Elvis Costello & the Attractions / Armed Forces (Radar Records,Germany, 1979)

To my ears, Armed Forces is Elvis Costello's last perfect record, the final moment when his ambition doesn't quite begin to outstrip his talent and charm. There are many genius moments on 1980's Get Happy!, some of which match or even exceed the best moments here, but creeping in with the gold are the first signs of Costello's desperate and bothersome need to telegraph sophistication, manifesting itself in the lyrical equivalent of dropping lines from a Waugh novel into a pop song. Maybe this is your cup of tea (are you English?), but when I'm listening to pop music so propulsive and bright I want to lose myself in the lyrics, to find the instant identifier.  On Get Happy! Costello is kicking your shin to point out his cleverness so often that I lose focus: It's the moment where the lyrics go from "very literate" to "so literate I no longer give a shit." By Imperial Bedroom, when we get to "Long Honeymoon":

All the bedroom lights go out
As the neighbourhood gets quiet
Everything in heaven and earth is almost right
But there's a wife who's wondering where her husband could be tonight
And when the phone rang only once she took a dreadful fright

 

Yeah, I'm reaching for the Track Forward button. And by Kojak Variety I'm reaching for the Album Forward button. I'm not saying that the guy shouldn't try to expand his range, just that I don't have to find the attempt successful or interesting.

But damn if Armed Forces isn't a juggernaut. In fact, since Costello is the kind of artist that makes one slip all too easily into High Fidelity mode, let's just go ahead and say that this is probably a top five Side 1 record. All six songs are faultless and substantial. Nobody doesn't like "Alison" but "Party Girl" is probably my favorite Costello ballad. And my college girlfriend told me when we broke up that she listened to "Big Boys" on repeat as a kind of revenge. Ouch.

 Still, as much as I love this record, it's not something I've dug for on vinyl. Too often his early platters are banged up, and the art on the American sleeve is kinda stupid; why mess with elephants? But this German pressing was too sweet to pass up. Check the specs: Four-way fold out cover with fantastic inner art (except for the center, which is the American cover art), a bonus 7" EP, and thick-stock cards with pictures of Costello and the band. And the record's in great shape, too. Cheers to Amoeba in San Francisco for pricing it like bin record.

 

 And just because Nick Lowe never gets enough credit for his production on the first six Costello records: Great work, Nick! 

Pixies / Surfer Rosa (Rough Trade, 1988)

 

The Pixies will be our Stones: the music we thrilled to as kids that ends up marking time between floors in elevators before we're forty. My cohort is hardly the first generation to find the anthems of our youth reduced to background music in increasingly less hip restaurants, but that doesn't lessen the sting, does it? One of my earliest music listening memories comes from an eighth grade spring when I gathered with my childhood friends John and Brent in John's bedroom and we put on my newly purchased copy of Doolittle and had our minds blown by his shitty boombox speakers pouring out "Debaser" at the best volume it could manage. Then just the other day I heard another song from that record wafting from the yuppie-cave sub-Adobe Grill hellhole around the corner from my apartment. The kind of place where everyone is over fifty and in sandals and the food sucks but nobody cares because their taste buds were the first thing to decay when soul rot set in. The Pixies in the 2010s—music to eat your decrepit enchilada by.

Do we just have to take it? Or should we let it drive us to music that's just too difficult to be played in an eatery? I doubt my friends who love Glenn Branca worry about hearing him in coffee shops anytime soon.

 

Surfer Rosa came a bit later for me in my Pixies chronology. Probably after Bossanova, an album that confused me at the time because it's space-rock production sounded like such a departure from Doolittle. In Surfer Rosa, though, I could see the rawness that had been smoothed away on the subsequent release. It helped define for me the band's trajectory, especially after I eventually heard Come On Pilgrim. (To this day I have never owned Trompe le Monde, or even heard it in its entirety.) As my inclination was always toward polish, it took me a bit longer to really get into SR, but I recall quite fondly a vacation afternoon in a Jersey shore motel when I got stuck on "Brick is Red" and listened to it at least twenty times in a row. I used to bring my CDs down to the shore in their jewel cases so I could look at the booklets, and worried that my mother would flip out about the topless lady on the booklet cover. (You chuckle, but this was the woman who just a few years earlier had made me return the cassette of Pearl Jam's Ten I'd won at a boardwalk game booth after she found out the lyrics included swear words. The booth guy looked at me like I was a sad asshole, which I surely was.)

