeves, contrasting the grey, fabric-lined outer box. The booklet is brilliantly detailed and a good read - the concert tickets and set-lists from over the years are particularly nice. All this for just under £50 is a ridiculous bargain - they could have charged twice as much and I'd still have bought it and still have been raving about how great it was.

Format: 6x 12", boxset, booklet

Tracks: 34

Cost: £49 new

Bought: Norman Records website

When: 23/10/15

Colour: Black

Etching: None

mp3s: Download code

Run the Jewels - Run the Jewels 2

When Run the Jewels released RTJ2, it felt like everything fell into place. They'd released an album that was truly incredible and everyone uniformly agreed - I don't think I heard (or have heard since) a single bad word about RTJ2. You'd play that album and people would be bowled over; moreover you'd play that album and without fail someone would reveal themselves as an RTJ fan - not that they were necessarily hiding it, but it was people you simply hadn't spoken to about music before. It was great. I was so pleased to see Killer Mike and El-P finally get the respect they deserved; this album propelled them to the place they should have been for years.

They released the album for free on October 24th 2014, and 364 days later I finally bought a copy. I'd planned to get it as soon as it was announced, and then really wanted to get a copy after I heard it. I can't remember why it took so long - maybe it sold out most places at the start. Either way, I picked up this pink vinyl copy (with some money going to a breast cancer charity) and sat down with the lyrics sheet open for the first physical play. Even though I'd played this album a lot in the year before that point, it was incredible reading the lines and hearing these brilliant moments and subtleties that had passed me by. It's been a long time since I've played a record and been so engrossed in the lyrics. Routinely I had to wait for breaks of choruses to go back and re-read some of the lines. Mike and El wrote some incredible verses here. When RTJ3 came out, I had another incredible time reading the lines and I'm so, so looking forward to doing the same thing with RTJ4.

There's no point listing the best raps because I'd end up re-writing huge sections of the lyrics sheet. Similarly, listing the best songs would mean listing most of the song titles. When I wrote about the debut album I said that the first nine tracks were good and then Christmas Fucking Miracle was just a step above it all; on RTJ they take the step-up that song represented, make another step beyond that and wrote 11 whole songs at that level. Oh My Darling Don't Cry is a perfect example of that, and it's only the second song on the album. The way Mike and El trade verses and work off each other's energy is perfect and seamless throughout, but All Due Respect might be the finest example of that. All My Life is the first real moment to breathe on the album, but the raps are still dense - it's a needed moment after the four songs that proceeded it. I saw RTJ for the first time at Primavera Sound in 2015 and Lie, Cheat, Steal always takes me back to that set.

One final note on this album - when they announced the album, El and Mike jokingly (and whilst high) put out a bunch of ridiculous kickstarter rewards including re-recording the whole album using cat noises. Someone then made an actual kickstarter to raise the money to make that happen and they agreed to do it, with the money going to charity. Being a cat-owner, I couldn't resist and chipped in to make sure it happened. I'd say about 1-in-10 times I put on RTJ2, I decide to put on Meow the Jewels instead.

Format: Double 12", insert, sticker sheet
Tracks: 11
Cost: £21.50 new
Bought: Norman Records
When: 23/10/15
Colour: Pink marble
Etching: none
mp3s: none

Mogwai - Come On Die Young

Some years ago I was explaining to a friend why I can never move away from having an iPod Classic (or another equally large capacity mp3 player, but I don't think there are any of note). The argument I gave was that there are days when you just really want to listen to some obscure Mogwai b-side, and that's exactly the music that wouldn't make the cut if you were worrying about capacity. At the time, I had The Hawk is Howling and the double cd re-release of Young Team, and it was precisely those bonus tracks I was thinking about. I got Young Team just before I started my PhD and those years were heavily soundtracked by post-rock on my trusty iPod in whatever library I found myself working in.

With that in mind, I was very keen to pick up this fancy boxset re-issue of Mogwai's second album Come On Die Young when it came out; 17 bonus songs was right up my alley. I ordered it from Norman Records because they offered free postage on orders over £50 - before that point I'd never heard of them, but I've since spent more money with them than I care to mention - as I've often said before, they cover almost everything I'm after outside of the Banquet Records and Truck Store remit (in fact, I'd say they're more in line with my musical tastes in terms of what they stock than either of the other two are, but these things always change in subtle ways). It's a lovely boxset, as can be seen in the pictures below, and well worth the money.

