Various Artists - Load Rocks [Promo]

Oh dear. Few things highlight the horrible pinnacle that nu-metal reached as shameless hip-hop/metal crossovers like this album. So you fully understand the grim extent of it, this record contains RHCP-stealing Crazy Town (a band everyone had blissfully forgotten about), Sevendust with Xhibit, Butch Vig for some reason, Black Sabbath trying to stay relevant by working with Wu-Tang, otherwise respectable Sick of it All with Mobb Deep, and the boy band of the era, Incubus.

Anyone who bought this album when they were a teenager (because no one else bought it) will notice that I've only listed the second half of the album. That's because I only have the second LP (and thus I've never been treated to what a collaboration between System of a Down and Wu-Tang sounds like). I bought this in a second hand record shop in Reading. I think, looking back, they might have had both discs there, but for sale separately. At the time, I thought it was the same LP twice, but it makes more sense that it was both LPs on their own. That said, this one has a sticker over the words "side C" and "side D", which was what made me notice when I got home that I only had one disc. Neither had the original sleeve, just the words "Loud Rocks Sampler" in biro on the corner. I paid £2 for this record, and I think at some point I might have had £2-worth of fun from it.

That fun, if any, feels like it must have been a very long time ago. This record has not aged well. Side C is appalling - Crazy Town and Sevendust you expect that from (the smooth chorus on the Sevendust song is cringe-worthy), but Butch Vig I expected better things from. He produced Nevermind and Siamese Dream for Christ's sake. It sounds like Asian Dub Foundation went horribly, horribly wrong. I'm just going to keep on pretending that song didn't happen.

I lied above when I said Black Sabbath were involved, Geezer Butler and Bill Ward dodged a bullet by not putting their name to it. I have a lot of time for the first two Black Sabbath albums, and I've greatly enjoyed them every time I've seen them, but that's because they only really play songs from the 70's, which everyone agrees is the best idea. This song doesn't work well. SOIA's Lou Koller's vocals are the only highlight of the whole record, and that's only because they're at such odds to everything else around it. Annoyingly, the chorus is the only place he sings and the transition between it and the verse is jarring. It's almost like they couldn't be bothered to write the transition. Who can blame them? The second the Incubus song starts you just want them to fuck off; such a clusterfuck of pop, rap and funk. Writing this, I'm very tempted to take the needle off the record, but that's against what I started the blog to do. I mean, it must be over soon, they can't stretch this shit out that far, surely? Still going, but this break surely means we're at least half way? Still going. Urgh, another chorus. The outro seems to go on forever. Oh, thank god. It's over.

Final critical thing to say about this album - have you seen the actual cover? It's fucking terrible. I'm lucky that mine just has a white sleeve. Record label execs in the late 90's/early 2000's were really taking the piss on many levels.

Format: 12", promo

Tracks: 7

Cost: £2 second hand

Bought: Reading

When: 27/12/02

Colour: Black

Etching: none

mp3s: no

Manic Street Preachers - The Masses Against the Classes

The Masses Against the Classes was a beautiful anomaly. I got into the band properly when they released their fifth album, This is My Truth Tell Me Yours, an objectively good album. The singles from it were excellent songs and, as with the four albums before it, sufficiently different from everything before it. However, it wasn't a heavy album. After hearing it I got Generation Terrorists, Everything Must Go, Gold Against the Soul and The Holy Bible (in that order, although I'd had a taped copy of The Holy Bible for a while, somehow with a few songs missing). I knew the band could be heavy; I wanted them to be again.

Then, at the start of January on the turn of the century, they released The Masses Against the Classes, the heaviest song they'd written in years and, it would turn out, the heaviest they'd be for a while. I loved it then and I love it now. The gradual build-up at the start, the arrogant spit of James' vocals and that huge chorus that stands ten times taller than the verses; what a combination. It's probably not always considered one of the best Manics songs, but I'd rate it very highly. They don't always play it live, but I get such a kick when they do. That said, it was a number 1 single in the UK charts, so maybe it's more loved than I realise. Of course, this was at the height of their national fame, so that probably helped. Close My Eyes is a suitably fuzzy b-side and also a pretty great song. Neither would have worked on any album they've ever released, but I'd love to hear an album they would work on (Know Your Enemy had some moments that came close, but these both would have stuck out). Loud and fuzzy works well for the band, it seems. Rock and Roll Music is a fine cover to round the single off, but struggles next to the songs that precede it.

