Vinyl love (revisited): Barenaked Ladies “Gordon”

(I started my Vinyl Love posts pretty much right after the launch of this blog to share photos of my growing vinyl collection. Over time, the photos have improved and the explanations have grown. And looking back at a handful of the original posts in this series, I found myself wanting to re-do some of them so that the posts are more worthy of those great albums. So that’s what I’ll be doing every once in a while, including today…)

Artist: Barenaked Ladies
Album Title: Gordon
Year released: 1992
Year reissued: 2017
Details: Black vinyl, 2 x LP, 180 gram Gatefold sleeve, 25th anniversary edition

The skinny: My original ‘Vinyl Love’ gallery on this record was posted back in November three years ago. In that piece, I blamed my pre-ordering of it during the prior summer on my friend Patrick, who is a pretty big fan of the Ladies and had alerted me to its reissue. I think it funny now that I had actually had to think about purchasing it. “Gordon” was a pretty big deal, especially in Southern Ontario, when it was released back in 1992. The rest of the world wouldn’t officially catch on to the four-piece from Scarborough until a few years later and by that point, I (and a lot of their other early diehard fans) had moved on. This debut, however, remains a classic and I had forgotten how great it was until I received this 25th anniversary reissue on two 180-gram discs in the mail. I feel like I’ve listen to these 15 songs more in the last three years than I had in the previous two decades. And yeah, I still know every word to every song. Every word. Every song. Classic.

Standout track: “Brian Wilson”

P.S. Those of you who are aficionados of early 1990s Canadian alt-rock might appreciate a photo I am planning on posting to my Instagram account tomorrow. Watch out for it.