As for Come On Die Young itself, it wasn't an album I instantly loved. One entirely unnecessary anecdote first though - at some point in my early twenties I was in Cambridge with my friend Tom and his friends Caz, Jim and Luch. Luch was studying there and for some reason I'd gone up with Tom to get drunk there one night. I have absolutely no idea why we'd gone out in Cambridge - it wasn't easy to get to and I don't think I had any other business there at the time. I can't even remember how we got up there, or where I'd come from (Winchester, Cardiff?). It definitely did happen though, and I remember more about the drunken night that followed than the days around it, it seems. Anyway, Luch was a Mogwai fan and had a poster of the cover of CODY on the wall. As we were drinking, he was getting routined harassed with the line "Come on Luch, die young". I will never be able to think about this album without thinking about his close friends telling him to die young.

About a year after getting Young Team, I bought a cheap, second-hand copy of CODY on cd in one of the records stores on Berwick Street in London. I was excited to hear it since I'd heard that it was considered one of their best albums. I didn't get it straight away, like I had with the other two albums I owned, and it took a long time for me to give it another chance (I also bought Funcrusher Plus that day, and that got a lot of play). If it wasn't that I knew it was so highly regarded, I might have disregarded it entirely.

To me, CODY is a very strangely sequenced album. Despite being sandwiched between two perfect bookends (Punk Rock and Punk Rock/Puff Daddy/Antichrist), it feels a bit like it's on shuffle for the most part. What is certainly true is that the best songs, and the most traditionally Mogwai songs are all at the end. It's rare that "classic" albums are so back-heavy, with most being the opposite (meaning people often forget to notice that the back-half is a bit weak). In this case though, it works against the album - there's about half an hour of music before you get to a song that sounds like what I want from a Mogwai song (May Nothing But Happiness Come Through Your Door). Ex-Cowboy is the first really incredible song on the album, and that's track nine. It's important to note though that Ex-Cowboy is really incredible. Of course, Christmas Steps is the real highlight, with it's slow start and bass-lead build up. It's almost as scary as the haunting face on the cover, and you want Mogwai to be scary, really.

At the other extreme, at the very start you have the title-track (of sorts) Cody which does nothing for me at all and couldn't be further from what I was expecting (which, I strongly suspect, is intentional). Sung vocals with an actual chorus and no big crescendos or heavy guitars. You can't help but believe they wanted that to feel a bit antagonistic. After the success of Young Team I imagine they took some pleasure in starting the album that way.

The third and fourth discs cover the 17 bonus tracks and we get a good mixture of demos, session and live tracks, as well as the Travels in Constants EP (from Temporary Residence Records excellent series of releases) and two rare songs, Nick Drake and Hugh Dallas. Of particular note are the shortened version of Christmas Steps, 7-25 with the fuzzed-out guitar thrashing, their cover of Papa M's Arundel (which took me ages to work out why it was familiar when I finally got a copy of Live From a Shark Cage), Spoon Test and Hugh Dallas which is pure Slint, but great for it. As expected, the bonus disc has had a good amount of play.

Format: 4x 12" boxset, double gatefold sleeves, inserts, poster, dvd
Tracks: 29
Cost: £54.50 new
Bought: Norman Records website
When: 06/08/14
Colour: Black
Etching: none
mp3s: dvd included

Graveyard - Innocence & Decadence

I should have bought this album on cd, but I got excited and carried away and bought the vinyl instead. It's worth going back a few steps though: one morning I clicked on a review on Pitchfork of this album, despite having never heard of Graveyard before. I was really craving some metal at the time, saw that magical word "metal" in the summary and decided to read on (Pitchfork rarely covers music I enjoy anymore, but somehow I can't stop opening the site every day). I listened to a song, enjoyed their shameless Led Zeppelin stylings and listened to a bunch more. I was in a Skype chat group with a bunch of colleagues who liked metal (although the intersections of the varieties of metal we liked was minimal at best - the only band that all six or seven people in the group ever collectively agreed upon was Clutch), and shared it around; people liked it, and I enjoyed my moment of being a taste-maker. I hastily ordered the LP.

