As the vinyl resurgence continues to take the recorded media market by storm, contradicting all practicality of the modern age, and becoming the single most sought after format available, it goes without saying that re-issues of bygone best sellers and fan favorites will continue to enjoy a second wave of sales volume. Everything from dusty old Johnny Cash best ofs to Camper Van Beethoven and The Sea And Cake's early releases have all seen rebirth in the vinyl format - many of them for the first time ever!
A lot of classic albums I recall from my youth - which I was certain would never see a vinyl incarnation - have come to be (Luna's Bewitched and Morphine's Cure For Pain come to mind most immediately), and with that in mind, I collected this index of other great albums that really would do themselves new found justice as vinyl re-issues... however unlikely they are to ever make it out there.
Original release: 1994
Velour 100's debut album Fall Sounds suffered the severe misfortune of falling into relative obscurity almost immediately after its release. Having relied its marketing near entirely on the nepotism between it and its older sister act of the day His Name Is Alive, Velour 100 failed to establish little, if any, of its own unique identity. The two bands shared a good helping of each other's personnel (Velour 100 was founded by HNIA drummer Trey Many, and the album engineered by HNIA frontman Warren Defever), but the problem lie in that Velour 100 rode the coattails of His Name Is Alive's success a little too hard, and as timing would have it, just as the latter were beginning to see a decline in their popular appeal, and were falling out of favor with their label - the illustrious 4AD. And so Velour 100, having been signed to the Christian label Tooth & Nail (for some reason - their association to a band bearing a misleadingly religious sounding name perhaps...?), wouldn't see the same caliber of support their influential sibling got to enjoy on 4AD; something they could have used, barring all other marketing to further this effort. While Velour 100 did release a follow up several years later, it was already apparent they'd lost their potential momentum, not to mention their lead singer, which served only to deliver another crushing blow to their chances at finding any sort of substantial audience. All that aside, Fall Sounds is still a remarkable accomplishment, and a truly fantastic stand alone album. Though it could arguably be likened to any of His Name Is Alive's earlier efforts, it still bears its own representation in the sense that this is much less interested in the hauntings that lurk in the shadows and hues of all things that go bump in the night. Fall Sounds instead finds its lamentations in the broad autumnal daylight, where it creates a dreamy and surreal soundscape that is both comfortably abstract and emotionally relatable.
The Honorary Title | Anything Else But The Truth
Original Release: 2004
Original Release: 2004
For every sale of Counting Crows August & Everything After, there should have been one for The Honorary Title's Anything Else But The Truth eleven years later. Yet, it didn't pan out that way, and this beautifully bittersweet, emotionally wrenching masterpiece never found the wider audience it deserved - despite a deluxe CD re-release just 2 years after its initial street date, in attempt to cultivate more than the small, albeit devout, cult following it garnered. The attempt fully failed, and after their sophomore effort, the even more commercially ignored Scream & Light Up The Sky, The Honorary Title threw in the towel. Why Anything Else and The Honorary Title as a band couldn't find widespread success is a bit perplexing. For all intents and purposes, the band's make-up was fully poised to capture the kind of sex-appeal exploitation (if nothing else) that is typically a guaranteed vehicle for popularity: frontman Jarrod Gorbel's boyish good looks, but bad boyish tattoo sleeved arms, his crack-pitched vocal whine and fervent and yearning lyrical expression - all should have instantly found its way into the pants of every female in the 15 to 25 age bracket, and simultaneously fostered an over-inflated sense of self in every emo-leaning male in the same; who would claim these compositions were perfect reflections of his own woes, convictions and mishandling. This is not meant to be misconstrued to imply that Anything Else But The Truth is pretentious - because it isn't. Far from it, actually. The album is the essence of all things sincere in the sentiments each song states. It's the pit of despair and the height of repair, the various forms of catharsis it illustrates are so purely organic, unaffectedly poetic, vivid and perfectly visceral. Perhaps because this album is so genuine, metaphorical and lyrically unpretentious is the very reason it never took hold with its target audience - one known to revel passionately in postured personal doctrines that are, well... anything else but the truth of what they really feel or know anything at all about.
Company of Thieves | Ordinary Riches
Original Release: 2009
Company of Thieves were on the cusp of explosive popularity a few years ago, fueled primarily by the catchy single from their debut album "Oscar Wilde" and furthered by even stronger non-single tracks like "The Fire Song" and "Even In The Dark". The band toured extensively to support their debut album throughout 2010 and 2011, and each date at every subsequent venue saw attendance that seemed to multiply exponentially (I myself had drinks with the entire band at a corner table at a 2010 show they played at The Bottom Lounge in their hometown Chicago, I must brag - and everyone in attendance looked respectively envious), and while their follow-up effort Running From A Gamble was released somewhat inconspicuously, and with little fanfare in 2011, that wasn't their death knell. What was, was an increasingly frequent and rapid line-up change after their debut, and lead singer Genevieve Shatz's cryptic social media statement in January 2014 that there "aren't any plans to record any further Company of Thieves albums". Later, Shatz announced her plans to pursue a solo music career. And that was the death knell for Company of Thieves. All assumptions that the band's shifting personnel and eventual demise were due to an overbearing front-woman are probably 99% accurate - and that is 100% unfortunate. The Thieves original line-up were a trifecta of lyrical prowess, instrumental intuition (speaking specifically here of guitarist Marc Walloch) and consistent compositional atmospherics. The Ordinary Riches album very esoterically delineates from an eavesdroppers perspective, in both content and form, a sort of "clique sociology", e.g "I went sifting through old letters just to find your number written a page", in the song "Old Letters" and "to keep the peace and stay sane, I stayed at Victoria's" in "The Fire Song". These are deeply personal stories, though vague to us, are clearly specific to those in Shatz's own personal circle. Oddly, this isn't at all alienating to the listener - it's contrarily intriguing, and this is especially to the band's credit considering most that would attempt this sort of songwriting disposition would suffer ill regard for their turgidness.
