Glassjaw - Cosmopolitan Bloodloss

I was a fan of Glassjaw from the first time I heard them, which was when Kerrang! put Pretty Lush on their free Devil's Music Volume 1 cd (I've already mentioned that compilation and how many bands it got me into here). I bought their debut Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Silence shortly afterwards and so, whilst there were some dubious choices back in those early days of getting into music, there are at least some choices I was glad I made. I'd also heard When One Eight Becomes Two Zeros on a Rock Sound cd so had no problems chancing £13 on a cd when I was 16. I picked up Worship and Tribute when that came out too and enjoyed it only slightly less than the first (a controversial statement for some). A few months later the 7" of Cosmopolitan Bloodloss came out and Hugh picked me up a copy on a trip to Southampton, which he gave to me as a Christmas present. How kind.

Anyway, here is that 7". The a-side is still a great Glassjaw song and one of the highlights of their second album. The b-side El-Mark is great too, in fact I'd even say better than some of the songs that made it onto the album. Definitely worth a listen. There was a while in the early 2000's where big American bands didn't seem to bother with b-sides, so it's always nice to have an actual song, especially from a band who aren't know for releasing records very often.

I found stuffed inside the sleeve of this record one of my tickets to see Glassjaw at The Garage in October of  2002, a gig that never happened. The original show was postponed three times due to Daryl's illness - one of which was the day I discovered The Paperchase and another was the day after an experiment I took part in at college on the effects of staying awake all night (so I wouldn't have been in much of a state for that show anyway) - and by the time it was actually cancelled it had been so long since we ordered the tickets they couldn't refund us. So Hugh and I were £13 down each and still hadn't seen Glassjaw. Luckily however they've played a lot of shows in the UK in the five or so years since and I've seen them a whole bunch of times, including a show a five minute walk from my old house in Cardiff which more than made up for it.


Format: 7"
Tracks: 2
Cost: Gift
Bought: Gift
When: 18/12/02
Colour: Black
Etching: none
mp3s: no

The Paper Chase - Cntrl-Alt-Delete-U

I've raved about The Paper Chase a lot on here already, and you can read about their other records here. There's something about their very unique style that I absolutely adore, but one of the many other things I enjoy is how they made each record feel like a whole, rather than a collection of songs. This EP certainly has that feeling, even though the themes are maybe less obvious than their other albums.

Cntrl-Alt-Delete-U only has five songs (and an amazing title) but they're all great, and there's no messing around. The songs feel fuller and more crazed than the ones on the band's other records, but maybe that's a result of the fact it's an EP - they had to squeeze all the ideas in. There's barely room for anything else in This is the Return of the Don't Talk Backs. I like it a lot, but The Paper Chase have long been one of my favourite bands so I was probably always going to. About halfway through Who Can Deny How Delicious it Tastes? these haunting string appear and fade in and out throughout the rest of the second half, which finishes with the epic ...The Unopened Email to God, possibly one of my favourite Paper Chase songs. The strings reappear even more prominently and carry the lengthy second half of the song whilst John rants about the sun. If all this wasn't good enough, the record ends with a man's voice explaining his hatred for the sun finally finding a locked groove in the vinyl with the line "I hate the sun" on repeat for infinity. I have a few records that end with locked grooves, but this is by far the finest (not to mention the difficultly of pressing the record so the last groove was exactly long enough; I have no idea how you go about planning such a thing).

Aside from a few albums I only have on cd, this completes the Paper Chase back-catalogue for me. When I've got a bit more money floating around I plan to see if I can pick up the missing vinyl because it'll be lovely to have the complete collection of one of my favourite bands.

Format: 12"

Tracks: 5

Cost: Gift, new

Bought: Gift

When: 25/12/05

Colour: Black

Etching: none

mp3s: no

Neutral Milk Hotel - On Avery Island

I imagine this is the case for the vast majority of people, but I also got into Neutral Milk Hotel backwards - In the Aeroplane Over the Sea then On Avery Island. I'd been listening to In the Aeroplane... for four months when I bought this one, and was already a huge fan (something you can read much, much more about here). I'd read lots about their first album, so I think I went into knowing it wasn't going to blow me away quite as much as the sequel had. I enjoyed it, but it took much longer to actually get into it.

On Avery Island is definitely a harder album on the ears. I've since learned to love the levels of fuzz throughout the whole album, but when the first thing you hear is the fuzzed-up Song Against Sex you know it's going to take some effort and perseverance to get into. I played the album a bunch of times, but the songs didn't quite jump out at me and it was definitely under-appreciated for a while.

The first song of these 12 that I really fell in love with was Gardenhead/Leave Me Alone, which I enjoy for both its beat and the fact that Jeff sings the first half as if he's constantly exhaling. About nine months after I bought On Avery Island I was in Canada with some friends, and at the end of the trip we were all going our separate ways and for the first time in two and a half weeks I was on my own. I was stood waiting for a bus to go to the airport with my mp3 player on shuffle when I realised how incredible Gardenhead is. I guess I was paying it more attention than I had before, and without the rest of the album to hide it I could appreciate it as a single song (albeit two songs squeezed together). As a side note, my mp3 player on shuffle was responsible for me getting into a number of albums I was struggling with as a whole, most notably Radiohead's Hail to the Thief, which I eventually noticed was 14 great individual songs.