A few weeks later I found two other Graveyard album on cd in Fopp for a fiver each and couldn't resist that price. I knew I wasn't going to find those album on vinyl easily, and it seemed better to just have the music to listen to than to try to wait until I found the vinyl (I'd still be waiting). With that moment, Graveyard became a "cd band" rather than a "vinyl band", leaving this album sitting alone in my record collection. More frustratingly, the LP didn't come with a download code, so Hisingen Blues and Lights Out have had far more plays than this album; it doesn't help that the first of those has The Siren on it, which is surely their finest moment and worth a listen if you've not heard it.

As I mentioned, Graveyard take a huge amount of inspiration from Led Zeppelin. This is totally fine - many, many bands have done the same, but very few end up in my collection. I think that morning I was just in the exact right mood for a band like this, and had someone put any Led Zeppelin album under my nose I strongly suspect that might have done the trick instead. They commit to the style well and have some great songs - The Apple & the Tree is huge and has stayed in my mind much better than I'd have expected for a song that I've really not played that much; Exit 97 is a great way to follow and From a Hole in the Wall starts the second side well; Far Too Close has another unusually memorable hook. It's a good album, although I'd almost certainly have appreciated it more if I'd bought the cd rather than the vinyl. But then I wouldn't have got to write about it on here.

Format: 12", gatefold sleeve
Tracks: 11
Cost: £12 new
Bought: Norman Records website
When: 23/10/15
Colour: Black
Etching: none
mp3s: no

The Decemberists - Florasongs

This was a thoroughly non-essential purchase, but I can't turn down a bargain. It also seems that I'm a big Decemberist fan, despite only really considering myself to be a casual Decemberists fan; my record collection certainly suggests the former. I remember when this 10" was announced sometime after their seventh album, What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World (an album I bought a week after it came out - maybe I am a big fan?). I remember thinking I wasn't going to buy it because I wasn't that big a fan, but here we are.

In March 2016, about six months after it came out, this copy of Florasongs found its way into the Norman Records sale and got added to my basket along with five other records. Despite my apathy towards buying it, I do quite like it. The opener, Why Would I Now?, is just one of those great Decemberist songs - moves along at a good pace and very memorable (the next song, Riverswim, fails on both those counts). Fits and Starts is basically a punk song and The Harrowed and the Haunted is a good example of a slower song that works (the hook is infectious), but Stateside is probably the highlight of the record for me. If the song isn't a direct reference to The Replacement's Answering Machine then I'd be amazed - the gentle strumming of a melancholy electric guitar and the fact the drums never kick in no matter how much you're expecting them to puts it right alongside Answering Machine. Another clue is that Colin Meloy literally wrote the book on Let It Be (albeit more of an autobiography of a very particular time in his life - as 33 1/3 books go, it's probably more interesting for a Decemberists fan than a Replacements fan, but luckily I'm both). That song alone justifies the £5 I spent on this 10" - thoroughly recommended.

Format: 10", insert
Tracks: 5
Cost: £5.24 new
Bought: Norman Records
When: 29/03/16
Colour: Black
Etching: none
mp3s: Download code

Earthless Meets Heavy Blanket - In a Dutch Haze

I love this album.

In a Dutch Haze is the appropriately named live album of Earthless's set with Heavy Blanket at Roadburn Festival in 2012. Earthless are a band I've really gotten into since seeing at Primavera Sound in 2015; Heavy Blanket I know nothing about, other than that J Mascis from Dinosaur Jr plays guitar. In January this year, Norman Records had one of their large clearout sales on, and I bought a lot of cool music. One such purchase was this live album.

It's worth noting that this is no regular live album. Over four sides of vinyl we have exactly one song, called Paradise in a Purple Sky. It is an hour long and incredible throughout. Despite only buying it at the start of the year I've already played it more than some albums I bought years ago. It didn't come with a download code, but Amazon or Google Music were selling the digital version of the album for £1 (since it's only one song, and the algorithms haven't yet figured out how to price stoner metal), which was too good an offer to pass up; as a result, it has had a lot of airtime at work. Turns out I get a lot done when listening to heavy, freaky hour-long jams.

Ordinarily I might talk about my favourite songs on an album, but here there are just parts that blow my mind slightly more than others. By the end of the first side they're already thrashing things out and you wonder how they can keep things as intense for the next 45 minutes. About halfway through the second side things simmer down a bit for a while, but Mario is still pounding away at the drums carrying things forward, and even that doesn't last long before they're ramping things up again. It'd be easy to think that one song that lasts an hour might be boring, but that's possibly the most exciting thing about this song - I never get bored, I never think "wow, this has been going on for a while". Earthless write long songs generally, but it seems there is no upper limit for how long their songs can be. And I like that.