Fearing it's status as "limited edition", I rushed out to buy a copy the day it came out. MVC didn't stock vinyl at the time, so I got the cd (for £3) rather than this 10". Over the following years I saw the 10" on eBay a bit but didn't by a copy until I found this one in Reading one day. At £7 it'd risen in price in two years, but seemed like a good price, especially given the near-mint condition. It's number 6272 out of, I assume, at least 10,000 - not a short run by any stretch, but they were very big at the time. (I had a jukebox 7" of the song that I'd found on eBay at some point in between the two purchases, which probably quenched my thirst for the song on vinyl for a bit too.)

17 years later, this is still an excellent single.

Format: 10", numbered (#6272)
Tracks: 3
Cost: £7 second hand
Bought: Reading
When: 27/12/02
Colour: Black
Etching: none
mp3s: no

Pop Will Eat Itself - The Pop Will Eat Itself Cure For Sanity

The Pop Will Eat Itself Cure for Sanity is the PWEI album I know the least well. I've never owned a copy on cd and this picture disc, whilst lovely, sounds like shit. One of the (many) problems with picture discs is that they often come in very tight plastic sleeves, which leads to a lot of fat-handed tugging at the side of the record. The pops and clicks at the start of each side here are louder than I've ever heard, and I feel a bit bad for my record player for having to deal with them.

An early PWEI purchase was the live album At Weird's Bar and Grill - I'd actually been listening to it for a while before buying it, because a friend bought a copy that I saw in a record shop one day (I think just so I couldn't buy it) and I eventually bought it from him. That album features a lot of these songs, albeit in quite different live recordings - 88 Seconds and Counting, Axe of Men and Nightmare at 20,000 Feet are all songs I'm very familiar with from their live versions. (Side note: I eventually ended up with a turquoise t-shirt from that very live show that another friend found in a second hand shop. My other PWEI t-shirts have all been given away in recent years, but I plan to keep that one for a long time yet).

Other songs are of course staples of best-of albums (of which I have two) and singles or EPs from that era - Dance of the Mad Bastards, X, Y and Zee, 92F (in various mixes) and Touched By the Hand of Cicciolina (the latter was always one I enjoyed for how shamelessly upbeat the piano is). As it is, playing it now, it feels much more familiar than I expected; the songs well known but as different versions. There's a fair bit of dicking around that thankfully didn't make it onto the other albums - I can take or leave the intro or City Zen Radio 1990/2000 FM and Dr Nightmare's Medication Time. Psychosexual and Axe of Men have a level of darkness that hints at the style they'd find two albums later on the very industrial Dos Dedos Mis Amigos. In a lot of ways, it's the odd-one-out of that era, as the albums either side of it sound much more similar to each other than either does to this one.

The highlight of the album is probably 92F (The 3rd Degree) - there are many different versions of that song and I think this might be the finest. I don't know anything about the woman singing, but her voice is great - somehow strained and slightly raspy, but it works so well. Later in the album we get the Boilerhouse "The Birth" remix, which features Clint or Graham singing instead. It's still enjoyable, but I find myself longing for the female vocals instead.

I found this 12" picture disc on a very fruitful shopping trip to Reading, a city I can only assume was overflowing with Poppies records, as I got two other PWEI records that day, and left even more behind on the shelves. At £10 it's £4 more than it's ever sold for on Discogs, but I was very pleased to find it and add it to my PWEI collection. The picture disc is great and it's nice to have the legendary "Sample it, loop it, fuck it and eat it" in large letters on a record, even if it's been censored. I think I once saw the cd in a second hand shop (in Morecambe, a place I'm glad to have not thought about for many years) but it was in very poor condition, and I figured other chances would come around. They haven't, but I'm not sat here regretting not buying it - the Poppies were a great band at a very certain time, but I don't get as much out of them as I used to.

