Sparta - Porcelain

Fourteen songs is definitely too many. For a long time I thought twelve songs and 45 minutes was the best album length; recently I've been finding ten songs and 35-40 minutes is better, but maybe that says more about the sort of music I'm listening to than anything else. Sparta's first album, Wiretap Scars, was twelve songs and 48 minutes and, mostly unrelated to those facts, was a great album (albeit one dominated by the opening song). On their second, Porcelain, they went for 14 songs and nearly an hour. It's too long. No post-hardcore album needs to be that long. It's probably worse when you note that two of the songs are actually minute-long interludes (so unnecessary). There's probably a good ten song album in there, but there's neither ten I love enough to suggest keeping, nor four I hate enough to suggest removing (beyond the two interludes); there are twelve mostly similar songs. If I picked four songs to remove and someone strongly disagreed, I definitely wouldn't feel strongly enough about my choices to argue against them for any amount of time (but I very much doubt this imaginary scenario will ever happen - I can count on one hand the number of people I've ever spoken to about Sparta, let along grilled them on the finer details of their opinions on the band's second album. I think I'm safe).

Anyway, a few months after buying Wiretap Scars in Canberra and falling in love with the opener, Cut Your Ribbon, I was really pleased to find this double-vinyl copy of Porcelain in a shop in Heidelberg called Vinyl Only. They had an interesting selection of records and I bought this as well as the only Rancid album I own for £7 each (a quick look on Discogs has this one selling for a good number of multiples of what I paid for it, which is surprising, but nice to see). I was excited to hear this one most when I got back home, although that was after a stop in Vienna and Lancaster, so it was at least a week later. On top of that, I didn't have much chance to play it before flying back to Australia, but I think I did take a taped copy back with me.

Porcelain never grabbed me in the same way Wiretap Scars did, and I partly blame the duration for that - too many songs that are too similar. I liked Sparta's take on post-hardcore and it felt it was a good step away from being an ATDI v2.0, but it does run thin over an hour. The singer's voice isn't the easiest on the ears, and they tended towards neater, grander production values which is unusual for this style of music. On the other hand, the guitars that twinkle on top of pretty much every song are brilliant and turn an otherwise very uneventful album to one that has some nice moments. Lines in Sand is a great example of that - without the guitars on the chorus it would just be a thoroughly dull melodic rock song - same goes for Tensioning (which is lucky because even the singer sounds bored of the chorus). The opener, Guns of Memorial Park, is a great song - classic Sparta and brilliant drums (it feels like the production focus on that was far greater than most the other songs). Death in the Family is another highlight, and one of the catchiest songs on the album. La Cerca has a strong chorus, End Moraine is good and heavy and the screams of "Oh god, I miss you" at the end of Travel by Bloodline are emo-perfection (although not a patch on Slint's use of the same line, of course). Splinters finishes the album with more energy than most of the songs that came before it combined - if the whole album was as frantic and urgent as that song, this review would be way more positive. It's the closest they come to Cut Your Ribbon by a long way, but is hidden away as the fourteenth track after 55-minutes of songs that barely stand close to it. Quite why they decided to put it there I don't know. Going out on a high is a bold move when it's after so many lows.

Two years later I got a copy of Sparta's third album, Threes, on cd for £2.30 in Bart's CD Cellar in Boulder and was beyond underwhelmed by it. There was one song that sounded like it might have been a Coldplay cover. I can't even think the last time I listened to that (I should probably give it another go. At least they had the good sense to keep that one to twelve songs). The trajectory of Sparta's three albums for me is then a fairly depressing one - strong opener, weaker second and bad third. They wrote some good songs in that time and were great each time I saw them, so I don't begrudge them that - I think I got about as much enjoyment out of them as could reasonably be expected.

Format: Double 12", gatefold sleeve
Tracks: 14
Cost: £7 new
Bought: Vinyl Only, Heidelberg
When: 23/01/06
Colour: Black
Etching: none
mp3s: no

Earthless Meets Heavy Blanket - In a Dutch Haze

I love this album.