Format: Double 12", gatefold sleeve
Tracks: 1
Cost: £16 new
Bought: Norman Records
When: 15/01/19
Colour: Yellow
Etching: none
mp3s: no

Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra - Kollaps Tradixionales

I've been gradually working on my Silver Mt Zion back-catalogue ever since Fuck Off Get Free We Pour Light on Everything blew my socks off in 2014 and became my album-of-the-year. That process has been very gradual - so far averaging two years between purchases. I could happily increase this frequency, but I just don't see the albums in records shops often enough. Still, it's giving me good time to get into each record as I buy it.

The second Silver Mt Zion album I bought was this double 10" copy of Kollaps Tradixionales, which happens to be the album before Fuck Off... (and, as it happens, the third purchase at the start of this year was the one before this one; it appears that I'm working backwards). Norman Records had one of their big sales on and I got it quite discounted - I can't remember the original price, but I paid just under £16 for this, which is a good price. The package is really lovely - Godspeed levels of attention paid to every part - there are two posters, a book, a lyrics sheet (which I have two of, for some reason) and the album on cd. The attention to detail throughout is incredible. I still love the line "and everybody sang" in the notes.

The album itself is really good too. It didn't grab me as instantly as Fuck Off... but over the years I'd say it's settled at a point where I listen to them about as much as each other. Kollaps makes clever use of the four sides of vinyl, grouping the songs on each - it's bookended by two 15 minute songs that take up whole sides of 10" each. There is a Light is a very positive and triumphant song benefiting from some extra horns, Efrim's vocals straining just before Sophie and Jessica take over singing the same lines much more softly. As per my thoughts on the first time I heard the band, Efrim's vocals aren't an easy listen, but they're such a major part of the band you have to love them a bit. Side two features two songs about "metal birds", some punkier songs as far as the band go; side three has the three "collapse" songs, which are the more slow, reflective songs on the album (although the third has a huge riff). 'Piphany Rambler is probably the highlight of the lot, another grand affair sprawling over quarter of an hour, the strings carrying the mid-section beautifully and building to a huge, messy, perfect post-rock ending.

It's going to take me years to get through all the band's albums at this rate - expect more posts far in the future.

Format: Double 10", book, two posters, insert, cd
Tracks: 7
Cost: £15.74 new
Bought: Norman Records
When: 29/03/16
Colour: Black
Etching: none
mp3s: cd

EMA - Marked

I've got a huge amount of time for Marked. It was the highlight of the Gowns Latitude session record and a big part of the reason I checked out EMA's solo work. I was disappointed to find that the studio recording wasn't on Gowns' Red State album, so was pleased to hear it on her first solo LP, Past life Martyred Saints. This is the same version that appeared there. I definitely prefer the live Gowns recording, but as I mentioned before, this tells the same story in a different way.

There were a bunch of reasons why I bought this 7", but one of them was just that Marked is such a great song I felt bad that this 7" was languishing in Norman Records' reduced record bin. Another reason was that it was languishing in Norman Records' reduced records bin and £1.80 is a bargain. It was one of their periodic massive online sales and I was buying a bunch of other records - it was a happy addition to my basket. Finally, there was a b-side I hadn't heard and thought would be worth a listen. There's a verse in Angelo rapped by a musician named MZ Gorjis, which came as a surprise. When Erika sings at the same time it really work (or works as a b-side - I think it would have sounded out of place on any of her albums). It's got very 80's sounding synths and is quite fun. Definitely worth the £1.80.

Format: 7", diecut sleeve
Tracks: 2
Cost: £1.80 new
Bought: Norman records
When: 13/04/17
Colour: Black
Etching: none
mp3s: None

The Ex + Fendika - Lale Guma / Addis Hum

This is a nice little 7". I've been listening to The Ex since Shellac had them play at their All Tomorrow's Parties in 2012; they've been going forever and have released so many albums I've barely scratched the surface in my listening. The 30 compilation (celebrating the 30 years they've been together, including a list of every show they've played!) showed many sides of them, and is well worth a listen.

I bought this record on something of a whim - Norman Records had one of their massive online clearance sales and this was amongst the records I decided to pick up. I think it was a Record Store Day release, but I wasn't aware of it at the time. I probably would have bought it for a much higher price had I seen it on the list. I'm never going to have a huge collection of The Ex's records - there are more than I care to count and they're a nightmare to search on eBay - but I buy what I find when I find it. I've drifted away from buying 7" singles in recent years - I never play them enough and when I do it's a bit of a chore, but releases like this one are why they're worth picking up sometimes.

