Johnny Cash - The Very Best of Johnny Cash

If you buy enough records, one of them will eventually be by Johnny Cash.

I bought this Johnny Cash compilation one afternoon from a record shop just off Albany Road in Cardiff. Albany Road was your usual former thriving high street that had descended into charity shops and gambling shops when everyone started going into the city centre instead. It had a few nice places to eat and drink, and might have improved recently; it's been many years since I went down there. The charity shops often had some good stuff, and D'Vinyl was just off the near end of it, so sometimes it was worth a browse down that road alone to find some strange records.

About a third of the way along, on a side road was a record shop I never knew the name of. I think it was basically someone's living room, which is also the possible explanation of how it could be a viable business - they must have been paying no rent. The stock was almost all dirt cheap and, in all honesty, of little-to-no value. I can't remember there being a great system for organising the stock, so you had to browse through hundreds of records that were pure junk if you wanted to find anything of interest. CDs were comically priced. Here is a complete list of things I bought in there over my two years in Cardiff:

• Electric Frankenstein - I Was a Teenage Shutdown (cd album): £3.70
• The Verve - Bittersweet Symphony (cd single): 10p
• Beck - Loser (cd single): 10p
• Therapy? - Teethgrinder (cd single): 10p
• Kula Shaker - Pigs, Peasants and Astronauts (cd album): £1
• This best of Johnny Cash: £2

At the sum total of £7, I doubt I was their best customer. Still, that Therapy? cd is great.

I'm not a big Johnny Cash fan. I'm very much of the age that I first heard of him properly was when he was covering Hurt by Nine Inch Nails. The American Recordings were huge when they came out, and it was hard to not get a little bit excited about the idea of him covering NIN and Soundgarden. But I never bought any of those albums in the end. If I saw them now cheaply, I might be tempted to pick them up, but I'm only really in it for the covers. He did do a fantastic job with Hurt.

I also remember watching the film Walk the Line on a flight, possibly to or from Australia, and thinking he was an interesting musician. I'd be lying if I said I was definitely awake for the whole film though, but that is more a reflection on the duration of the flight than the film necessarily.

But the truth is, I just don't care for his music enough to spend much time with it. I can probably count on one hand the number of times I've played this record, and that hand could be missing up to two fingers and still probably be true. It's definitely possible to respect a musician without actually liking their music; that's how I feel about Johnny Cash. Maybe that makes me a bad music fan. I guess buying this record was a nod towards being the sort of music fan who dabbles in the music all the legendary musicians made, even if that's not actually who I am (a fact I'm finally ok with). (Ghost) Riders in the Sky is quite good, and It Ain't Me Babe I'm familiar with from the sprawling Bob Dylan boxset I have. Will Whitmore recently covered Busted, although I see that Johnny was covering it too. Ring of Fire never fails to baffle me.

As a final note, when I looked this up on Discogs I discovered that there are 900 Johnny Cash compilations listed - 900! He also has over 100 regular albums. That's ridiculous.

Format: 12"

Tracks: 16

Cost: £2 second hand

Bought: Albany Road record shop, Cardiff

When: 02/02/08

Colour: Black

Etching: none

mp3s: none

Fugazi - Steady Diet of Nothing

Steady Diet of Nothing is the only Fugazi album I don't have a digital copy of, which means it's had far, far less play then the others. It was also the last of their albums I heard having gradually picked them all up over the course of a couple of years. Beyond Repeater and the self-titled EP (the first two Fugazi albums I heard), I'd always found that each album had a handful of songs I really loved and a lot that I was basically a bit indifferent towards. The album I heard before this one, End Hits, I struggled with a lot, and looking at the tracklisting here, I'm not seeing any I've ever taken a particular shine to. Maybe I'd just rushed through their back-catalogue a bit too fast.

Recently I made a Fugazi mix cd for the car. I went through and found all my favourite songs and put them into a playlist. Just the ones I knew to be great songs took up 90 minutes, so I didn't even revisit the albums to see if I'd missed any (and had to find 10 minutes to remove). But because I didn't have mp3s of this album, none of them made the cut. The mix has been getting a lot of play in the car - they wrote some truly incredible songs.