This record came out in March 1988 in the UK on 4AD, and was imported to the US until August when Rough Trade released it here. I can't technically call this a Project 90s record for obvious reasons, though it was interchangeable in my boombox with the usual grunge suspects. Still, I'm guessing given the 1988 date that there's a bunch more of these kicking around than what came later; we hadn't quite hit the height of the CD era, and I'd imagine Rough Trade was game for printing more vinyl that any of the majors would just a few years later. The price bears it out, too, reasonable in comparison to some of the key Project 90s acquisitions.


A great example here of why a cover that works on vinyl sometimes needs to be reconfigured for CD. The printed lyrics for "Oh My Golly!" are a wonderful touch that would've been reduced to illegibility on a disc booklet, and so 4AD wisely cropped them for that issue. Plus it makes the uniqueness of the vinyl release that much cooler.

I don't pull my Pixies records out too much anymore; spinning this was the first time I've listened to Surfer Rosa in at least five years. Still love it, but it's edges feel sanded down by time now, and by the widening of my range of music experience. Or maybe they've just been swallowed up by the fruit of their influence.

Dinosaur (Jr.) / You're Living All Over Me (SST / 1987)

Boston's steady decline as a record town has been the source of no little consternation to the few left to be bothered, but every so often a dedicated digger can still find a gem. Armageddon Records, risen from the ashes of Cambridge's legendary, defunct Twisted Village, purveys a fine selection of punk, garage, and metal LPs, new and used all mixed together in the bins as regrettably has become the fashion. I haven't turned up much here over the years and find the new/used toggling annoying, so I was making a perfunctory flip through the new arrivals when I found myself staring at a great favorite: Dinosaur Jr.'s breakthrough classic, You're Living All Over Me.

I came to this band and this record late, sometime after college, having missed the 90s era, post-Lou Barlow version of the band and their excellent albums during the grunge years, though I do remember hearing a lot about Green Mind at the time. Fish to water with this record, right? Not one that needs to grow on you. It's impossible to deny YLAOM's insane melodicism, and the carefully layered guitar parts just barely discernible through the crap production that gives the record it's unique texture. This record seems both influenced by and kin to early Meat Puppets in the way it manages to feel simultaneously sludgy and bright, and perhaps also in how J. Mascis and Curt Kirkwood manage to turn their imperfect voices into remarkably successful instruments that feel of a piece with the music.

I'm burying the lede, but the coolest thing about this record is that it's a true first pressing from 1987, with the band's original non-Juniorized name on the jacket. The short story: after recording their first, self-titled record as Dinosaur, they put out YLAOM only to be instantly hit with legal action by now-forgotten "supergroup" (shouldn't a band have to produce some worthwhile music to earn this tag?) the Dinosaurs, prompting the name change on subsequent pressings of this LP. Seeing this without the Jr. made me pull a double-take, then grin like an idiot who's just found candy.

The second coolest thing about this record, or maybe the coolest depending on your perspective, is the SST catalog booklet that came inside, still in mint condition. Aside from being a kind of time machine back to the days when people spent real attention designing print ephemera, it also helps date this pressing doubly. Everything is available only on LP and cassette, excepting an insert page headed "Compact Disc-O-Rama," featuring SST's earliest CD offerings (unsurprisingly the biggest names on the roster). All in all, this is a hell of an item, a cornerstone of any punk/alt collection. Though I'll bet Green Mind is impossible to find on vinyl.

*Update* I just reread this post and think it sounds too bitchy about Armageddon, which is a very cool record store with a great deal of good stock and very friendly owners who assured me that I could return this record no problem if I encountered any trouble with it. As some of you know, there are many record stores I'd be happy to shit on for being poorly run, stocked, or organized, but Armageddon isn't one of them. Go buy something from them.

SRC / Milestones (Capitol/EMI, 1969)

I wrote a sweet post for this record while sitting at a bar last weekend and it seems to have disappeared. Now I'm not sure I have the energy to reconstruct it. Bear with me.

The short of it is: I found SRC when I was futzing around on music blogs about 4-5 years ago. Someone had posted "Black Sheep," the first track on their self-titled debut record, and I couldn't help but notice the screaming guitar tone, super hot. I listened to the whole record of psych-prog fuzz a few times, liked it a lot, and promptly forgot about the band for the next half-decade, as tends to happen when you have unlimited access to all the music ever made in the world.