Format: 12" picture disc
Tracks: 19
Cost: £10 second hand
Bought: Reading
When: 27/12/02
Colour: Picture disc
Etching: none
mp3s: no

Cable - God Gave Me Gravity

I vaguely remember being aware of Cable back in the day, but can't really remember why or how; they were probably just one of those bands you kinda knew about. The band were brought back to everyone's memories in 2012 when Hundred Reasons and Hell is for Heroes played the 10-year anniversary shows of their excellent Ideas Above Our Stations and Neon Handshake albums - a flurry of shows were scheduled for December 2012 featuring Cable, Hell is for Heroes and Hundred Reasons. Many people of a particular age (my age) got very excited and I went to a couple of the shows.

Some friends of a friend were very excited for Cable at the show in The Coronet in London (a fairly hideous venue in Elephant & Castle that I’d never been to before, nor have I been to since). They were in the very small minority of people who were there to see Cable more than the other two bands and I think left afterwards. I enjoyed Cable’s set, but it was hard to get as excited by for two reasons - I’d never listened to them before (and nostalgia is a huge factor in these reunion shows) and that I was really looking forward to seeing HIFH and Hundred Reasons (I’d seen HIFH play Neon Handshake the day before and the day before that in The Peel in Kingston, and I saw Hundred Reasons earlier that summer, but still - they were both playing incredible albums that I love dearly).

I found this 7” just over a year later in Reading. I’d been record shopping in Reading a few times over the years, but hadn’t been there for a very long time by the time I went in 2014. For work I was having to go there a couple of times over a month, and made up for the long and tedious train journey by going record shopping on my lunchtimes. However, most of the shops that had yielded great finds in my teens had long since closed and there was little left. In fact, all there was left was The Sound Machine in one of the arcades, HMV and an Oxfam Books and Records; my lunchtimes were not as fun as I hoped they might be. My main memory of those trips to Reading was using the train journey home to apply for other jobs (one of which I got and, thankfully, escaped suit-wearing drudgery).

The Sound Machine was where I found my copy of Manic Compression in 2002, amongst a few other gems, so I was pleased it was still there. I was less pleased with the stock - after browsing through pretty much all of it, all I found was this 7”. There are many circumstances where I might not have bought it, but given I’d been in the (tiny) shop quite so long, I felt like I had to buy something. It had some excellent stock back in 2002.

Additionally, I was intrigued by the sticker on the sleeve explaining how the two b-sides were squeezed onto one side of vinyl. I’ve certainly not seen anything like it before - for the b-side, the left channel plays Dinky and the right channel plays Electro Gazelle. If you don’t have the ability to focus the audio through one speaker, then the resulting sound is a mess. It’s a funny idea and a novel solution, but entirely unnecessary - I’ve seen 7”s where the b-side plays at 33rpm rather than 45, meaning you can fit more songs. However, it played a part in me wanting to buy the record, so it worked in that sense (which I suspect might have been a large part of it). The second is slightly longer than the first, so you still hear a bit of it at the end, which makes you wonder how much you can hear of the other song even with the sound entirely to one side.

All the songs are fine, but getting into this band 15 years after their hey-day is not advised; it's hard to listen to them without thinking how late-90's their sound is. That's not a criticism - it was the late-90's, so it was fine - and I can't imagine many people will be in the position I'm in now. God Gave Me Gravity builds up to a decent ending, which I like. The b-sides are ok, but actually suffer from the novelty of their arrangement on the record, as both sound pretty flat in mono. I suspect I'd enjoy them more, particularly Electro Gazelle, in stereo.

Format: 7", folded sleeve
Tracks: 3
Cost: £2 second hand
Bought: The Sound Machine, Reading
When: 25/02/14
Colour: Black
Etching: none
mp3s: no

Pop Will Eat Itself - Box Frenzy

Back in the early 2000's when I was getting into Pop Will Eat Itself, it was incredibly easy to find their records. As a result, I have many PWEI records. One day when record shopping in Reading I found this 12" copy of their debut LP, Box Frenzy (for a very reasonable £5), along with another PWEI LP and a 12". I think there were a few more to be had that day that I didn't bother picking up.

