Miracle of 86 - Every Famous Last Word

There's a joke in Parks & Recreation that I always really liked - Ann makes a passing comment about Diddy being on Instagram and Mona-Lisa replies "How did I not know Diddy was on Instragram, you jagweeds?" - "Who are you yelling at?" - "The jagweeds"; the intonation on the last line is what really makes it (and doesn't remotely work in written form). A few months ago I found this reissue of Miracle of 86's incredible album Every Famous Last Word and I felt what Mona-Lisa was feeling - how did I not know this had been reissued? Why did no one tell me? Surely I follow all the right Twitter accounts to know about such things? Clearly not.

My introduction to Kevin Devine's music came about from two potentially related events - we saw Kevin supporting Lucero in Le Pub in Newport and at some point, a copy of this album appeared in our kitchen. I don't know which happened first - the Lucero gig was the same night as my work Christmas party and being sober felt like a distant memory at that point; similarly, the four of us were routinely adding cds to the collection in the kitchen - but I'm pretty sure it was a while before I made a connection between Miracle of 86 and Kevin Devine (we also had a copy of Circle Gets the Square, seemingly unrelated and equally vaguely-owned). Damaged Records in town always had copies of this and Circle amongst a collection of very cheap cds that often found their way in raffle prizes at charity gigs so that might be how we ended up with them.

What I do know is that on March 28th 2009 I bought a copy of this album on cd for £2 in Damaged (along with Milloy's excellent More Than a Machine), and already knew I was a big fan of the album; I was pleased to have my own copy. Nearly ten years have now passed and I still play it often; the title track has made it onto countless mixtapes and I play it to anyone who'll listen. In those years, I saw copies of the LP appear on eBay every now and again, but never bought one - they were often in the US (expensive postage) and in poor condition. The prices weren't horrifying though.

Fast-forward to ArcTanGent festival this year and my "jagweeds" moment. We were browsing the records in the Big Scary Monsters distro (a local label who have put out a lot of Kevin's albums over here and been very supportive of his music) and as I got to the back of the second box I saw this record and got very excited. I've browsed their online distro many times and never seen this on there, and had zero idea that it had been reissued. Part of me wondered if it was an original that had somehow been found stored away, but Sarah pointed out the Devinyl logo on the back, Kevin's new label, so I concluded it was a reissue. Either way, I was very happy with my purchase and rushed back to the car to store it away safely for the rest of the weekend.

A few years ago I saw Kevin Devine play an incredible acoustic solo set in Kingston's lovely All Saints' Church. Banquet had started putting on shows there around the time I left London but I was lucky to see a few shows there (the Survival Tour just before I left, the La Dispute show that ended up on the Tiny Dots LP and Kevin Devine). It's an incredible venue and shows there work really well. I travelled from Oxford for the Kevin Devine show because I knew it would be a special show. Anyway, at some point during the show he asked if there were any requests and the words "Every Famous Last Words" came out of my mouth before I even realised. He obliged and it was incredible. I'd seen him play it once before (in Birmingham supporting Cursive) but this time was perfect - the echo of the church adding so much as he screamed out the chorus. Between that and Brother's Blood I could have left happy.

There are other great moments throughout the album too - Southern States is a highlight, Knife has a great lead-up to the chorus and the duo of Nice Shirt, Salvador Dali and Keep on Charging the Enemy provide some great late-album energy. I love this album. I think in the right circles there are plenty of other people who love it too, but I also think that there are huge swathes of people who have never heard of the band, let alone heard the album and it's been a mission of the last ten years - and many years to come - to educate people otherwise. Progress is slow, but I'll get there.

Format: 12", picture sleeve 
Tracks: 12
Cost: £15 new
Bought: ArcTanGent festival
When: 17/08/18
Colour: Black
Etching: none
mp3s: Download code

Palace Brothers - There is No One What Will Take Care of You

In 2006 I bought I See A Darkness by Bonnie 'Prince' Billy, which was the perfect introduction to his work - by complete chance I started with one of Will Oldham's best albums. Over the years that followed I continued to buy albums of his pretty much at random. The second album was this one, his first and recorded under the name Palace Brothers.

It was the sixth week in my Tuesday-record-from-Spillers week and the week before I'd just heard In the Aeroplane Over the Sea for the first time, so we were on a good roll. I can't remember much of what the description on this sleeve said, but it would have mentioned that it was a Will Oldham album and probably said some other things that drew me in. I was certainly keen to hear more and £9.50 now sounds ludicrously cheap for an LP.

I struggled with this album a lot at the start - there were moments I really enjoyed but it didn't hit anywhere near as hard as I See A Darkness. It's a difficult listen, and I strongly suspect that's intentional. There are simple-sounding songs that remind me of Daniel Johnston (like (I Was Drunk at the) Pulpit and I Had a Good Mother and Father) but I always thought Will was trying to create that persona of naivety and simplicity rather than actually having it; the fully rounded songs like Long Before, the title-track and King Me fly in the face of that, and are some of the stronger moments.

A while later I bought the Bonnie 'Prince' Billy Sings Palace's Greatest Hits cd, which was the nail in the coffin for the Palace albums for me. I really should try the others properly (Days in the Wake has some songs that I know to be great from other records) but it's not happened yet. My scatter-gun approach to his back-catalogue has been more miss than hit, but that could be bad luck. It's been fun dabbling though.

