Vinyl love: The Beautiful South “0898 Beautiful South”

(Vinyl Love is a series of posts that quite simply lists, describes, and displays the pieces in my growing vinyl collection. You can bet that each record was given a spin during the drafting of each corresponding post.)

Artist: The Beautiful South
Album Title: 0898 Beautiful South
Year released: 1992
Year reissued: 2018
Details: black vinyl

The skinny: Last week, I posted about how I purchased a reissue of The Beautiful South’s debut album, “Welcome to The Beautiful South“, without a second thought when I saw it became available for pre-order. This week, I’m back to admit that this was maybe a fib. I actually did have a second thought and that was that I’d also would love to be ordering their third record, 1992’s “0898 Beautiful South”, at the same time. Luckily for me, this very same album was also reissued a few short months later and I wasted the same little amount of time before getting on the pre-order train. “0898” was the first album by the British alternative pop group that I purchased and was in fact one of the first handful of CDs I ever owned, so it found itself getting played a lot. My only knock against this reissue is that they went a little cheap on the packaging. The photos jammed onto one side of the inner sleeve (that you can see above) were each on their own page of a multi-page booklet that came with the original CD. It’s a shame because the image for each song is, in and of itself, a lovely piece of surrealism. All I need to do to forgive the record company, though, is put the record on and turn it up and I’m transported back to the early 90s.

Standout track: “36D”