All that by way of saying it took me a minute to remember why their name sounded familiar when this record appeared on the wall at Academy. Milestones is their follow up, and I think I actually like it better than that first record. Side 2 is especially well-written and well sequenced, and if the spoken intro to "The Angel's Song" dates this record in a way that will never not be embarassing, it hardly takes away from the fuzz-fest that follows. Take a look, though, at the lyrics printed on the verso in the photo below and tell me if it doesn't sound like something you might have had to sing at your middle school graduation.

Record blogs and CD reissues can probably convince you that there were a million bands like SRC out there between 1967 and 1972, probably at least a thousand in Detroit area alone, from where these guys hail. But this is a better than solid example of the genre, and I love the guitar sound courtesy of Gary Quackenbush; it's still my favorite thing about the band. It's very, very trebly, to the point where I have to turn down the treble knob on my receiver to avoid feeling like it's blasting the enamel off my teeth. But I do have the feeling I'll come back to this record every few years.

Beck / Mutations (Geffen / Bong Load, 1998)

Bong Load Records scored a major coup in 1992 when cofounders Tom Rothrock and Rob Schnapf independently discovered Beck Hansen at L.A. clubs and signed him to release the 12" of "Loser." A year later, though, the excitement generated by the single led to a bidding war, won by Geffen, for Beck's debut full length, which appeared two years later. For Bong Load, the consolation prize was twofold: Beck's contract with Geffen allowed him to release side projects on the label, and BL got to keep his vinyl issue, which hardly interested the majors this deep into the 90s.

Things went smoothly through Mellow Gold, but after the smashing critical and commercial success of Odelay vaulted Beck to the top tier of rock artists, Geffen got itchy. Beck had recorded an album with producer Nigel Godrich that he didn't intend as a proper follow-up to Odelay, but Geffen went ahead and released it anyway, prompting a round robin of mostly collegial lawsuits between them, Beck, and Bong Load that took a year or two to iron out.

That album was Mutations, and Bong Load's LP issue is an excellent specimen, both as listening experience and object. For starters, it's pressed on heavy vinyl, and well mastered. Even better, it includes a supercool bonus 7" with three tracks not included on the CD release. The packaging for the 7" is an accordion- folded insert that's essentially the liner notes and lyric sheet for the album proper. I'll let the photos speak for themselves, but the performances sound excellent, and I've come to think that closing track "Static" is one of Beck's underrated best.

This is just a cool record to own. I actually hadn't thought it was ever pressed, but lo and behold, it turned up on Jonny's list of Record Store Day wall gems and I fought my way through scrappy Williamsburg trust-funders to snag it just moments after the store opened. My short take on Beck is that he's the closest thing any subsequent generation has had to a Dylan, and I think his work from the 90s remains underappreciated. When you have a moment, go back and listen to this record; it's remarkable how it feels simultaneously constructed and spontaneous, loose but assured. This kind of risk-taking has long since gone out of fashion.

Unhappy Returns, or, The Rebirth of the Negative Option in the Age of Vinyl Revival

For decades, the negative option was a vibrant, powerful business model. Here’s how it worked: Book or music clubs like Columbia House and Book-of-the-Month Club would offer you a slew of free selections (plus monstrous shipping and handling fees) on the condition that you bought some specified further amount at full price (plus more monstrous S&H fees) in the next few years. Since the clubs printed and pressed their own stock, their per unit costs were nearly nil, but the real financial engine was the monthly main selection. You’d get a card in the mail indicating each month’s title and artist/author, and it you didn’t return this card in 7-10 days to decline the selection, the club would ship it to you automatically. When it landed in your mailbox, you could return it for a refund, but you still got stuck with the S&H costs going both ways. Basically, the whole process put the onus on you, the subscriber, to let the club know you didn’t want product, and they made every part of the return process hellish by staffing intransigent customer service departments. Lives are busy and people lazy, and frequently it became easier just to pay for the stupid thing (even though a CD at full price after S&H could set you back over $25) rather than deal with the hassle.