I was familiar with a few of these songs from the PWEI Product anthology double-cd, so I knew that the album was the transitional release between their very grebo days and the strange hip-hop/indie mash-up that would dominate their sound in the 90's (so much so, the words "Fuck this grebo shit" appear before the song Hit the Hi-tech Groove on the sleeve). Throughout the album there are some really great moments, spiked with turntables and a blatant disregard for the genre they'd been in up to that point. Songs like Beaver Patrol, There is No Love Between Us Anymore and Hit the Hi-tech Groove are genuinely really good, but there are also fairly stupid songs, like Ugly and Inside You.

Stupid is the name of the game throughout the album really - the sticker on the front boasts that it contains two "totally crap singles", there's a comic strip about becoming well-built by listening to the Poppies and there's a quote from the NME asking "So how come they've made such a crap LP?". I guess hindsight does a lot for an album like this - if you heard this alone, without the context of what was to follow, it wouldn't be a great album. It's even stranger to think that this was technically their debut album - I can imagine a lot of people hoping they'd release something like the fully-grebo EPs and singles that preceded it.

I've not played this album in a very long time, but it's better than I remember. I think I got a lot of it mixed up with the early EPs in my mind - the first half of the first disc of PWEI Product covers the era before Box Frenzy and it does less for me (and, interestingly, was missing entirely from the other PWEI compilation I had in those early days). The confusion might be because I have the Poppiecock 12" and the Now For a Feast cd, which both cover a lot of those early songs, so I got confused about which album was which. Largely, anything before the Designers Republic era was slightly dubious, but Box Frenzy was the best of that time in my opinion.

Format: 12", picture sleeve

Tracks: 12

Cost: £5 second hand

Bought: Reading

When: 27/12/02

Colour: Black

Etching: none

mp3s: no

Pop Will Eat Itself - Get the Girl! Kill the Baddies!

The story of how I got into Pop Will Eat Itself is a long one, and I can't be bothered to tell it now so I'll save it for another day. The key point of that story is that Pop Will Eat Itself were a pretty exciting band to discover as a teenager. They'd long broken up by the time I heard them, but it was great fun stumbling across their records in second hand stores in the early 2000's.

This record is a prime example of that. Two days after Christmas in 2002 I decided to head into Reading for the day to see what the record shops had to offer. I went on the Yellow Pages website and noted down the addresses of each shop in town (remember, it was 2002) and jumped on a train. I came home with a nice stack of records (including one of my all-time best finds, Manic Compression by Quicksand), three of them by Pop Will Eat Itself. In one record shop, upstairs in the old shopping centre to the west of town, I found this 12" single and the picture-disc of The Pop Will Eat Itself Cure For Sanity. Whilst I'm largely uninterested in remixes, there were was no way I wasn't buying this record. Look at that cover! It's possibly one of my all-time sleeves. It's not one that comes to mind when I think of great record covers (it's no Spiderland), but it's still awesome. One day I'll get round to framing the poster that came with it.

The film poster style of the sleeve certainly adds to it's charm, in more ways than it just being a novel idea. The title of the song is a reference to Total Recall ("Get the girl, kill the bad guys and save the entire planet!"), which is fun in itself. The reason it's even more amusing now is that the singer, Clint Mansell, has gone on to have a huge career in composing film scores. I've recently bought two of his scores on vinyl and, ever since seeing Requiem For a Dream many years ago, I've struggled to believe that the man singing here also composed Lux Aeterna, a piece of music who'll have definitely heard even if you don't think you have. It's really quite incredible.

Anyway, Get the Girl! Kill the Baddies! was amongst the first few PWEI songs I heard (on the budget compilation Wise Up Suckers!) and it's a classic in their discography. None of these remixes adds a great deal in my opinion (especially when the line "Yeah, you motherfuckers" gets changed to "Yeah, you brothers and sisters" for the radio edit), but this record was always more about that awesome sleeve. They always joked that they sold more t-shirts than records and, given the strength of the artwork, I can believe it.

