Vinyl

[Janszoon]

Are you a fan of "Get in the Ring" and "My World"?

They aren't my favorite songs but I like them. With "My World", I always thought it was cool that they were trying something so different.

[Lexi Darling]

Appetite is great, the Illusion albums have their moments but I find a lot of the songs to be a little overlong and both albums as a whole a bit of a slog to listen to front to back. I think with some more editing it would have made a killer single album though.

[SGR]

REM's Reveal finally got repressed and I just copped the limited edition. I love this record beyond what it probably deserves for personal reasons, and I'm just happy to finally be getting it as an LP.



"Imitation of Life" is still one of the best songs they ever did - with one of the most creative music videos, especially for 2001.

[FETCHER.]

I have a question for UK based members.

Where do you buy vinyls? Online they are extortionate, garage & car boot sales only have 1920's country (which there is nothing wrong with, I just don't want it 😂) and I'm really struggling to get any decent records. I think I only have about 5 or 6 because I've had to buy brand new for £30/40/50

[Janszoon]

Wynton Kelly—It's All Right! (1964)

I just picked this record up the other day. Love the Roy Lichtenstein vibes to the album cover. It's a pretty interesting artifact given that it came out in the mid-60s, because it sounds at least ten years older than that. This is some stately non-bop that makes me wish I liked olives enough to chomp on some as I sipped a martini in a quiet 1950s hotel bar.

[Guybrush]

Thanks for sharing, Jans.

I'm checking it out briefly and Portrait of Jenny is deliciously laid-back, so that's going straight into my rotation. Lovely!

[Lexi Darling]

Wynton Kelly—It's All Right! (1964)

I just picked this record up the other day. Love the Roy Lichtenstein vibes to the album cover. It's a pretty interesting artifact given that it came out in the mid-60s, because it sounds at least ten years older than that. This is some stately non-bop that makes me wish I liked olives enough to chomp on some as I sipped a martini in a quiet 1950s hotel bar.

So lovely to see you around!

And that album sounds very up my alley.

[Janszoon]

So lovely to see you around!

And that album sounds very up my alley.

Thank you! ☺️

It's definitely worth a listen.

[Janszoon]

Lupe Fiasco—Drill Music in Zion (2022)
Lupe Fiasco apparently recorded this over three days because he was going for something raw and imperfect. Obviously a lot of writing and preparation went into it beforehand and the results are fantastic. It's beautiful and thoughtful like Drogas Wave, even if it's only about half the length. I'm frequently lukewarm on rappers who get a lot of attention for their lyrics, but Lupe really writes stuff that resonates with me. 

[Janszoon]

Kebekelektrik—Kebekelektrik (1977)
This was somewhat of a random purchase. At first I had no idea how to pronounce this weird looking word "Kebekelektrik". Then I noticed the album was produced in Montreal and I realized that it's pronounced "Quebec electric". Anyway, it's a pretty good record. As the back of it advertises, "This album was recorded entirely with synthesizers". It has that warm 70s synth feel, some disco beats, and the entire second side is a single track—a disco synth rendition of Ravel's "Bolero".

[Guybrush]

Kebekelektrik—Kebekelektrik (1977)
This was somewhat of a random purchase. At first I had no idea how to pronounce this weird looking word "Kebekelektrik". Then I noticed the album was produced in Montreal and I realized that it's pronounced "Quebec electric". Anyway, it's a pretty good record. As the back of it advertises, "This album was recorded entirely with synthesizers". It has that warm 70s synth feel, some disco beats, and the entire second side is a single track—a disco synth rendition of Ravel's "Bolero".

I got curious, so checked this out. Not quite for me, but still fun 🙂 I like the name.

Maybe @Lexi Darling would find this interesting if she isn't already familiar.

[Lexi Darling]

@Guybrush @Janszoon I wasn't familiar! Interesting that it says it's all synth but I very clearly hear a clavinet, which isn't a synthesizer but an electromechanical keyboard. Could be a translation thing, or maybe they just called all electric keyboards synths.

It's pretty cool. The take on Bolero is pretty creative. I appreciate you thinking of me, @Guybrush !

[Janszoon]

Madonna–Celebration
I actually got this comp a few months ago, but I'm still digging it. There's definitely part of my love for this that's related to my own time spent in the twentieth century closet. Now that I'm a litle more open, I fucking love it. The later sides are a little depressing, but the parts that draw me in are incredible. It put me in some vague gender/orientation by I love it an it feels perfect to me.