Among its many other good qualities, the internet is responsible for mostly killing the negative option. With the web came far greater sources of curated content, leaving the clubs and their monthly catalogs seeming fusty and old-fashioned; plus, the negative option doesn’t work with digital files that can’t be returned, and the contraction of the book and record industries due to file-sharing (not to mention the clubs’ late-to-the-game attitude toward digital interfaces) cut the bottom out of the market for physical editions, especially music. Direct Brands, which gobbled up both Columbia House and competitor BMG, basically quit the music biz for DVDs a few years ago (no word on how long that will last), and while the Book-of-the-Month club once had two million subscribers, it now has a negligible impact on on the book world.

So it seemed like the negative option was dead, and all was right with the world. Then, this morning, I came across an ad on Allmusic for something called feedbands.com that offered “a killer vinyl delivered to your door each month.” Intrigued but skeptical, I clicked through.

Feedbands is basically a revived version of the negative option model, a monthly subscription service made possible only through the broad resurgence of interest in a physical medium. The deal is basically thus: Feedbands discovers “smashing bands and press[es] their unreleased records” on vinyl. You sign up, get your first record free (starting to smell familiar?), and then they send you a new record each month for just $19.95, plus shipping and handling (now the stench becomes overpowering). According to the site, if you “don’t like a record, don’t pay for it,” but of course by that point you probably already have the record and the onus is on you to get your refund (Glade Plug-ins, anyone?).

The delicious twist that Feedbands uses to make the negative option their own is that you don’t even get to taste what they’re sending you. You can’t listen to the bands first, something that undermines every good thing the internet has done for checking out new music. Why not? Well, it’s because Feedbands “wants you to experience our bands for the first time on vinyl—an experience we are striving hard to create. The last thing we would want is for you to hear the band for the first time streaming a low-quality mp3 of the internet.”

Perish the thought. Folks, I pride myself on being something of burgeoning audiophile, and while I don’t know all there is to know about the vagaries of audio engineering and record pressing, I can tell you that this 100% bullshit. In fact, there’s so much misleading information on Feedbands website that it’s hard to know where to begin. On the section that asks “Why vinyl?” they write:

Vinyl records are a lossless analog format which [ed: should be “that”; are they Brits? or do they just have poor grammar?] offers the absolute best listening experience.

Not entirely true. If you have a brilliantly mastered pressing of an well-recorded analog source tape played through a hi-fidelity sound system, there’s no question it will sound better than an mp3 ripped in 1994 at 128kps. But mp3s have been closing the quality gap for years, and much of what’s been released on CD or lossless digital files in the last couple decades performs as just well as a record if not better. This is especially true since most records today are pressed on recycled vinyl, mastered for a digital format, and listened to almost exclusively on crappy earbuds against significant background noise. The myth of vinyl as the format par excellence comes mostly from the high quality of many records pressed in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, where quality control existed at every level of the production chain. Also, once upon a time people had stereo systems that were worth a damn.

The website goes on:

Mp3s, by comparison, contain only 15% of the original sound information.

We are the 85%! We are the 85%! But seriously, it’s not like the mp3 of “Stairway to Heaven” you’ve been listening to is missing a few verses and the guitar solo. Mp3s are compressed files that trade sound info for file size, but the increasingly improved algorithms by which the compression takes place are built around something called auditory masking. This describes a condition of human hearing whereby, basically, when you’re hearing more than one tone simultaneously, certain tones will be rendered inaudible by the others. It’s something the brain does automatically to make sense of all the information it’s required to process; our visual system does something analogous when it comes to seeing. Mp3s get small by essentially removing the sonic information containing the tones we don’t process. And as anyone of average hearing who’s done an A/B listening test comparing an mp3 sampled at 320kps and a CD or record can tell you, it’s pretty hard to hear the difference. But if that’s not good enough for you, most labels now offer lossless digital files like FLACs that contain far greater sonic information, and sound fantastic. So mp3s end up being a straw man in Feedbands’s argument.

This is my favorite line:

If you want to hear music exactly the way the band sounded when they recorded, vinyl is the only option.

Actually, if you want to hear music exactly the way the band sounded when they recorded, you should have been in the studio with them. Maybe in the future, Feedbands can start a new program where they fly you to a different recording studio each month to sit in on the band’s session. If they do, please let me know how much they charged to ship and handle you.

