Tag: Alternative pop

(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”

(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: Welcome to The Beautiful South
Year released: 1989
Year reissued: 2018
Details: black vinyl, fluffy toys cover

The skinny: If you missed it, I started a new series back on Monday – I’m counting down my 10 favourite albums from 1989. That first post gave a taster – albums 10 through 6 – and in a couple days I’ll unleash my fifth favourite album from that year. The Beautiful South’s debut album, “Welcome to The Beautiful South”, hit the number eight spot for me with their dichotomy of bright sounding alternative pop, complete with mind-blowing vocals by Paul Heaton and Dave Hemingway, against dark lyrics and heavy subject matter. This reissue of that album came out two years ago and was a no brainer to snap up. However, I had no idea when I pre-ordered it that I would get this updated cover art. The CD I had back in the day (see Monday’s post) was the Canadian version that was already scaled back from the original, somewhat controversial cover you can see in the video below. The ‘fluffy toys’ cover is almost too cute for words… but I kind of think that’s the point.

Standout track: “Woman in the wall”