When I was buying a record every Tuesday from Spillers, I made an effort to record them all onto cd to play on the kitchen hifi - that stack of cds ended up in my car and I tried to play this one recently. I don't think we made it to the end of Idle Hands before my wife suggested we listen to something less abrasive.

Format: 12"
Tracks: 12
Cost: £9.50 new
Bought: Spillers Records, Cardiff
When: 12/02/08
Colour: Black
Etching: none
mp3s: None

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

Nine Inch Nails - The Downward Spiral

Nearly exactly 18 years ago, I came home from a record shopping trip to Bournemouth with a second-hand copy of The Downward Spiral on cd, which I was very pleased to have bought for £6. I'd not heard any Nine Inch Nails at this point, but knew I wanted to get into them - everything I'd read in Kerrang! and heard about them made me think they were a band I wanted to be a fan of. On listening to it, I remember thinking at the time that I was glad I hadn't got into them sooner, when I was younger and wouldn't have got it; a very precocious thought for a 16-year-old to have, but not an entirely surprising one, all considering.

My thinking was that the younger-me would have been put off by the instruments that weren't guitars and drums, and would have considered it too far from rock music, the very broad genre I had decided was for me; there are records in my collection today that 14- and 15-year-old-me would be very shocked to see indeed.

As it was, I decided I was "old enough" to appreciate the things Trent Reznor was doing musically and decided it was fine to branch out from traditional instruments to the industrial noise this album contained. In hindsight, I suspect part of it was that I'd spent money on it - had I been leant a copy there's a very good chance I'd have dismissed it as "not rock" and spent years ignoring the band, a mistake I'm glad I didn't make. I think part of me really wanted to like it despite everything else because everything I'd heard about the band had made me really want to be a fan. Whatever it was, I got into it and it became a huge album for me. 18 years later, I still think it's a landmark album and enjoy that it's been part of my life for more than half of it.

I can still remember the feeling of pressing play that first time, not really knowing what to expect and hearing that solitary strike at the start of Mr Self Destruct. Then hearing it again and again increasingly quickly before the song properly starts - what a way to start an album - so sparse and bold. There are a lot of albums that start off strong, but none in such a unique way. The song is brilliantly abrasive and it was around that point that I decided I was going to be a fan and that I was glad I'd not dismissed them at an earlier age. I also remember loving the way the drums in Piggy drift away from the song such that they're almost playing independently from the other instruments, only to have the keys float in creating a calm over the maniacal drumming. Throughout the album the drumming is huge and forms a large part of the sound - for a long time, that drum sound was what I associated with industrial music, and the bands I liked the most were the ones that made the most of drums.

Of course, being a self-obsessed teen, I read far too much into the lyrics, despite really not understanding the intended concept very well at all. I'd like to pretend that I didn't try to read so much into them, but if I said I didn't that would be a lie; a teenager with a lyric booklet is a very dangerous thing indeed. This vinyl reissue comes with a 12" booklet giving details about the recording and production process, which was a fascinating read and an unexpected highlight of buying the record. It talks about what Trent considered the theme to be, which I got bits of but hadn't tied together quite so nicely in my mind.

The Downward Spiral was the 16th album I'd bought and furthered the idea in my mind that an album should be more than just a collection of songs, but a work intended to be heard as a whole with a beginning, a middle and an end. Of course there are albums I love that don't adhere to that, but I've certainly got a soft-spot for those that do. And what an end this album has - after 13 songs of difficult and abrasive industrial music (albeit played with Trent's astute understanding of pop, and how to apply it to the most unlikely music), the album closes with Hurt. Can you imagine what it was like for a 16-year-old to hear that, not knowing that he had such song-writing in him, let alone that finishing an album like this in that way was even allowed? Needless to say, it quickly became a favourite and one that I knew all the lyrics to by heart. In hindsight, it's laughable that I thought that I was in anyway unique in doing that - the album had sold countless copies for years and 16-year-olds everywhere around the world were doing the exact same thing. Again, the drums are brilliant.

Despite all my embarrassing associations with this album, I still fucking love it. It hits hard and hasn't aged (as far as I'm concerned), which isn't something I can say of a lot of the other music I was listening to back then. Sometimes I go years without playing it, other times I listen to it often. I look forward to enjoying it for many years to come.

Format: Double 12", picture sleeves, 12" booklet
Tracks: 14
Cost: £23 new
Bought: Truck Store, Oxford
When: 16/07/18
Colour: Black
Etching: none
mp3s: Download code

Fucked Up - Year of the Tiger

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

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

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

Format: 12", insert

Tracks: 2

Cost: £4.65 new

Bought: Banquet Records, Kingston

When: 08/02/12

Colour: Black

Etching: none

mp3s: Download code

MewithoutYou - [A -> B] Life

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

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

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

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

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

Format: 12", picture sleeve, insert

Tracks: 13

Cost: £31.70 new

Bought: Band's webstore

When: 27/01/18

Colour: Half gold / half black

Etching: none

mp3s: Download code

Manic Street Preachers - Know Your Enemy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Format: 12", picture sleeve

Tracks: 16

Cost: £4 new

Bought: Selectadisc, Nottingham

When: 15/03/04

Colour: Black

Etching: none

mp3s: no