In a Dutch Haze is the appropriately named live album of Earthless's set with Heavy Blanket at Roadburn Festival in 2012. Earthless are a band I've really gotten into since seeing at Primavera Sound in 2015; Heavy Blanket I know nothing about, other than that J Mascis from Dinosaur Jr plays guitar. In January this year, Norman Records had one of their large clearout sales on, and I bought a lot of cool music. One such purchase was this live album.

It's worth noting that this is no regular live album. Over four sides of vinyl we have exactly one song, called Paradise in a Purple Sky. It is an hour long and incredible throughout. Despite only buying it at the start of the year I've already played it more than some albums I bought years ago. It didn't come with a download code, but Amazon or Google Music were selling the digital version of the album for £1 (since it's only one song, and the algorithms haven't yet figured out how to price stoner metal), which was too good an offer to pass up; as a result, it has had a lot of airtime at work. Turns out I get a lot done when listening to heavy, freaky hour-long jams.

Ordinarily I might talk about my favourite songs on an album, but here there are just parts that blow my mind slightly more than others. By the end of the first side they're already thrashing things out and you wonder how they can keep things as intense for the next 45 minutes. About halfway through the second side things simmer down a bit for a while, but Mario is still pounding away at the drums carrying things forward, and even that doesn't last long before they're ramping things up again. It'd be easy to think that one song that lasts an hour might be boring, but that's possibly the most exciting thing about this song - I never get bored, I never think "wow, this has been going on for a while". Earthless write long songs generally, but it seems there is no upper limit for how long their songs can be. And I like that.

Format: Double 12", gatefold sleeve
Tracks: 1
Cost: £16 new
Bought: Norman Records
When: 15/01/19
Colour: Yellow
Etching: none
mp3s: no

Poison the Well - Ghostchant

I never really got on with Poison the Well's third album, You Come Before You, but I think that's mainly because I left it far too late to hear it. Tear From the Red was huge and I was into from the off; The Opposite of December and Distance Only Makes the Heart Grow Fonder were heavier but I was into them too. It helped that I heard all those albums within a little over a year of each other (and that that year was 2003, a good time to be a fan of Poison the Well). I also got this 10" single of Ghostchant that year for £3 in Selectadisc London, the day we went to see Deftones play Wembley Arena (for the first time) and also the day I got my Aeroplane Flies High boxset. It was an ok single, but didn't grab me like some of the songs on Tear From the Red. There's very little memorable about it - I've literally just played it and couldn't really tell you much about it.

What probably didn't help was that the day I bought this was also about a week before I started university, where I was introduced to all sorts of new bands - in the first few months alone, some Americans in my halls introduced me to Hum and Black Eyes; these were exciting times and Poison the Well definitely got left behind. In fact, it'd be 2006 before I finally bought a copy of You Come Before You (a cheap cd purchase in the HMV in Sydney, just days after I'd found my surprisingly rare copy of Hum's You'd Prefer An Astronaut on vinyl). Australian summer, combined with being a few years older were not the right conditions for enjoying Poison the Well's metalcore. Moreover, it felt like they'd done away with the unexpected acoustic guitars and shameless emo that made Tear From the Red so interesting; similarly, there were none of the hooks or breakdowns that made the earlier stuff fun too. And, like that, I pretty much stopped being a Poison the Well fan. I still play Tear From the Red from time to time, but not very often at all.

Anyway, there are two other songs here: Midair Love Message, which has some strong blast beats but not much else, and a demo of Sticks and Stones Never Made Sense from Tear From the Red, which is just a scrappy version of the album take (I know that's what demos are, but usually ones that get released and a bit more interesting). It's not one of the more interesting records in my collection, but for £3 you can't really complain. Red vinyl, numbered (#1018, out of 2000 it seems).

