Tag: 12″

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Vinyl

Vinyl love: Frank Turner “Be more kind”

(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: Frank Turner
Album Title: Be more kind
Year released: 2018
Details: Black vinyl, 180 gram

The skinny: Okay. So I haven’t posted one of these paeans to the artifacts in my vinyl collection since last month. But don’t you ever take that to mean I haven’t been spinning tunes on my turntable. In fact, this album here, Frank Turner’s “Be more kind” has gotten a bit of a workout over this past month. I played it for my wife Victoria a few weeks ago and she really enjoyed it so she asked me to spin it again, just this past week. (I think that may be the first time she sat through the same record twice with me since I got my player a few years ago!) Anyway, despite playing some Frank Turner for her before on other occasions, this particular album, Turner’s lyrics, and the message appears to have to have struck a different chord with her this time around. I can’t complain at all, now that she is replaying certain songs from it, over and over again on Spotify, especially since I ranked this particular album #2 on my end of the list for 2018 albums. If you haven’t given it a spin yourself, I recommend doing so… right now.

Standout track: “Be more kind”

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Vinyl

Vinyl love: Stars “Set yourself on fire”

(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: Stars
Album Title: Set yourself on fire
Year released: 2004
Year reissued: 2012
Details: Black vinyl, 180 gram, repress

The skinny: Fresh off seeing the Canadian indie pop collective last night at the  National Arts Centre with the house orchestra as support, and where they performed the song below, “One more night”, “Your ex-lover is dead”, and others off this very album, I thought I’d spread some Stars love this morning. Released in 2004, “Set yourself on fire” is likely still considered the band’s high water mark, despite releasing five very fine albums since and still touring regularly to appreciative audiences. This album, along with Arcade Fire’s “Funeral”, was a big part of the reason that the world turned their collective ears to Canada and we had an indie pop renaissance of sorts for a few years at the beginning of the 2000s. This is big, bold, and beautiful sounding chamber pop (which leant itself well to orchestra accompaniment last night) and an album that was amongst the first that I sought out after starting my fledgling vinyl collection.

Standout track: “Ageless beauty”

Categories
Vinyl

Vinyl love: Teenage Fanclub “Howdy!”

(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: Teenage Fanclub
Album Title: Howdy!
Year released: 2000
Year reissued: 2018
Details: Black vinyl, gatefold, 180 gram, reissue, remastered at Abbey Road Studios, included bonus 7″ single “Thaw me” b/w “One thousand lights”

The skinny: So here’s the final of the five reissues the Fannies released late this past summer. “Howdy!”, their sixth (or seventh, depending on how you count them) album, was their first since the debut not to be released on Creation and the first since the debut that I didn’t immediately rush out and purchase on CD. In fact, this repress is the first physical copy of the album I’ve ever listened to and for some reason, it sounds quite different than the digital version I have. Perhaps it’s the remastering? Nonetheless, another great and underrated offering by the band that followed very much in the same vein as “Songs from Northern Britain” and was the last proper album the band would release for five years.

Standout track: “I need direction”