[SGR]

Madonna–Celebration
I actually got this comp a few months ago, but I'm still digging it. There's definitely part of my love for this that's related to my own time spent in the twentieth century closet. Now that I'm a litle more open, I fucking love it. The later sides are a little depressing, but the parts that draw me in are incredible. It put me in some vague gender/orientation by I love it an it feels perfect to me.

Will probably always be my favorite Madonna track - very nostalgic. That hum-sing chorus is auditory nicotine.

[Trollheart]

While I won't be showcasing any psychofunkjazzexperimentalsalsa records or anything, and while I haven't bought vinyl in about 25 years now (way too expensive and I no longer have a turntable - how I get those locomotives to rotate is a problem now) I still want to join the conversation here. When younger I only bought vinyl, mostly because there was nothing else to buy. So I have about 400 albums and what I'm doing here is literally grabbing one, two or three at random from the rack and then wittering on about them. As you can see from the first one below, I had a habit of labelling/cataloguing my albums, for various databases. Usually this took the simplest form - album title and artist, and an assigned number - occasionally it got a little more involved, with codes and stuff. You can see here I've taped a yellow index card to it and written the details on that too. Here's the first one anyway.

(My image is a little shiny thanks to the plastic dustsheet, which I didn't remove, so here's a clearer copy from the Big W...

Toto IV - Toto - 1982

I was never a fan of Toto, and I still am not. I read a review once which used the line "revenge of the session men", and so it seems: almost all of the band worked with other bands for a long time before they came together to form their own band, or before at least that band got popular. But did it? I imagine maybe 1 in 100 households had this album, maybe more. It's one of those albums you bought even if you were not a fan of the band. It broke them commercially and has three hit singles on it, including their most famous, "Africa". It sold over six million copies worldwide and was a top 5 album both sides of the water.

But it's an album that lives and dies really on its singles. "Rosanna", the aforementioned "Africa" and "I Won't Hold You Back", the only ballad on the album, are where this album shines. As for the rest? Yeah, not so much. There are a lot of weak tracks here, and in particular I don't rate the disco-ish "Waiting for Your Love", "It's a Feeling" or "We Made It". In fact, bar those three singles and maybe the one time they really rock out on "Lovers in the Night" I think it's a pretty substandard album. But such was the power of those hit singles that everyone - given there was no such thing as itunes or Spotify or downloading single tracks at the time - bought the album on the strength of those singles. I heard another of their albums, The Seventh One, and I was distinctly underwhelmed. Even now, I bet if someone asks you to name a Toto song, if you can, it's gonna be "Africa". I mean, who doesn't know that song?

But do three singles a good album make? Not in my view, but then, what do I know? Anyway, going one better than Jansz (sorry man, you know me) I want to also display the reverse cover and what was inside as well as the album itself, and so...

I can't say I think much of this one really. A hodge-podge of jumbled live photographs and the track listing. Considering the album art was so clever (apparently it's four rings to represent all four albums, with each of the previous ones a little tarnished to show they're older ones, or so it says) they really just went on auto-pilot for the back cover.

Inside albums you would often find interesting, lyric-printed inner sleeves, as we called them, though sometimes all you'd get would be a plain white paper envelope. In those cases, people with more time on their hands than they should, like me, tended to often decorate these themselves. Voila!

(The things you can do with a packet of felt-tip pens, huh?)
Also just showing the reverse, which isn't decorated but I have angrily tippexed out the warning that used to be on many of the albums: HOME TAPING IS KILLING MUSIC! AND IT'S ILLEGAL!

Well, no: exorbitant prices were killing music, and they were legal. And they did, more or less, kill music, pushing us into an online marketplace. It's quite funny to me how the deliberately tippexed out warning was my flipping the bird to the record companies. Ah, what a rebel, eh? Incidentally, my name and address is on the back cover too (why I don't know - if this album went out of my possession it was going to be because someone robbed it, and they were hardly likely to return it were they? Maybe I thought I might loan it out to a mate) but I've blurred it out, as I have enough death threats coming to my house as it is, thank you very much.

And finally, because why not, the album itself.

I must admit, I kind of miss seeing the record label logo on the album going round as it played. Oh well.