The Music - You Might As Well Try to Fuck Me

I just wrote about The Music's The People EP, but before that 12" came out, they released an EP called You Might As Well Try to Fuck Me. I found this record for about £2 in Newbury Comics in Boston about nine months after it came out; it was a very long way from where the band were from.

I have no idea how well the band went down in the States (although the price tag on this, presumably, imported 12" suggested not very well) but I can see how a music exec might have seen their potential over the pond. Bands like Q And Not U and Les Savy Fav were doing very interesting things with indie music and they had the potential to fit in well with that arty New York crowd. On the other hand, they were incredibly British and I suspect the States were still trying to get over Britpop too.

The title track is a bit more traditionally rocky than how the first album turned out, which is possibly why it wasn't included. The other songs are a mixed bag - Karma is a slower, trippier affair (comparisons to The Verve are rife here), Treat Me Right On has an annoying bit of guitar in the verses but a surprisingly heavy chorus, and Too High sprawls (for even longer than on the album); as an epic closer, it actually benefits from being a bit longer.

Much like The People EP, I'm surprised at how well this 12" has aged.

Format: 12", picture sleeve

Tracks: 4

Cost: £2.10 new

Bought: Newbury Comics, Boston

When: 05/08/02

Colour: Black

Etching: none

mp3s: no

The Music - The People

Who remembers The Music? For a short while, they were the hottest new thing. It was 2002; Britpop was long dead and indie bands had begun crossing over with dance music. It was the perfect scenario for a band like The Music to rise to prominence.

This is The People EP, a four-song 12" featuring one of the highlights from their debut album. As a song, The People stands up quite well - you can see why it was very popular at the time - it's upbeat, something you could dance to or sing along to. The singer had a very distinctive northern accent, one that would have been very familiar to people who had lived through The Verve and the other big indie bands from the north in the 90's. But it's also quite a smooth voice and complimented the songs well.

The other songs on the EP are fine, but you can see why they weren't album cuts. I found this 12" about a year after it was released in Soho for £4. I had a bunch of their 7"s and thought it'd be a good addition. Plus, I think at that point I was still quite enjoying the band. Needless to say, this record hasn't had a lot of play in the last 10 years or so, but it's aged far better than I expected it to have.

Format: 12", picture sleeve
Tracks: 4
Cost: £4 new
Bought: Soho
When: 07/03/03
Colour: Black
Etching: none
mp3s: no

Rancid - Rancid

I have one Rancid album, and this is it. I'm pretty sure any Rancid fan would be horrified at the prospect of only owning their self-titled fifth album, rather than one that everyone agrees to be better, such as ...And Out Comes the Wolves. I was never a huge Rancid fan - I saw them at a Reading Festival one year and borrowed one of their cds from a friend (back in the day when that was how you shared music). I don't think I ever had any plans to get into them properly, I just bought this because it was quite cheap.

I was in Heidelberg visiting a friend who was spending a year abroad studying there. I was exploring the town one day and found the local record shop, Vinyl Only (I can't remember if it was true to its word, or whether there were cds there too). There wasn't a huge amount I was after, but I did find this and Sparta's Porcelain for £7 each (or whatever that was in Euros at the time), which seemed like good deals. I figured I'd get £7-worth of enjoyment out of it and I probably did back then. Plus, I knew the song Rattlesnake from a free cd I got on a copy of Kerrang! one summer - that cd ended up being the soundtrack to a family holiday to France (at least in the headphones I had, not the car hifi).

I've not listened to this album in a very long time - it was before the era of mp3 downloads and it's rarely what I feel like listening to when I sit down in front of my record player. It's not a bad album, but it's pretty flat - I mean that in the sense that across the 22 songs, there are few moments that really stand out, which means it's just 22 hardcore-ish punk songs. There's a very subtle hint of their old ska days, but it's not very noticeable. Generally speaking, I prefer the songs that Lars sings, but I definitely couldn't listen to a whole album of just him singing, so it's good that there's a mix. There are a few moments that stand out a bit, but it's hard to figure out which ones they are without counting lines on the LP (and I guess I just don't care that much)

I think I just came to Rancid too late. I can see why my friends were big fans in our late teens - the band had a perfect mix of aggression, aesthetic and enough genres to appeal to a variety of people. As someone whose teenage years are beginning to feel like a distant memory, it's harder to enjoy as much.