Format: 10"
Tracks: 3
Cost: £3 new
Bought: Selectadisc, London
When: 19/09/03
Colour: Red
Etching: none
mp3s: none

Weezer - Weezer (The Red Album)

I feel like when I bought this record the idea of buying the new Weezer album the week it came out wasn't a thing to be embarrassed by, but looking back at their discography it must have been. I'd had Make Believe for a year and a half by that point so knew they were capable of writing bad albums. But The Green Album and Maladroit weren't uniformly terrible, so it was possible, I'm pretty sure, at the time at least. that Make Believe was just an anomaly. Of course, we all know it was next step in a slippery slope; a slope that steepened with The Red Album.

The Red Album came out whilst I was doing my Tuesday-record-from-Spillers year and seemed like a solid purchase that week. My colleague Hywel was really excited for the new Weezer album and I think some of that rubbed off on me. As has been discussed at length by everybody on the internet for years, Weezer built up a lot of good trust with The Blue Album and exactly how far that trust went varied depending on who you asked. For me, I definitely went into this wanting to like it. But I never really did. Pork and Beans has something classic Weezer about it, but is ultimately a very stupid song (which eventually became their modus operandi). The Greatest Man That Ever Lived was a ridiculous concept that didn't translate into a good song, and there's basically nothing else I remember about the rest of the album. I can't think how many years it's been since I last played The Red Album, maybe there'll be something to redeem it I'd forgotten about. Update: I'm at the end now and there isn't. The Angel and the One isn't terrible, but that's not exactly praise. I'd also forgotten that Cold Dark World contains one of the worst lyrics I've ever heard.

The Red Album turned out to be the last new Weezer album I bought. Raditude came out a year later but I had no interest in buying it. Weezer's downwards trajectory was well-established and the good trust they'd established with me was finally wearing out. Some friends gave them a few more chances, others stopped before I did; everybody has their limit with Weezer-Blue-Album-good-faith and I quite like seeing where that line is for other people. This album pushed me to the other side.

Format: 12", gatefold
Tracks: 10
Cost: £15.50 new
Bought: Spillers Records, Cardiff
When: 23/06/08
Colour: Red
Etching: none
mp3s: no

Pink Floyd - The Wall

One of my earliest musical memories is of The Wall. My dad had a modest collection of records mostly by Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath and Thin Lizzy, and they sat very neatly in the unit the hifi lived on, rarely being played. I remember looking through them from a young age - mostly reading the spines but sometimes taking them out and looking at the sleeves. I have a few particular memories: being terrified of the "war pig" on the cover of Sabbath's Paranoid, not understanding why In Through the Out Door came in a brown paper bag and the terrifying cartoons inside the gatefold sleeve of The Wall. As far as the music goes, I distinctly remember Mother and it's slightly haunting lyrics (I think my dad used to sing it to us), as well as the school children on Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2, but little else.

Fast forward some years and I heard Nine Inch Nails' The Fragile for the first time, maybe a year or so after it came. It's probably too much of an over-statement to call that album my generation's The Wall, but double albums weren't really a thing, and I remember the endless comparisons to The Wall. That was a landmark moment in a lot of ways - the realisation that the music my dad listened to could influence the music I was listening to. In hindsight, it's obvious - those were some of the biggest bands of the decade and Black Sabbath basically made metal the awesome thing it is, but to a 16-year-old child, you just assume everything is always new, and not a constant reinvention of things from the past.

In January 2001 I bought a copy of the 1980 live recording of The Wall to add to my small collection of cds. Obviously between hearing The Fragile and then, I'd decided that Pink Floyd were a cool band that it was ok to like, and not some dad-rock band; my friend Matt who I walked to school with was a huge fan, so that maybe helped. That was how I properly got into Pink Floyd, but all the preamble is important; I'd been listening to Pink Floyd long before I even knew it.