Another thing that helped me properly discover On Avery Island was the brilliantly basic recording of Jeff playing solo between the two NMH releases on Live at Jittery Joes. He plays a number of songs from the first record and they come across brilliantly stripped back to just an acoustic guitar, which in turn allowed me to appreciate them better on the LP. I saw Jeff play live last year and one of the songs from this album that impressed me the most was April 8th, one of the darkest sounding songs Jeff's ever released, which was otherwise hidden away at the end followed by a few more minutes of fuzz.

So it took me some effort, but I am now a big fan of On Avery Island too; it's certainly more than just "the other Neutral Milk Hotel LP" to me at least.


Format: 12", insert
Tracks: 12
Cost: £11 new
Bought: Spillers Records
When: 10/06/08
Colour: Black
Etching: none
mp3s: no

Mudhoney - Live Mud

My Mudhoney back-catalogue is thin at best, but this is record the highlight by far. I hadn't seen Mudhoney when I bought it and only had their best-of compilation March to Fuzz, so I didn't know a great deal of their music. I found this live LP in Spillers early on in the Tuesday-Record-From-Spillers year and it was probably the limited run of 500 copies that drew me in (always a sucker for limited editions), or maybe there just weren't that many other records I wanted to buy that day. Either way, I was very pleased when I got it home and played it.

Mud Ride is a perfect opener in both the way it builds up and how it prepares you for what's about to happen. I didn't know that song before but enjoyed it greatly, so we were off to a good start. In fact, I didn't know any of the songs on side 1, but they're all great Mudhoney songs. Side 2, however, is where the hits are at - Touch Me I'm Sick, Suck You Dry and In & Out of Grace all get played and still work fantastically, despite their age. The highlight for me however is Hard-on For War, a song from their album Under a Billion Suns which hadn't been released when the show was recorded. The beat and the riffs are perfect and it's brilliantly cynical. When I finally saw them at All Tomorrow's Parties and they played this song, my friend turned to me at the end to tell me what a huge tune it was. I already knew this of course, but I was glad he agreed.

I've raved about Mudhoney on here before (I wrote about The Lucky Ones a while back), but it was this live album that made me much more of a fan than I was before. When they played that ATP I had very high hopes but they easily reached them. Maybe I still would've been amazed had I just gone to see them without having heard this record, but there exists the possibility that I might have missed them, which would have been a shocking mistake. As it was, they were amongst the bands I was looking forward to the most.


Format: 12"
Tracks: 11
Cost: £10 new
Bought: Spillers Records
When: 04/03/08
Colour: Black
Etching: none
mp3s: Download code

Chuck Ragan - The Sawblade 7"

This is a nice looking record, so much so even Chuck himself agreed when he saw it. Last November Chuck Ragan played an in-store show at Banquet records in Kingston on a Tuesday lunchtime and, being a lazy student with nothing else to do, I jumped at the chance to see him play a tiny venue again. He played for 25 minutes and squeezed in some great songs (including an acoustic version of Drag My Body from the new Hot Water Music LP, which might be my favourite song on there). Banquet recorded the whole thing and you can watch it here. It was a very cool show indeed.

Afterwards, they explained that Chuck would be staying around for a bit to sign any records people wanted signed. I usually don't go for the whole autographed records things, but this is the man who wrote my second favourite album of all time so I decided I would get something signed and thank him for his great music. The problem however, was that I already had at home all of the Chuck/HWM albums Banquet had in stock and the only record I didn't already own was the slightly-more-expensive-than-I'd-have-liked-but-lovely-nonetheless Sawblade 7" which, as you can see, is in the shape of a circular sawblade with the outline of Florida and a hammer crossing it. It is a lovely looking record, and looks even nicer in white. I had been thinking about buying it for a while and figured today was as good a day as any. I'm always happy to spend my money at Banquet, especially when they put on incredible free live shows like that, and I figured I would have paid at least a fiver to see that, so maybe the cost of the record isn't that bad after all.

Anyway, Chuck signed the label (see the last picture) and was pretty impressed that Banquet had it in on white vinyl, we had a brief chat and I was off. He is a thoroughly lovely man. Musically it's very nice too, although Live by the Sword has already found its way into my record collection twice (here and here), so calling it "unreleased" is a bit of a stretch (although the recording is different here, and a nice one at that - the backing vocals give it a haunting feel). The other song Field Holler is another great Chuck song and would have sat on his last record perfectly.

All in all, a nice record with even nicer memories of a great gig.

Format: 7" shaped vinyl (12" across at its widest)

Tracks: 2

Cost: £11 new

Bought: Banquet Records

When: 13/11/12

Colour: White

Etching: none

mp3s: no

Rage Against the Machine - Rage Against the Machine

I was at a gig the other week and between bands they played Rage Against the Machine's self-titled debut. It was playing too loud for conversation, so all the non-smokers were just stood there enjoying it and remembering what a great album it is. I, for one, had long forgotten how great it is; I'd loved it back in the day and listened to it so often I didn't feel I had to anymore - I knew it backwards. However, in those years that passed with Rage only being played sporadically, my memory of what an excellent album this is faded. It's now 20 years old and it still blows me away.