Format: 12", 20x20" poster
Tracks: 4
Cost: £3 second hand
Bought: Second hand store, Reading
When: 27/12/02
Colour: Black
Etching: none
mp3s: no

Crackout - This is What We Do

Another 7" from Crackout's second album, and I picked it up at the same time as the other one. Again, I knew the a-side here so this one ended up in my record collection for two very similar reasons to the last 7": a) the b-side is a cover of Beyonce's Crazy in Love and b) it was also only 50p.

When I saw the 7" in the bargain box of 7"s at the stall they used to have at Reading and read the back, I had to hear the cover. For 50p I figured it couldn't be too bad, and it had the potential to be excellent. It turned out to be on the excellent side and, again, mostly only ends up on the turntable for the b-side. Crackout's floaty, laid-back cover sounds neither very much like Crackout nor like Beyonce, which makes it all the more enjoyable.

Format: 7"
Tracks: 2
Cost: £0.50 new
Bought: Reading Festival
When: 27/08/04
Colour: Black
Etching: none
mp3s: no

Crackout - Out of Our Minds

I'll save a longer chat about Crackout for when I write about their debut album, This is Really Neat. They've been mentioned here before, because they were supporting Vex Red on the NME Upstarts Tour, which was the first time I saw them.

This 7" is the first single and opener from their second album Oh No!, which I'd owned for a few months by the time I bought this. I'd been disappointed by their second record, especially because the first one had been so fun, but there are two reasons I bought this record: a) the b-side is a live version of the excellent song You Dumb Fuck from their debut, but with the word "fuck" replaced by "truck", which amused me and b) it was only 50p. (Actually, there's probably a third reason, which is that I sometimes can't stop myself from buying records).

Anyway, as I suspected, it was worth at least 50p for the b-side alone. The a-side isn't terrible, but the only reason this 7" ever graces the turntable is for You Dumb Truck. The song was always a fun, catchy song and this censored, acoustic version always puts a small smile on my face. The line "get the truck away from me" is a particular highlight.

Format: 7"
Tracks: 2
Cost: £0.50 new
Bought: Reading Festival
When: 27/08/03
Colour: Black
Etching: none
mp3s: no

Nebula + Winnebago Deal - Split

Nebula and Winnebago Deal were two perfectly good bands I never really got into properly. I wish I could think of a good reason why. I guess I was just being lazy. Both are bands that, on paper, I should totally be into. The two songs here are excellent. Maybe listening to them both again today will spur me on to get into them properly.

The first time I heard of Nebula was at a record fair (rather fittingly for this blog). I used to spend a lot of time (and money) at record fairs. I remember going to one in the main hall of Southampton Guildhall and chatting to a guy who had a lot of new-looking records by American bands. Thinking about it now, I bet he had some records in there I'd go weak at the knees over now; 28-year-old me is shocked by the ignorance of 16-year-old me. That was the first time I saw the Rival Schools and Onelinedrawing split cd, but I didn't buy it (a recurring theme, it seems). I didn't know Onelinedrawing and was a bit confused by the concept of a "split" (I later picked a copy up in my local MVC). Anyway, more excitingly, he had a copy of Nebula's split with Lowrider on this awesome, marbled, murky-green vinyl. That, alongside the awesome Fall of Icarus artwork, was one of the most impressive records I had ever seen (and one of the most appropriately coloured stoner-rock records). However, I didn't buy it. I don't know why, I definitely should have bought it. I still regret that now. I've never seen it since (not that I've been looking particularly hard). I bought the Dos EPs cd and heard the songs on there but, needless to say, it's not the same.