Primus | Antipop
original release: 1999
original release: 1999
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| image courtesy of Salvador Pombo, www.cargocollective.com/salvadorpombo |
To start, the album image above is not the artwork for Primus's 1999 Antipop that we've all come to know and abhor. I found this in a google search, and it appears to be a promo pack design for the album which, in my opinion, is about fifteen billion times superior to the actual artwork used on the release. Whether or not this ever saw release is unclear, but Mr. Salvador Pombo (the graphic designer credited for this) it seems, has a better feel for album layout than whatever retard was actually responsible for the Antipop album art as it is (I'm simply too lazy to look it up, and/or too disgusted to give the person credit).
Primus's Antipop sits as a sort of thorn in the side of both fan and band alike. Though over-produced, and recorded during a time when the band was not getting along all that well, and though the album cover is a lazy slough-job that makes it look more like a "best of", or an unofficial live recording, than a collection of new material, and though it was released to an audience that wondered where Primus was going or what the fuck they were doing anymore -all that aside- it still contains a number of songs that fans might, however unwilling, admit they really like: "Lacquerhead", "Natural Joe", "Dirty Drowning Man", to name a few. What irks their fanbase really, is that every Primus album post Pork Soda was more cartoonish than the last, and though Antipop did admittedly have a more serious slant to it, it was overrun by guest musicians and ham fisted over-production. This was likely at the behest of the record label, due to the disappointing sales of its predecessor the Brown Album, Primus's first full length effort not to feature the beloved Tim Alexander on percussion, and a tepidly received foray in the realm of pure analog recording - which came out sounding overbearingly muddy - intentional or not. Interscope likely felt the band needed a fresher perspective, and much to their chagrin, Antipop was what they suggested. It's no wonder Primus wanted to distance themselves from their classic "Primus Sucks!" slogan... because where in the late 80's to mid-90's it was spoken ironically - because they certainly did not suck then - present day... it's a little too accurate for comfort.
Here, however, is a suggestion for how Primus can repair their tainted chronology. Though Antipop was just short of being a completely Unholy monstrosity, I contend that it can be salvaged. In 2013 Primus released a re-mixed, re-mastered "deluxe edition" of their magnum opus Sailing The Seas of Cheese, originally record in 1991. If the master tapes of that could be so manipulated as to completely revamp that album's sonic representation (which, I have to admit, nice job Claypool), then Antipop - recorded much deeper in the digital age - could most certainly benefit from the same treatment. Imagine Antipop with the guest guitarists' parts completely removed or replaced with Larry LaLonde's own work... okay, now imagine (assuming it was done post-production) completely removing that fucking hideously annoying envelop effect Claypool seems to like to apply to his bass entirely too often. That would be an incarnation of Antipop I think we'd all enjoy and respect more thoroughly.
His Name Is Alive | Last Night
Original Release: 2002
Initially received as nothing less than a half-hearted swan song to both their tenure with 4AD records and their collectivity as band entirely, His Name Is Alive's Last Night kind of came and went without any notice. And though the band seemed to be making it a decided point to peel away their fan base album by album with releases that navigated further and further away from the goth-americana feel of their early work, this effort in hindsight, became an inadvertent fan favorite.
In 1996, after extensive touring to support their third and most commercially accessible album Mouth By Mouth, HNIA released the ESP-Disk reminiscent Stars On E.S.P. to an audience and record label that only begrudgingly accepted it. Their UK based label 4AD, meanwhile, having secured regular U.S. distribution with Warner Brothers Records for the first time, amended His Name Is Alive's contractual obligations around this time, forcing them to sign to a conventional agreement (unlike the album by album deal they had previously), and with that, dictating their behavior be more befitting to a proper band. Frontman Warren Defever's artistic integrity was disagreeable to this, however, and though the contract was signed, did all he could - fans be damned - to get 4AD to drop His Name Is Alive from their roster. This resulted in 1998's Ft. Lake: a loud and jangling venture that saw His Name Is Alive sounding more rock n' roll than they ever were conceptualized to sound, and complete with odd Detroit booty-rock electronica. Interestingly, Ft. Lake was fairly well-received (not by me, mind you), but the follow-up, 2001's Someday My Blues Will Cover The Earth served to thoroughly piss off 4AD, and at the same time confuse the band's fans. Someday was an all out R&B album, recorded with an entirely new singer, singing in an entirely new style, and creating an album that 4AD (and any other label, for that matter) found entirely impossible to market with any consideration to the band's back catalog. With one album left in their contract, Defever submitted the rehearsal sessions recorded in his basement for the Someday tour as the final His Name Is Alive album for 4AD. The label, in turn, released it under obligation of contract, offered it no marketing, and then eagerly handed HNIA their walking papers.
Regardless, Last Night's stylistic divergence, for some reason, presents itself less jarring than the two albums that preceded it; and quite frankly, stands as a statement for a band deep in the throes of identity crisis still capable of re-iventing themselves in a way their audience will embrace. So while Last Night was by and large supposed to be a quag, it ended up being a surprisingly consistent album. Conditioned with a new found smokey jazz lounge feel, a sultry african american singer (Lovetta Pippen), the band sewed together an unintentionally homogenous album that finds them stretching their form, even while trying to break free of it.
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