Listening to Steady Diet of Nothing now, I'm aware of two things: I should play this album far more often and Reclamation, Latin Roots and Polish all would have made the mix cd if I'd had mp3s - they're all great songs. Reclamation in particular has this huge wall of guitars, and Polish is one of those slower Fugazi songs that works perfectly with Ian's tortured vocals. The fade out between Latin Roots and Long Division straddling the two sides of vinyl is strange, but I'm sure there's a good reason for it.

I say this a few times a year, but the point of this blog was to make sure I revisit all my records at some point, and every now and again that process unearths a forgotten classic. I should have given this album a lot more time in the past.

Format: 12", picture sleeve
Tracks: 11
Cost: £8 new
Bought: Damaged Records, Cardiff
When: 25/10/08
Colour: Black
Etching: Side A: "Don't worry" Side B: "This is the last one"
mp3s: none

Goodtime Boys - Are We Now, Or Have We Ever Been

I got into the Goodtime Boys because, in a lot of ways I kind of had to. Two friends were in the band at various points of time, they toured with my housemate's band and released a split EP with them, and they were just so intrinsically linked to the Cardiff punk scene at the time that it was impossible to avoid them. They were also quite good, despite myself not really expecting to like them; there were a bunch of bands with broadly similar sounds that I wasn't into and it was a very "all or nothing" scene. I didn't commit hard to it, so I have only a few Goodtime Boys releases and very few by the bands that moved in similar circles.

It's hard to talk about the Goodtime Boys without mentioning that the singer used to be in The Automatic and made a good chunk of money from that song about a monster coming a hill. I imagine he'll never get away from that particular bit of trivia. Some might say it's also why this band are quite so heavy - you'd never suspect there was a connection.

Anyway, I got a copy of the split with Solutions shortly after seeing them play together in London, a strange night in a pub in London I'd never been to before or after (apparently, The Flower Pot). It was nice to see Nicky and Kai, and it was fun to see Pennie throwing himself around from tables in an otherwise unsuspecting pub. As it happens, the cd release of this EP includes the songs from the split (and I know that because I got a copy of the cd for free from Palm Reader Records when they were trying to shift them).

I bought this one afternoon in Banquet about two years after that gig (I'd also seen them that January with The Saddest Landscape in another venue that I'd not been to before or after - The Star of Kings). I only bought this and a cd, so it must have been one of those times where I'd just gone in a bit bored and not really found anything I was particularly after. I dropped the bag on my walk back somehow, which is why the record has a slight ding to the corner of the sleeve. As for the music, it's basically as enjoyable as all the other music they recorded, which is to say, somewhat. Like I said, I'm not hugely into this scene, but I enjoy it every now and again. Sometimes you just need very heavy, angry music and Goodtime Boys do exactly that.

Format: 10", picture sleeve
Tracks: 5
Cost: £10 new
Bought: Banquet Records, Kingston
When: 07/05/12
Colour: Transparent blue
Etching: none
mp3s: none

Pacer - No. 1

Pacer released two very good albums, this EP and a split with Iron Chic, all of which I have in my collection. Between 2011 and 2013 I saw them six times and then they sort of disappeared as their regular lives took over - recently they've played a couple of shows and I hope to catch them again soon. I picked this up when I saw them supporting The Bouncing Souls (on the second of the two nights I saw them play together).

I think one of the reasons I liked Pacer so much is that they didn't sound like a lot of the other bands in the UK punk scene at the time - OK Pilot and The Shitty Limits were the only other bands from around then that had the same frantic energy and heaviness. I guess, most crucially, they weren't trying to sound like Hot Water Music (which is neither a criticism of HWM or the many, many bands we used to see who were trying to sound like HWM - I enjoy both).

Anyway, No. 1 is their debut EP and comes and goes in 16-minutes and seven songs. Everything's Fine and The Long Drop are the highlights, possibly because they have enough time to do some different things (much like on Flutters, my favourite song of theirs by a good distance which is also one of their longer songs despite still not quite hitting the 3-minute mark). It's a solid EP and every bit as essential as their albums for me.

Format: 10", insert
Tracks: 7
Cost: £5 new
Bought: Gig
When: 03/08/11
Colour: Grey with black splatter
Etching: none
mp3s: Download code

All Eyes West + Above Them - Split

I picked this 7" up along with a bunch of other records from Specialist Subject Records - I think they had a sale on, or a discount across everything, so I stocked up. I bought it because I love Above Them and didn't have this song anywhere else. It's a great song so worth the purchase alone - a great fast-paced chorus and could have been a strong song on any of their albums.

