Vinyl love: The Airborne Toxic Event “The Airborne Toxic Event”

(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 Airborne Toxic Event
Album Title: The Airborne Toxic Event
Year released: 2008
Year reissued: 2020
Details: Limited edition, 180 gram, white with red splatter, signed by some of the band members

The skinny: I’ve been back collecting vinyl for well over a decade now and have quite a few great pieces in my ever-expanding collection, as you might have noticed by these very posts. And though I do try to spin them quite regularly, what I have found that I don’t do enough of is what my wife might call listening to them “with intention”. So I started changing that this year. Instead of putting on discs while doing something else, I’ve been focusing on devoting time to just listening to the full album, examining the artwork, and reading the lyrics and liner notes. In fact, I started this routine back during the second week of the year, working my way through my collection, from A to Z, a couple of days a week and documenting each with photos on my Instagram* account. The first couple were Adorable’s “Against perfection” (for which I’ve already done a ‘Vinyl love’ post) and this one, The Airborne Toxic Event’s self-titled debut. I was all over this album when it was originally released back in 2008, mostly on the back of the excellent track referenced below, and then, I got to see them live at V fest that fall. I’ve seen them live a few more times since and enjoyed their following records as well, but never quite as much as I did the debut. So when they announced a reissue in late 2020, pressed to coloured 180 gram vinyl and signed to boot, I was all over it.

Standout track: “Sometime around midnight”