Anyway, fast-forwarding to 2004, I was madly in love with The Paper Chase and went to Nottingham to see them. I travelled in from Lancaster and convinced my sister to come in from Derby. After the gig we went to Rock City where Nebula and Winnebago Deal were also playing. I definitely remember seeing part of Nebula's set and I have the faintest memory of catching some of Winnebago Deal's set too, but I don't know who headlined and what time they started, so it could all be some blurry (slightly drunken) memory. Since that's the only time I saw either band, it's a shame I remember it so badly. I do remember that Zane Lowe was DJ-ing in the main room and that all the girls looked way too young to be in a club.

Move forward a few months to Reading Festival 2004, and I found this 7" in one of the record shops they had on the site (this was back when they had record shops at the festival, not just stands selling herbal highs and crap). I figured for £1 it was a good buy, and survived the rest of the weekend in my tent.

But now it's 2013 and I've put no more effort into getting into these bands since. Strange Human is an awesome song, but it's not made me buy any more Nebula records. Maybe it's because I'll constantly be reminded that I never bought that great copy of the Lowrider split.


Format: 7"
Tracks: 2
Cost: £1 new
Bought: Reading Festival
When: 27/08/04
Colour: Black
Etching: none
mp3s: no

Quicksand - Manic Compression

In 2000 the 800th issue of Kerrang! magazine came out with a list of the 100 most influential bands since it had been a magazine (along with a piece on the new Deftones LP and a 5K review of Worship and Tribute). I've always loved lists and read it over and over again, learning about these bands I'd mostly never heard of, let alone heard. Gorilla Biscuits made it in at number 98 and Quicksand appeared at number 77. That was almost certainly the first time I heard Walter Schreifels' name and the fact that it claimed Quicksand influenced the Deftones was enough to intrigue me.

At some point in the following year, Rival Schools exploded onto the scene and for the first time I heard a song Walter was involved with. I became a huge fan of Rival Schools (something I still am today) and set about finding music by his older bands that I'd read so much about. Just after Christmas nearly ten years ago I decided to explore the record shops of Reading. I'd been for the festival but never to the town center and figured they might have some decent record shops. The first one I found was in this arcade near the station, and was still open when I was in Reading a few years ago. It was pretty good, and had plenty of second hand records by bands I was interested in, but sat high on one of the shelves was not one but two copies of Manic Compression. Both were in decent enough condition and only a tenner, so I added one to the armful of records I was buying and took it home.

Hugh had somehow heard Landmine Spring and told me a number of times how great it was (to this day I still don't know how he heard it, because streaming music on the internet was a long way off). On the first listen it was Delusional, Simpleton and Skinny (its Overflowing) that caught my ear the most and I thought Supergenius was pretty cool too. The lengthy It Would Be Cooler if You Did stood out but listening to it now, I can see what Kerrang! meant in their comment about Deftones - Pink Maggit was their equivalent to this song. If I had to make a list of the best final songs on a record, this one would be up there. It took a few listens before I realised how awesome Landmine Spring was, and even longer before I appreciated how brilliant the lyrics were ("There is no pain in death / It only hurts to die" and "Loading my questions like a shotgun" are two favourites).

Quicksand are another band on everyone's tongues at the moment - they've been playing a handful of shows and both the albums are getting re-issued (I only have Slip on cd so plan to pick up a vinyl copy sometime). I'd love to see them live. I've seen Walter and Rival Schools countless times, and they're always great. To hear these songs live would blow me away. Last time Rival Schools were over Walter said he was going to play a song he used to play with Quicksand and my heart jumped to think I might hear any of these songs, only to be dashed a second later when he announced it was a Smiths cover. Hopefully one day they'll make it over again.

Whilst I haven't bought Kerrang! (or any music magazine) in years, I still have the copy that introduced me to Quicksand and Gorilla Biscuits and so many other bands. It's quite fun reading it again now; I have albums by over half of the bands and the rest are all so familiar its hard to think that they were once entirely new names to me. Luckily, when I was 16 the name Quicksand caught my attention because it's still exciting listening to them today.



Format: 12", insert
Tracks: 12
Cost: £10 second hand
Bought: Reading
When: 27/12/02
Colour: Black
Etching: Side A: "Who pissed in Lyle's Snapple" Side B: "Sundahl's getting married?"
mp3s: no