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Vinyl

Vinyl love: Coldplay “Parachutes”

(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: Coldplay
Album Title: Parachutes
Year released: 2000
Year reissued: 2020
Details: 20th anniversary, reissue, 180 gram, yellow translucent

The skinny: I’ve already written on these pages about how excited I became when I first heard the single “Yellow”. Given how big that song became and how much commercial radio overplayed it, you’d think (and normally I would’ve thought the same) that I might have gotten sick of the tune by now but somehow this never happened. Indeed, “Yellow” is still my favourite single tune from the year 2000. And the rest of “Parachutes” is hardly a slouch. I bought the album on CD on the back of the aforementioned single and quickly fell for the other nine tracks. And none of this admiration has faded at all despite repeat listens for over two decades*. So when a 20th anniversary reissue of the album on (of course, yellow) 180 gram vinyl was announced last year, I did not hesitate to pull the pre-order trigger. It arrived months later, looking and sounding just as sweet.

Standout track: “Yellow”

*I’ve got the album ranked as number four on my favourites for the year in a series that I am still in the process of working out.

Categories
Vinyl

Vinyl love: Lush “Gala”

(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: Lush
Album Title: Gala
Year released: 1990
Year reissued: 2016
Details: translucent vinyl, disc one in limited Origami box set, Record Store Day 2016 release, limited to 2000

The skinny: This year’s Record Store Day was scuppered back in April for obvious reasons and the Plan B was to split the usual special releases between 3 separate ‘drops’ at the end of August, September, and October. I wasn’t able to make it to any of my local shops for the August drop but hope to get out in a couple of weeks for September’s drop. In the meantime, I thought I’d share this, the first in a five part series on the Lush box set, “Origami”, that 4AD put out for Record Store Day 2016. This set includes a reissue pressing on coloured vinyl of each of Lush’s twelve inch releases. Disc one is “Gala”, a compilation 4AD originally put out as an intro to the band in the US, gathering together material already available in the UK from the band’s first bunch of EPs and a couple of rarities. The track below is one of my all time favourites from the comp and really, by the band, and appeared at number 8 on my Best Tunes of 1990 list.

Standout track: “De-Luxe”