I'd never heard of Rage Against the Machine until the 29th of December 1999, when some friends and I had gone record shopping in the many second-hand shops of Bournemouth. I'd filled out my Manics collection (on cd) and picked up Ignition by The Offspring. Hugh bought a couple of cds, one of them Rage's debut and their name first passed my ears as we stood outside the shop comparing our purchases. Back then we all taped each other's cds so I recorded Hugh's copy and eventually bought a copy a year later when a friend's brother was shifting all of his cds for a fiver each (I think he'd recorded them all onto mini-disc, a move he'd surely come to regret). A year or so later I was in Newbury Comics in Boston, found the LP and picked it up along with some Tool records, Gorilla Biscuits and a Rival Schools 7"). I knew it was a classic and was pretty pleased to have it on vinyl (the album has one of the most brutal covers out there - not many records have an actual picture of a man dying on the front, although that's probably a good thing).

Now, nearly 13 years after first hearing this album, it's still incredible. As soon as each song starts it's nearly impossible to not drum along or mime the bass or guitar or rap every single word that Zach spits. I could never listen to this album when I was revising for exams because it makes it so hard to focus on the task at hand. Years later it's still stealing my attention. Sure, lines like "fuck you I won't do what you tell me" sound a little cliché these days, but the songs are so good you just don't care. I couldn't possibly list my favourite songs as there's not a bad one on there, but Bombtrack, Take the Power Back and the outro to Bullet in the Head always stayed with me.

Rage were up there with the first bands I ever saw live - my 8th gig was the Sunday of Reading Festival in 2000 where we saw, what would be for a while at least, Rage's last UK show - and they were incredible. The pit down the front was ferocious and I cautiously stayed a bit further back. I remember taking comfort in the fact I wasn't the only one also "singing" the guitar bits. I would see them two more times, including the free Finsbury Park "Thank You" show for getting them the Christmas number one spot. A lot of people I knew were against the campaign to get RATM to number one citing such arguments as "when did you last care about who had the number one single?", etc (even arguing it was unfair to the X-Factor winner). However, I was all for the idea, to the extent I even downloaded a song I have the mp3 of. Yes, I've not given a shit about the singles chart in a very long time, but as a kid I certainly did, and I loved the idea that people could come together to affect something like that. I get the point of X-Factor, but I'm not it's target audience and hope I never am, so it pleases me to see people with fond memories of non-pop music taking the power back, as it were.

Musically it was excellent, but in other ways the Finsbury Park show was an odd one. I figured the audience would be much younger, but I'd say that on average the crowd were the same age as me and upwards. It made me a bit sad to think that in the years since Rage broke up kids just weren't getting into them. The idea of passing through your teenage years without Killing in the Name just seems wrong.

This album has just been re-issued in a variety of formats, and the 2cd+dvd package looks pretty nice. The deluxe boxset looks even nicer, but probably out of my price range for an album I already have two copies of. If I didn't own this LP I'd probably be more tempted (it also comes with the dvd of the Finsbury Park gig, which would be nice to re-live).


Format: 12", picture sleeve
Tracks: 10
Cost: £6.30 new
Bought: Newbury Comics, Boston
When: 05/08/02
Colour: Black
Etching: none
mp3s: no

The No WTO Combo - Live from the Battle in Seattle

Here is a record I spent quite a while looking for, almost entirely because of the line up. The idea of Krist Novoselic and Kim Thayil playing in the same band definitely appealed to me. By then I hadn't come to dislike Jello Biafra's voice quite so much so I probably considered that a pro too. I think Mary-Ann Hobbs played a song on the Radio One Rock Show around when it came out and I guess I enjoyed it, but it was definitely the Nirvana/Soundgarden connection that kept the record in my mind.

Anyway, years passed (many years, nearly 8 of them) and I eventually found this in Damaged Records in Cardiff for a mere £6, so excitedly took it home to finally hear the whole thing. The problem is that in those nearly 8 years, I'd discovered that Jello Biafra's voice winds me up no end. I have one of the albums he did with the Melvins and I find that equally hard on the ears. Unfortunately the record starts with a sprawling spoken word rant by Jello, in which he makes some perfectly reasonable points if you can get past his voice. The four songs that follow are plenty nice enough, again despite Jello's voice, and make for an interesting listen on their own.

Whilst in 2000 I was at an age where I really should have known a lot more about what was going on in the world than I did, the politics and meaning behind this record are a bit lost on me. Worse still, I'm yet to sit down and read the lengthy essays inside the book (which I'm sure will fill me in greatly). There's no excuse for ignorance, but it's not high on my priorities right now. I have a rough idea of the history and this record is certainly captures the time and place nicely, even though I was neither there nor involved.


Format: 12", 8-page 10" booklet
Tracks: 5
Cost: £6 new
Bought: Damaged Records
When: 16/08/08
Colour: Black
Etching: none
mp3s: no