Over the years I've seen Roger Waters a handful of times - Glastonbury 2002, Roskilde 2006 (where he played Dark Side of the Moon in full, more on that another time) and at the O2 Arena in 2011. That night deserves a special mention - in a brilliant combination of events, he was touring The Wall and playing a series of shows at the O2 that happened to coincide with my dad's 50th birthday, so I got us tickets to one of the nights. I think he'd seen Pink Floyd play it back in the day, or certainly had seen concert footage of the wall going up. Either way, I think we were both as excited as each other to see the album played out. By complete chance I happened to pick the same night where both Nick Mason happened to be in the crowd, as well as the night where David Gilmour fulfilled a promise to come on stage with Roger for Comfortably Numb; in Outside the Wall, for just a few moments, the three living members of Pink Floyd were reunited on stage to play together for what I think remains the last time and by complete chance we got to witness that. It was very cool.

The stage show was, of course, everything I imagined it would be - the wall gradually being built and the giant flying inflatables and the anti-war rhetoric projected onto the newly built wall. If The Wall teaches us anything, it's that if you're going to have a theme, you might as well to commit to it fully (aside from being over two discs and telling something of a story, the comparisons to The Fragile (or rather The Fragile to The Wall) fall away pretty quickly - Trent had no stage show like this). Being a moody teenager listening to The Wall was a strange experience, and quite grounding - clearly people had been having similar thoughts for a long time and I was in no way unique in emphasising with the idea of building a wall. Again, obvious in hindsight.

Musically, The Wall didn't hugely influence what I was listening to - beyond being guitar-based, it sounded nothing like the other bands I was into, and considerably poppier (or should I say radio-friendly, since the definition of pop has changed a million times since this was released). Very little of my collection pre-dates 1990, so it certainly didn't send me on a journey through 70's rock. But The Wall set new ideals of what I wanted from concept albums, and is probably part of the reason I have such a soft-spot for them. Albums are great, but albums that are tied together with a narrative are a whole step beyond; albums that feel like haphazard collections of songs where not even the music fits together do considerably less for me.

To list the highlights is to list most of the songs on the album - The Thin Ice, Another Brick in the Wall (all parts), Mother, Goodbye Blue Sky, Goodbye Cruel World (what a dangerously bleak lyric), Hey You, Comfortably Numb (not initially a favourite of mine but one I came to love - Roger's vocals in the chorus are perfect. Plus, you know, guitar solos), In the Flesh (with the backing singers providing the haunting "against the wall" lines), Run Like Hell, Waiting for the Worms (what a trio of songs) and The Trial wrapping everything up in a pinnacle of pomp and commitment to the theme. It's a truly remarkable album.

Anyway, this isn't my dad's copy of The Wall - this is one I picked up for a ridiculous 33p in a charity shop near my house in December, in what can only be called remarkable condition for an LP that's 40 years old - the vinyl is cleaner than some new vinyl I have (and sounds crystal clear) and the picture sleeves and gatefold all look incredible. One detail I'd never noticed before is the gradually increasing height of the wall over the four labels - a very nice touch.

I've rambled on for quite long enough (and I still have a side of vinyl left to go). We all know this is a classic, so I'll forgive you if you skimmed most of this.

Format: Double 12", gatefold, picture sleeves
Tracks: 26
Cost: £0.33 second-hand
Bought: Blue Cross charity shop, Kidlington
When: 01/12/18
Colour: Black
Etching: none
mp3s: none

Alexander Tucker - Portal

I was convinced I'd written about this album years ago, but apparently I haven't. I'll get straight to the point - I've never really gotten into this one. I've definitely tried, but it's never happened and I suspect it never will.

I bought this during the Tuesday-record-from-Spillers year and the main reason for doing so was because it was on ATP Recordings. A few months before that I'd been to my first ever ATP festival and was beginning a journey that would last years and introduce me to more bands than I care to count. My friend Aled had passed a comment at some point about how great it is discovering records because they're on a certain record label - how that was essentially a stamp of approval. Whilst I agree that's true in some cases, there are many examples of it going the other way. I can totally see why this album would get released on ATPR, but that's not to say I like it.