It shouldn’t amaze me that unscrupulous companies are looking to feed off the recent vinyl frenzy, but I give them credit for trying to revive what’s considered one of the oldest legal cons in the business. It makes a weird kind of sense today, when people are essentially overloaded with information, to try to make money by giving them one more annoying, easily-overlooked task to add to their infinite to-do lists. I might even have let Feedbands slide without comment were they not trying so hard to pass off much-invoked dumb canards about the quality of vinyl compared to mp3s. But with no track record or good faith effort to establish any curatorial credibility, it’s hard to see how Feedbands’s monthly meals will satiate anyone other than its investors. 

Phil Upchurch / The Way I Feel (Cadet, 1970)

From time to time, I'm going to put up a few things I've had sitting around for a while. Why not, right? Otherwise they just sit around in my apartment collecting dust between spins. And anyway, I've always thought that part of amassing this collection would be sharing it, which is the inspiration for this blog in the first place. Great, so that's settled.

When I was doing more hunting for soul jazz a few years ago, I came across a record called Darkness, Darkness on Blue Thumb by the guitarist Phillip Upchurch. Turned out he'd had quite the storied career, playing with Jerry Butler, Jimmy Reed, George Benson, Curtis Mayfield, Bo Diddly, Howlin' Wolf, Jack McDuff, and many more. Anyway, Darknesswas pretty cookin' and so I started keeping an eye out for his other titles, though the samples I found of those records online left me skeptical. When I came across The Way I Feel at Good, I didn't quite know what to make of it, but Jonny was a big fan, and I have to admit that over time I've come to love this one even more than Darkness. 

It's a weird record, no doubt. Listening to first song, "Peter, Peter" evokes that reaction that I so often have to certain jazz-funk records: "Who the hell was buying this stuff in 1970?" There seems to be no clear-cut audience for it, with its eerie, expansive arrangements by Charles Stepney (perhaps best known for writing and arranging big hits for Earth, Wind & Fire), and one foot in jazz, one in funk, and a third foot you were terrified to discover in psychedelia. But then you'll hit something like "I Don't Know," which gets at the heart of what's great about Upchurch's playing: a few minutes of pure screaming mastery.

This record came out on Cadet, which also released Dorothy Ashby's Afro-Harping, and a lot of other great records by jazz luminaries. I didn't know this until just now, but Cadet was the jazz subsidiary of Chess Records, which helps explain the Stepney connection (he worked as a Chess producer in the 50s-70). Like a lot of this stuff, it's not clear that it's ever been released domestically on CD.

Wikipedia fun fact: Upchurch is on his seventh marriage. I wonder what goes through your mind when you're the 4th, 5th, 6th, or 7th person to marry somebody.

Screaming Trees / Dust (Epic / 1996)

Two roads converged: the first began when I was 16, in the summer of 1996, when the Screaming Trees released what would be their final record, Dust. I fell hard for it on first listen. Though nothing on it quite matched the pop blast of "Nearly Lost You," their biggest hit, made massive by inclusion on the multiplatinum soundtrack to Cameron Crowe's movie Singles, this was a killer record front to back, easily outpacing their previous effort, Sweet Oblivion. Dust was a repeat record for me, to be listened to again and again. Certain songs I would play many times in a row, chief among them "Sworn and Broken," with its glorious, swirling Wurlitzer organ solo that strove for and achieved a kind of earnest transcendence now considered acceptable only from Arcade Fire.

The second road began in Tunes, the Hoboken record shop, in 2003, when I bought the Jayhawks' Tomorrow the Green Grass after hearing it playing in-store. They literally pulled the disc out of the player and sold it to me used for seven dollars. Over the next decade it would become one of my favorite records, thanks to its beautiful country harmonies layered over Gary Louris's incredible lead guitar work. No record combined crunch and country as well since the first two Uncle Tupelo albums; the influence is palpable, the palette expanded.

Then, about four years ago, I was wasting time at work doing a little Internet research on the Jayhawks, which is when I discovered that TTGG, and its predecessor, Hollywood Town Hall, had been produced by a man named George Drakoulias, an A&R rep for Rick Rubin's Def American label, who had discovered the band when he phoned Twin Tone Records (then the Jayhawks label) and got an earful of them in the hold music. Drakoulias expanded the band's sound, making the Jayhawks bigger and more epic without sacrificing the folksy intimacy of the harmonies. He even played a few instruments himself. Not bad for a guy who had previously made his name primarily as a hip-hop guy, the man who had discovered LL Cool J and the Beastie Boys.