All Eyes West are an American band who toured with Above Them in 2011 (which I guess was when this came out), and I saw them together in Kingston. I've not played their song here that much, but it's instantly familiar (but maybe it just sounds like some other gruff punk - hints of Latterman and Iron Chic, with a bit of Leatherface). It's nice, but never set my world on fire.

Format: 7"
Tracks: 2
Cost: £2.29 new
Bought: Specialist Subject Records website
When: 03/08/17
Colour: Red
Etching: Side A: "Deayer is a weiner" Side B: "Fish and chips"
mp3s: Download code

Goshen Electric Co - The Gray Tower / Ring the Bell

I play these two songs a lot, so much so that I paid to download the mp3s on Bandcamp to be able to listen to them even more. As an added bonus, the mp3s include and extended version of Ring the Bell, so there's even more loveliness to be had.

Goshen Electric Co is the name that the regular members of Magnolia Electric Co (who weren't Jason Molina) and Timothy Showalter (from Strand of Oaks) decided to record under. When this came out, they'd played a few shows together in the US as Memorial Electric Co or Songs: Molina, depending on how you choose to interpret the name the shows were billed as. This record came out around the same time that they took that show on tour throughout Europe. The shows, and the 7", were an opportunity for these people to keep playing Jason Molina's songs together and I was incredibly pleased that they did. I consider myself very fortunate that I got to see Magnolia Electric Co once (and very nearly didn't - I only got offered a ticket that morning because someone had a spare) but didn't know any songs at the time. I knew nearly every word when the tour came through Bush Hall in London in 2018.

Ahead of the shows they put out a video for The Gray Tower and I watched it a bunch of times. I wasn't familiar with Strand of Oaks at the time, but was very pleased with how Timothy took on the vocals. By the nature of both bands, they play it much more like a Magnolia Electric Co song than a Songs: Ohia song and it works amazingly; I love both versions - Jennie Benford's vocal round out the sparse original version so the two sound and feel very different. Ring the Bell from Didn't it Rain is a much less niche choice (The Gray Tower is only on a 7" and the Journey On boxset or as a demo called The Gray Tour on the Didn't it Rain reissue) and also becomes a much bigger sounding song (even more so on the nine-minute extended version). The extended one takes a lot of inspiration from the original, which itself is over six minutes in length.

As a result of this record, I started listening to Strand of Oaks and really got into them. I started off with their fitting tribute to Jason Molina, JM, and spiralled from there (JM even got an airing at the Songs: Molina show). Turns out I'd seen them at Primavera in 2015 on the recommendation of one of Matt's friends. I enjoyed them, but saw another nine bands that day and they got forgotten in the blur of great music. I'm now a huge fan.

Format: 7"
Tracks: 2
Cost: £5 new
Bought: Gig, London
When: 27/09/18
Colour: Black
Etching: none
mp3s: none

The Loved Ones - Build & Burn

I wrote about The Loved Ones a couple of years ago when I wrote about their perfectly fine debut album. The following summer their name came up again - they played a fun set at Leeds Festival and they released their second album, Build & Burn. 2008 was the year I was doing my Tuesday-record-from-Spillers, but also my Monthly-record-from-Damaged year, so this was my purchase that month; at £9, Welly was basically giving it away.

The first half of Build & Burn is good - Pretty Good Year is a really strong opener and The Bridge is huge, possibly the best song they wrote. But the second side of the album it all goes to pot - Selfish Masquerade ruins everything with a piano and some slow ballad nonsense, and Louisiana is even stranger - some sort of country working song. It's hard to take them seriously when they're trying hard to do these sorts of songs. I Swear is another strong song to close the album, but it's always tainted by Selfish Masquerade and Louisiana.

I think I wanted The Loved Ones to just be a solid punk band, but they clearly wanted to be Springsteen. There's nothing wrong with wanting to be Springsteen, but you can't go from songs like the ones on the first half to those two strange ones. After this album they sort of just disappeared and Dave Hause began his solo career. I saw him a few times, although it was mostly by accident. I remember him doing a solo cover of either Remedy or Trusty Chords by Hot Water Music, which was fun but once again reminded me that I have no idea what any of the HWM lyrics are.

Format: 12", insert
Tracks: 10
Cost: £9 new
Bought: Damaged Records, Cardiff
When: 20/09/08
Colour: Black
Etching: none
mp3s: cd included