Format: 12", picture sleeve
Tracks: 22
Cost: £7 new
Bought: Vinyl Only, Heidelberg
When: 23/01/06
Colour: Black
Etching: none
mp3s: no

One Minute Silence - South Central

South Central was one of the biggest songs from One Minute Silence's debut album. My friends and I all became fans of the band when they released their second album, Buy Now... Saved Later and eventually dug out copies of their debut (I found mine in a record shop in Bournemouth). In the early 2000's I developed a pretty unhealthy eBay addiction and occasionally saw this 12" picture disc go up for sale, but I never bought a copy. I liked how shamelessly metal the a-side looked (at least back in the day, anyway).

Many years later I was in Auckland and stumbled across a copy in the huge Real Groovy. It was a mere £1.85 (or whatever that was in NZ$ at the time) and it seemed rude not to. It had been three years since OMS had released their third and final album, although I still listened to them from time to time. It wasn't remotely like the indie or post-hardcore I'd been getting into for the few years around that time, but I felt like I owed it to younger me to buy it. He'd have been pleased that I had him in mind when I made that purchase.

I guess the most curious thing about this record is how it made it all the way around the globe in the first place. I wonder if the band ever had much of a following in New Zealand? If so, it almost feels like a bit of a shame that I should buy it and bring it back around the world for it to reside in my record collection in the country it came from. The b-sides are Stuck Between a Rock and a White Face, also from the debut album and Half Empty a song that made it onto the Japanese version of the debut. It's a fine additional song and would have fit on the album just as well as a lot of the other songs.

This is another slightly (understatement) underappreciated record in my collection, but I'm glad I have it.

Format: 12" picture disc
Tracks: 3
Cost: £1.85 second hand
Bought: Real Groovy, Auckland
When: 20/04/06
Colour: Picture disc
Etching: none
mp3s: no

Pale Angels - Primal Play

I very nearly saw the first ever Pale Angels show, but it clashed with another band I really wanted to see at (Pre-)Fest, so I had to miss them. In the end, another 6 months would pass before I finally saw Pale Angels and became a fan, and that was only really by accident.

Pale Angels feature Mikey from The Ergs and Jamie from The Arteries. Being a big fan of The Arteries I was intrigued, but I'd never really listened to The Ergs and was aware that Mikey had a tendency for being in many bands at any one given point. Being shockingly apathetic, I simply never made any effort to check them out, despite hearing good things about their album, Primal Play (which, if I remember correctly, had come out just ahead of their first ever show at Fest). Anyway, one Friday evening in east London, Calvinball were playing one of their last ever shows along with a few other familiar bands, and Pale Angels got added to the bill. I was pleased to finally be forced into checking them out (plus, it turned out that by this point my friend Reza was playing drums for them, an arrangement that continues to this day).

I had no idea what to expect when they took the stage, but I certainly wasn't prepared to be taken back to early-90's grunge rock. It felt a bit like what it must have felt like in the dingy bars of Seattle 25 years earlier - unexpected walls of fuzz-heavy tunes. I was impressed. (I had the same feeling the first time I saw Hot Mass a few years later - another Arteries offshoot.)

At the end of the year, I finally picked up their album, along with two 7"s in a bundle from Specialist Subject Records. It was everything I was hoping for after seeing them - fuzzy and heavy. In the Sunset is possibly the highlight, although the 14-minute Bed Bugs is more exciting than you might otherwise expect from such a long song - it starts of slow but then builds to quite a pace before finding a very catchy chorus.

Format: 12", insert
Tracks: 9
Cost: £11.50 new
Bought: Specialist Subject Records
When: 05/12/14
Colour: Blue marble
Etching: Side A: "Put the kettle on" Side B: "Sexy willy riff"
mp3s: Download code

Explosions in the Sky - The Wilderness

Explosions in the Sky are an incredible band. I often feel that it took them a while to realise that themselves though; the level of grandeur around their first three albums was minimal (almost non-existent). The Earth is Not a Cold Dead Place is musically mind-blowing, but on the surface appears much like a regular album - if you picked it up in a record store, you'd have no warning of quite how huge it would be. On All Of a Sudden I Miss Everyone they finally began to release records as if they were an epic post-rock band - everything about that record screams "I am a big album".

It was a theme that they continued with Take Care Take Care Take Care and this album, The Wilderness. It's strange to focus so much on the packaging, but a lot of time and effort has clearly gone into it, so it feels worth dwelling on. If you picked up this double LP copy of The Wilderness in a record store, you'd know you were in for something big. The gatefold sleeve unfolds in ways I still can't quite fathom and makes a sort of cave of geometric art (see the last picture). The first disc is red and the second clear with a laser etching of the geometric lines found across the artwork. It's a lovely way to present the album.