Alexander Tucker plays all of the instruments on this album and, generally speaking, that's a worrying sign for me; there's a lot to be said for other people reining in ideas sometimes. Of course, I didn't know that when I bought it. In fact, beyond the fact it was on ATPR and whatever positive things Spillers had written on the sleeve, I knew nothing about it but figured it'd be worth chancing £10 on. The music is nice enough - mostly acoustic guitar and various layers sounds - but his voice grates a bit. It's not a very powerful voice and, intentionally I'm sure, floats somewhere behind the guitars. I imagine Alexander considers himself a guitarist first and foremost, and is very talented at it. I'd often had trouble with music I've called "guitar-players music" - music that people who play the guitar love, but because it's complicated and strange, not necessarily because it's good (I put Sonic Youth firmly in this category). Maybe I'm just unfairly dismissing it because I'm not talented enough to play the guitar, who knows.

Every now and again through this album, there are some pretty heavy guitars, and I'm a fan of that. But they're always paired with that same acoustic guitar and background-y vocals and it's just a shame. The label (the only place on the sleeve where there's any information) thanks Stephen O'Malley (of Sunn O))) fame), a name that wouldn't have meant anything to me when I bought this; I can see how the two might get along. Belljars, the first song on the second side, has a strong riff and pairs heavy electric guitars with the acoustic ones and works quite well until the point where it turns out that it's not an instrumental song.

When I was buying my weekly record from Spillers I was routinely recording the albums I bought onto cds to play in the kitchen (via my shitty USB turntable) and the pile of cds that resulted in still sits in a spindle in my car. Every time I go through there I see this album and I absolutely never think to play it. With a few of those cds I think "maybe I could be in the mood for that", but I never get that with Alexander Tucker. Playing it now will probably tide me over for many years. Like I said, I've never cracked this album and I'm increasingly sure I never will.

Format: 12"
Tracks: 8
Cost: £10.50 new
Bought: Spillers Records, Cardiff
When: 02/09/08
Colour: Black
Etching: none
mp3s: none

A Place to Bury Strangers - Onwards to the Wall

There are records in my collection that I honestly can't say why I bought. I was about to say that this is one such record, but I just looked up the details of when I bought it in my spreadsheet and now I see why it's here - it was £3.50. Mystery solved; I love a bargain. I don't know why it was so cheap, but at that price it's hard to say no.

I guess I knew the name A Place to Bury Strangers at least - as band names go, it's a great one and one that's hard to forget. I'd certainly never heard any of their music when I bought this EP, but somehow I knew roughly what to expect - maybe Banquet had a description on the sleeve saying "shoegaze" but also "heavy"; those two words sum the band up pretty well. The wall of noise that hit me was certainly not a surprise. Onwards to the Wall is five songs of loud, guitar-fuzz and noise shoegaze. The title track features some female vocals as well as the male singer, which breaks things up a bit. There's an 80's feel to the whole thing that I can't quite find the words to explain, as well as some industrial undertones that appeal to me. I just noticed that the drummer from Baroness plays drums on two of the songs.

I like this EP and play it more regularly than the next sentence would imply. I've never got round to seeking out any of their other music though. Partly that's because I never see their albums in record shops, but I think I might be on the fence even if I did. When I listen to shoegaze I definitely enjoy it, but I don't consider myself a fan of the genre; moreover, I have enough shoegaze albums that I can get my fix whenever I need it. Maybe I've just not spent enough time with the genre to appreciate the subtle differences between bands and get excited by and seek out more of the ones I like. Maybe it's the genre itself - it almost feels intentionally un-inviting.

Anyway, I suspect this record will remain something of an anomaly in my collection - a sole APTBS record not surrounded by its friends. That is, unless I stumble across any of the others for such cheap prices.

Format: 12"
Tracks: 5
Cost: £3.50 new
Bought: Banquet Records, Kingston
When: 18/07/13
Colour: Black
Etching: none
mp3s: Download code