You can guess where this is going. A couple months ago, when this price-clipped copy of Dust arrived in the mail after a rare eBay purchase (I was tired of never seeing it in stores, and suspected I never would), I pulled out the inner sleeve to discover finally that it was produced by none other than George Drakoulias. A delightful connection, but it made sense. In both cases he managed to bring the band's performance and presence to another level, broadening the arrangements and adding melodic depth without sacrificing essence. And though it's impossible to know what effect Drakoulias had on songwriting, both bands turned in their best sets under his watch. 

The Screaming Trees were notorious drunks. Brothers Van and Gary Lee Connor frequently chugged until they came to blows and Mark Lanegan's bottle troubles are well documented in the band's lyrics. Perhaps that internal chaos was the reason it took them so long to finish this record, which came out well after grunge had turned like a rancid fart in the musical wind, surpassed in the mainstream by Seven Mary Three shit-rock, and among college students by indie rock's halcyon efforts. Like the last records by alt-rock holdouts Urge Overkill and Jawbox, which came out in the space of the same eight months, Dust disappeared as quickly as it came, and with it the Screaming Trees. Or I guess you could say almost disappeared, as not two years have gone by in the last sixteen in which I've not come back to this record. On the closet door of my childhood bedroom hangs a poster of this album cover, which I'm constantly thinking of bringing to Brooklyn.

This copy sounds mostly great, and big, as befits the production. "Dying Days" is a classic waiting to be discovered. The last tracks on either side have a touch of distortion thanks to long-album, thin-inner-groove syndrome (the record was definitely compiled with CD length in mind), which frustrates especially on "Make My Mind," but as the first track on side two "Sworn and Broken" tears the roof off. This is a must-have record for me, and when my fortunes improve I would almost certainly spring for a non-price clipped copy. I would wager that I'll go at least another five years without seeing this in a shop. Further bulletins as events warrant.

Björk / Debut (UK / One Little Indian / 1993)

Something must have been infectious about Björk's singles from 1993's Debut, "Crying" and "Human Behavior," because I could still recall the melodies having not heard either for a decade. Plus, the moment I saw this UK pressing of her first record at In Living Stereo, I knew it was part of what I'm calling Core Collection, or the canon of albums I know I have to have, no dithering, no dicking around.

What's funny is that despite owning this on CD as teenager, I'm not sure I ever listened to it all the way through. The singles were great, but I also fell hard for this album cover. Björk was around 27 years old when it was taken, and thank goodness that was then, and that she's not in publishing now. Anyway, I never bought any of her other records, and maybe never will, but I was happy to hear that those dance-y singles sound wonderful on this heavyweight vinyl pressing. The rest of the album is lovely as well; I'd venture to say I grew into it, because I can totally understand why the tracks where she sounds like a French chanteuse didn't quite appeal to my Hüsker Dü / Minutemen-loving fifteen-year-old self.

One thing I find terribly annoying is when record stores have big-dollar records but no listening stations. ILS is kind enough to play what you want to hear in the store, but it still hard (for me) to catch noise and crackle when the speakers aren't nearby and the music is loud. This record turned out to have some quiet tracks where the noise really distracts. In fact, I'm not sure I'll end up holding on to it. Still need to give it a few more listens. One point in its favor, though, is that this particular copy is part of a limited edition 5000-copy run to include a lavish 16-page booklet with lots of fancy pictures of Björk that make me feel fifteen again. All in all, it's a pretty classy object, and as we all know I'm a classy guy.

It's still a mystery to me just why, at the moment when loud, guitar-driven music had the greatest hold on my imagination, I fell so hard for Björk's very danceable tunes. But she must have been doing something right, because along with Radiohead and Beck, she's one of the only respectable mainstream "rock" artists to maintain popularity through the height of the gangsta-rap and nü-metal years. She must've been on the cover of Rolling Stone three times between '94 and '99. Although, to be fair, at some point during that era, Rolling Stone ceased to be any kind of useful barometer for mainstream popularity. It'd be like being on the cover of Maximumrocknroll anytime after 1989. Boy, did they hate it when Green Day blew up. Total free-association, but I recently heard "Time of Your Life" on the radio and I thought, "Wow, these guys really did sell out hard. Just not quite when everyone in the punk world thought they did." Reminds me that I need to add Dookie to the Core Collection list. This has been a useful post, indeed.