Musically, I'm a huge fan of The Wilderness. Take Care was a good album, but it didn't do anything dramatically different to what they'd done before. The two before showed they'd found their sound, and they made it their sound. There's nothing wrong with Take Care, but it was too similar without being better. The Wilderness, however, shows the band much further outside of their comfort zone, and the results are brilliant. So many little things are different that it's hard to even put my finger on what makes it so different.

The album has far more songs than we're used to, but a similar duration, resulting in much shorter songs. When a band like Explosions records song that is only three minutes long, you assume it's filler, but these moment somehow contain just as much beautiful music as the longer songs. Infinite Orbit is a great example - it's only two-and-a-half minutes long but still makes my jaw drop. Gone are the quiet-quiet-loud moments that the genre is used to (and the band have historically done so well) and instead we have songs that hit all the same emotions and tell equally interesting stories, but in a totally different way.

It also feels like there is a lot more experimentation with how to make sounds - at the very start of (and a bit throughout) Disintegration Anxiety I have no idea what they're using to make the music, but it's great. John Congleton (of The Paper Chase, and the reason I got into EITS) produced the album, but he also produced Take Care, so I assume that all parties brought fresh ideas to the table.

I'm really pleased that the band released this album, both for them and for me. It would have been easy to play it safe with another expected post-rock album, but instead they treat us with a huge mixture of things that they still somehow manage to craft into sounding beautiful.

Format: Double 12", multi-directional gatefold sleeve, 24"x24" poster, slipcase
Tracks: 9
Cost: £35 new
Bought: Truck Store
When: 04/04/16
Colour: Transparent red, clear
Etching: Laser etching on side D
mp3s: Download code

Owen Pallett - In Conflict

I started listening to Owen Pallett when he was recording under the name Final Fantasy. I'd been given a mixtape with the huge The CN Tower Belongs to the Dead and shortly afterwards I had the opportunity to see him in Cardiff - it remains one of the best shows I've ever seen - he played entirely solo with a loop pedal and then played a bunch of songs in the car park after the show finished. About 20 or 30 people were stood in absolute silence watching him play violin and sing un-amplified. It was quite something.

Six years later, I finally went to see him play again. I think there'd been opportunities to see him in between, but I think I was worried about ruining my memories of that Cardiff show. This show was a seated show in the Queen Elizabeth Hall, a building on the south bank in London that I'd not been to before. I can't remember what I knew about the show in advance - quite possibly very little - I didn't even know if it was going to be solo or with other musicians. I dragged along my friend Rich thinking he'd probably quite enjoy it. Plus, he worked a few doors along the river, so it was at least easy for him to get to.

Owen played that night with a chamber music orchestra, a drummer and a bass player (as well as a few songs solo) - it was quite a grand set-up compared to what I'd been used to. I remember really enjoying it, but it being very different to the last show (which was a good thing). However, the highlight of the night hit when he played a couple of songs with all the musicians at the same time. It was like watching a live drum 'n' bass remix of classical songs. The drummer in particular was beating the shit out of his drums and the effect was incredible. If I'd just seen those two songs alone I would have left happy. I couldn't have pictured a show more different to the one I saw six years before and I certainly wouldn't have expected to enjoy it so much.

Those two songs turned out to be The Riverbed and Infernal Fantasy, two consecutive songs from his most-recent-at-the-time album, In Conflict. I'd heard a lot of noise around the album release, but after my moderate enjoyment of Heartland I was wary of rushing out to get another album. After the London show I bought In Conflict as soon as I found a copy (the LP includes a bonus track that isn't on the mp3 download - Bridle & Bit - a very interesting song with female vocals). It's a great album with a strong mixture of songs - I Am Not Afraid and The Secret Seven are really great. But for me, three songs towards the end of the album are what I look forward to the most. The Sky Behind the Flag quickly picks up the pace as the drums and beat get moving fast but then The Riverbed hits even harder from the outset and is the highlight of the album. It's probably the most obvious "rock song" that Owen's ever recorded, but it turns out that style of writing with his musical stylings work incredibly. Then we are treated to Infernal Fantasy, which features some almost-gang vocals towards the end. It's very strangely weighted album for me - I listen eagerly awaiting those songs towards the end - but it makes for a very rewarding listen.

Format: Double 12", gatefold sleeve
Tracks: 14
Cost: £20 new
Bought: Truck Store
When: 14/01/15
Colour: Black
Etching: none
mp3s: Download code