Matador, 2010
Acquired: Love Garden, New, 2010
Price: $16
How coincidental! I'm wrapping up the LPs section of this blog on Record Store Day! I woke up bright and early today (9:30! WOW!) and walked down to Love Garden in hopes of snatching up one of the hyper-limited copies of the new Hold Steady record. In all honestly, I was hoping they hadn't come in and all of my stress would be relieved because the joy of getting a copy wasn't going to be as good as the pain of watching someone else get probably the only copy the store got and promptly selling it on ebay. Oh, would you look at that! It's already up! $100! Yeah. Anyway, it was a lot of stress walking down there because goddamnit, that's just what happens. Naturally, there were a ton of people there and fortunately, being at the end of the line didn't make much of a difference in the bum-rush to the back where all the “exclusives” were. Hearing that they didn't get any copies of Heaven is Whenever was like sweet, sweet music and also fortunately, most of the stuff didn't look that exclusive and it was all stuff I could live without.
It was weird being around record nerds again. Since I quit buying vinyl months and months ago, I've distanced myself from my old obsessions and now only buy the essentials, or at least stuff I'll listen to frequently rather than stuff I'd let languish on my shelves for a good long while. My eye was caught by this new Pavement best-of, which is an alternate version of the one that was officially released last month. It's got a different tracklist, the “most imaginative” fan submitted tracklist as chosen by the band. I was initially bothered by the absence of super-jams like “Frontwards,” “Gold Soundz,” “Range Life,” and “Summer Babe,” but seeing that it had “Shoot the Singer,” which wasn't on the regular release, it had to be scooped up. That and I missed the thrill of buying goddamned records. The cover art on this thing is beautiful, and there are a handful of awesome tracks I never really listened to because I never really got into Pavemenet like a normal person.
“Shoot the Singer (1 Sick Verse)” is a song I'd never heard til Danny started playing it during band practice once last summer and I was all “WHAT THE HELL IS THAT THAT'S A GREAT SONG!” Though I picked up this record for that song, the rest of it is pretty fucking great and worth the $16, easy. Good to have on hand, and I can finally feel OK about getting rid of my copy of Wowee Zowee now that there's a second Pavement album in thee collection. Anyway, that's it! This is a great collection of songs which is already pretty obvious because despite the spottiness-issues I have with Pavement's LPs (I'm sure people feel the same way about Guided by Voices records, so I'm not hating! Hell, even I think there's spottiness on almost all GBV records), that's just a matter of personal opinion and Stephen Malkmus' strength was always having at least 6 or 7 of the best songs ever written on almost all of the albums. And though this isn't that, i.e., this isn't the proper version of this greatest hits collection, all the songs are good, and this is going into the stack of records that pile up on the right speaker i.e. the stack for when I'm too lazy to flip through and just want to listen to something good. However, I am pretty pissed that they didn't put "Gold Soundz" on this because, I mean, COME ON! It's got the titular line!
No comments:
Post a Comment