Galaxie 500 / This Is Our Music (Rough Trade / 1990)

First off, I'll have a lot more up here in the coming weeks. Between traveling to LA and San Fran, and Record Store Day, I have quite a few new records to get to and with any luck I won't grow bored of this project, or of myself, or life in general.

I think This Is Our Music must be the easiest Galaxie 500 record to find, just because it was the last of their career and released at the peak of their albeit limited popularity. Plus Amoeba in LA had it stickered at $15, which seemed like a sweet deal. I don't really see Today or On Fire for less than $50, but when I asked the clerk why this one was priced so low, she said they see that record a lot. So I guess it's around, but it's still nice to find. Actually, now that I think about it, I might have preferred the clerk to say something like, "Oh, wow, that must be mispriced. Guess it's your lucky day." Salesmanship, folks.

I like this band more ever year, which is to say that they've become one of my great favorites. It's not saying much to say that they do a lot with very simple elements, and Kramer is clearly a fourth band member in shaping their sound. Recently I read (was it Pitchfork's?) oral history of Galaxie 500 (it was indeed Pitchfork's), and I seem to remember Dean Wareham saying that one of the keys to their sound was Naomi Yang playing the bass so high up on the neck. In fact, I think all three of them were unusual players. These songs done straightforwardly might be more forgettable. Wareham gets the most attention for the vox and great guitar sound, but I've never but one of those who though Luna was anywhere near this band's equal. And as much as I love Damon and Naomi's work with Ghost, there's something about those lyrics. "Watching Kojak all alone..." Kojak was a little early for me, but sub in MacGyver and it rings true.

This LP sounds nice with a bit of surface noise buried in the guitar squall. The vinyl favors the atmospheric production, and I've already gone back to it quite a few times. "Listen, the Snow Is Falling" slays me every time. I never owned this on CD, so it's nice to have it first on vinyl.

Though This Is Our Music appeared in 1990, I don't consider it a Project 90s acquisition because to my ear this band feels planted firmly in the 80s. It's definitely a pre-grunge record.

Matthew Sweet / Girlfriend (Zoo/Classic, 1991)

When I think about Matthew Sweet's Girlfriend, I think about Robert Quine. Eight years have passed since the guitarist took his own life after falling into a deep depression following the death of his wife Alice a few months earlier, but I find that his presence as a guitarist persists for me. I come back to his work frequently, especially his sides with Matthew Sweet on Girlfriend and Altered Beast, which to my (probably heretical) mind, represent the apotheosis of his playing. His soloing on "Girlfriend" might be the best known of this work, but give a listen to "Dinosaur Act" or "Superdeformed" from the No Alternative compilation record and you'll get a sense of just how explosive his technique can be, jagged and possessed, never quite tracing the lines of the rhythm, rather erupting from the speakers like a kind of primal scream.

Quine plays on about 2/3 of the tracks on Girlfriend (1991), which is by far Matthew Sweet's best record. Listening to his previous album, Earth, one can't help best suspect a kind of Faustian bargain at work, since though Earth is a pleasant record of decent tracks, Girlfriend is a remarkable leap forward in songwriting, performance, and recording. Sweet's achievement here is typically attributed to two things: the creative wellspring borne from the dissolution of his marriage while he was making the record, and the remarkable lineup of musicians who helped him record it. Along with Quine, Sweet also got fantastic guitar work out of Television's Richard Lloyd, as well as top-shelf backup from Ric Menck and Greg Leisz. Though he would work with these artists again, he never quite returned to the heights of Girlfriend, rather continuing to make records of varying quality while slowly putting on about a hundred pounds over the next two decades. When I saw Sweet play the album front to back at City Winery last year, his voice was virtually unchanged, but he no longer seemed a compelling narrator for the emotions on this record.

As far as the vinyl goes, without giving numbers I'll say that I've never spent more on a record than I did for this one. Judging by completed listings on eBay, there seem to be relatively few copies out there, but here's a nice bonus: Though Girlfriend was released by small independent label Zoo, now long out of business, Zoo apparently made a deal with high-quality reissue label Classic Records to press their vinyl. The results are apparent on Girlfriend, which has always sounded excellent on CD and sounds even better here, bright and punchy with excellent clarity. And the iconic cover photo of a young Tuesday Weld is even more entrancing at LP size.