Here, The Ex join forces with an Ethiopian band called Fendika. They've played with a variety of musicians from far-flung parts of the world before, so it's very much in character. The best part of it is that no matter what music they mix their particular style of punk with, it works; given that these songs aren't written by The Ex, they have their very distinctive sound to them ("written" in the traditional sense - I'm sure there's a huge influence in the particular arrangements). Lale Guma is based on an Ethiopian war cry and features an instrument that sounds a bit like violin but almost certainly isn't. The riff is fun. Addis Hum is a bit more chuggy, but the way the vocals mix is perfect.

I'm glad I picked this record up - I doubt it's considered essential amongst fans of the band, but it's nice to hear something a bit different - I strongly suspect there are no other records in my collection (currently) that feature any Ethiopian musicians, let alone a war cry.

Format: 7"
Tracks: 2
Cost: £3.50 new
Bought: Norman Records
When: 29/03/16
Colour: Black
Etching: none
mp3s: None

Songs: Ohia - Ghost Tropic

Ghost Tropic has long been one of the Jason Molina albums I've struggled with the most. I found a copy on cd in Amoeba Records in San Francisco in 2015 having been on a huge Molina-trip for a couple of years. It was great and I was finding gem after gem in his back-catalogue. I think Ghost Tropic threw me off because I wasn't instantly floored by it. Years later, I still play it the least often.

Ghost Tropic represents a side of Molina that appears occasionally - playing very sparse, long songs. A few such songs have appeared on splits or singles, but Ghost Tropic is the only album where that is the theme. Whereas Magnolia Electric Co. were the very full-band side of his songwriting, most of the Songs: Ohia work was folky but still busy - there are great songs where he races through lyrics with only an acoustic guitar and some accompaniment, and that speed was one of the things I enjoyed the most.

The effect of the slow pace of Ghost Tropic has it's pros and cons. Every single word, guitar strum, or note from any instrument sounds intensely deliberate. Turn it up loud enough and you find yourself thinking about each individual note, hit or pluck; you can picture the various musicians very carefully and thoughtfully striking each moment. More than on a lot of his albums, this one to me conjures the images of the four of them in the studio, crafting the songs with great precision. In that respect, it's an incredible album, unique in what it makes you feel.

The problem however was that I wasn't ready for that experience and, as interesting as it is, it doesn't result in anything that I'd consider a highlight. It's only really a small step away from some other Molina work - you'd still broadly categorise them in the same way - but it's far enough to throw the listener off. When I got back from SF it was at the top of my pile of music to listen to and I remember being baffled. I distinctly remember being surprised by how little happened and how long it seemed to go on for. The second half comprises two 11-minute plus songs - I recall glancing at the cd player and being amazed by digital readout of how long the song had been playing. It could have been during either of Not Just a Ghost's Heart or Incantation.

The first half prepares you for those songs in their sparsity, but not quite their duration. Lightning Risked It All feels like it's building to something but never does. The lyrics get increasingly spread out until they eventually stop; the song continues for a bit then also ends rather unceremoniously. The Body Burned Away broods in a similar way, but reaches more of a conclusion. In a lot of ways, there are comparisons to Low, a band I wouldn't normally consider as having much in common with Molina's work - their albums are often full of songs that feel like they're intentionally not going where you want them to.

I found this copy online recently and picked it up along with a few other bits. I'm trying to flesh out my Molina collection and I'd certainly like to have them all on vinyl. I was pleased to get a copy, but knew I'd never play it as much as Magnolia Electric Co., Let Me Go or Josephine (or any of the others really - it's hard to name the highlights when there are so many). Strangely the labels are on the wrong sides of the record, but it's instantly obvious as side B has two very large chunks of uninterrupted groove. What's more confusing is the that information etched in the run-out groove implies that side B is in fact side A, so the error must go back as far as the masters. The artwork is as bare as the cd - just the title in white in the top right corner. People often refer to the first, self-titled album as "The Black Album", but in artwork, theme and sound, this album is almost certainly the more deserving of such a definitive title.

Format: 12", insert
Tracks: 8
Cost: £15 new
Bought: Norman Records
When: 07/03/18
Colour: Black
Etching: none
mp3s: Download code