Here's Sweet playing "Girlfriend" on the mercifully short-lived Dennis Miller Show with Quine on lead guitar:

A Few Notes about the Blog

Though I'm sending this out to just five or seven of you, I'd appreciate any feedback you might want to leave in the comments. I imagine this as kind of a conversation, since I think different aspects of what I'm writing here will appeal to different readers. In any case, I hope it will prompt thoughts worth sharing. Plus, no one likes writing in a vacuum. Actually some people probably do. I suppose that's the essence of a diary.

I can't promise regular updates on the site since I don't know when, exactly, I'll be acquiring new records. But I will post some short bits in between acquisitions, because a lot of these records are good jumping off points for discussion of other, related things. And in these early days, I'll probably go back to recent additions to my collection that are worth mentioning, stuff that I wanted to write about at the time but couldn't because I was procrastinating starting this blog by doing something stupid.

Figure I'll keep this going so long as the self-imposed stakes are low. If I remain convinced that this blog can feel really tossed off and rough, I'll probably enjoy it enough to persist. But the second I put any pressure on myself to really polish the prose, I'll almost certainly beg off. I once wrote a humor piece about a guy trying to write the Great American Novel, but because of his laziness and the impossibility of the goal, he keeps whittling down his ambition until finally he's pleased after a long, hard day's work generating short ideas that might be candidates for the underside of the Great American Bottle Cap. That's pretty much how I feel about writing, and why, I think, I've come to enjoy simply producing jokes; it's a lot easier to whack a sentence into really great shape than a page or a story, or god forbid a book. As an editor, I see people finish books all the time, though I'm baffled at how they do it, how they've managed to navigate and make the 80-90K decisions that a book requires without collapsing from exhaustion or caving under the weight of self-doubt. (That humor piece remains unfinished, by the way.)

I also understand more why revision is writing. Anyone can vomit onto a page, but the real work, the real craft, is in shaping that into something extraordinary, which is exceedingly difficult and time consuming. Though if we might stay in that metaphor for a moment, it's true that some people's vomit is far better company than others. I don't know if that works but if I start thinking about it, I will never post this.

I promise there really will be more on collecting and records going forward.

Inaugural Post: Smashing Pumpkins / Siamese Dream (Virgin Records, 1993)

There won't be much to this blog, I promise. Time is short, good writing is hard, and the internet is full of temptations. But some of you have from time to time encouraged me to start a record collecting blog, and damn if I didn't suddenly think that was a great idea in a moment of utter procrastination. (Though, frankly, it's Friday night, 10.30pm, and unclear what I'm putting off doing. Living my life?)

What's really got me going is what I'm calling Project 90s, an attempt to track down the vinyl of some of my favorite records from my youth, from what some might call the grunge era. That said, not every record on the list is grunge, and certainly not all are from Seattle. Today's pickup is an original pressing on Virgin via Caroline Records of the Smashing Pumpkins' sophomore LP, Siamese Dream. A cute girl in my eighth grade drafting class (the teacher wore a toupee) made me a tape of this record and I listened to it a lot while staring at her adorable handwritten track listing. "Today" got the most radio play off this record, but it might be the worst song here. To my ear now, it plods too much. "Hummer" is the secret star, "Rocket" also great.

Pressing-wise this sounds decent. One frustrating aspect of this record is that it's a double LP pressed on purple-and-orange marble vinyl, which is just silly. Novelty wax makes the whole thing feel more packaged, more of a collector's item than a straight-up issue. And the format begs the question, is this really a record I want to flip three times? Only a handful of records draw a yes (Exile being the most obvious). Still, Howie Weinberg did the mastering at Masterdisc and it shows. This sounds as good as the CD, though perhaps not better, owing to the marble crap it's pressed on. Cool gatefold, pic below.

Jonny at Good Records dug this out of a recent 90s collection he picked up. He's promised further goodies from this trove but I'm not sure when he's putting them out, and I'm not sure how much more I want to drop this month on records. Major label vinyl from the 90s don't come cheap, after all. But if he's got some Soup Dragons albums, I might have to pawn my grandfather's watch. You understand, I'm sure.