Category e) Naughts [2000 – 2009]
ENJOY EVERY SANDWICH
You’ve lived the rock and roll lifestyle and it’s taken a toll. Diagnosed with terminal lung cancer and given three months to live, you decide to make an album, to soundtrack your own wake. A last musical hurrah. Comrades heed the call. The last call. August 2002 For Warren Zevon it is The Wind. Jorge […]
I NEED DIRECTION
A Catholic Education Bandwagonesque Thirteen Grand Prix Songs From Northern Britain Howdy! The millennial year was a challenging one. Having formed a strong and passionate connection with a new partner, I was dismayed to hear that she was decamping to her English homeland for an indeterminate period. This was not my fantasy of how the […]
BACK TO THE PAVILION
You are a young guitarist, talented and hard-working, and join a band of school mates. It’s 1967 and everyone is forming bands, so why not? And this one has promise, it records a debut album in 1969 that is well-regarded but doesn’t sell a whole lot, possibly because of its biblical title or maybe because […]
GOING INSIDE
When it comes to choosing albums to write about, I’ve noticed a few trends. One—previously mentioned—is the difficulty in writing about a really special, favourite record. Something about the meaning, the importance, the desire to communicate the specialness; these somehow inhibit my fingers. At the other end of the spectrum are those artists only known […]
MARS ATTACKS!
There is a wind-up alien on the cover. The title is Attack Of The Martians. No record label; it was self-produced in 2004. Eccentric Orbit is the name of the band. They come from planet Synth. This intriguing CD was part of a recent haul, a whim-purchase based on half the quartet playing electric […]
V
The thing with progressive music is, it’s a bit more complex and structured. Which means, depending on what prejudices you bring to the argument, that it is either (a) music for wanky poseurs, or (b) something to spend a bit of time with before passing judgement. No surprises that, as a card-carrying wanky poseur, I […]
SOUNDTRACK
How do you file the soundtrack albums in your collection? The Vinyl Connection library has them alphabetically under ‘Soundtrack’, a nice little section sitting snugly between Sonic Youth and The Soup Dragons (the CDs) and a bigger vinyl section sandwiched comfortably twixt The Someloves and Joe South. If you browse any collection of soundtrack albums […]
REGA-L AFFIRMATION
Imagine the excitement. First turntable purchase in over twenty years. Frown at the brain-bending decision: what to get? Stagger under the swirling weight of unanswerable questions. What will suit the rest of the system best? How does a Hi-Fi shop audition translate to a suburban lounge-room? Quiver at the realisation this is the biggest purchase—after […]
COMET, CACTUS, CAFE
Decade Diving Number #4 2006 Though I tend not to loiter at the heavier end of the music spectrum here in Vinyl Connection land, there is a goodly chunk of noisy stuff in the collection. Avatar by US West Coast band Comets On Fire is an album I’ve had for a while and really like, despite an aversion […]
DECADE DIVING #1
Several ‘Album Anniversary’ posts have appeared here at Vinyl Connection. We have cruised to Köln with Keith (Jarrett), raved about Relayer and hung out with the Minstrel In The Gallery forty years on. Sometimes it’s just too hard to resist the lure of the decade-driven ‘It was twenty (thirty, forty) years ago, today…’. Yet I’ve […]
THANKS FOR DROPPING BY
For some blogs, fifty-five thousand page views is an average week. For Vinyl Connection it is the culmination of over two-and-a-half years of posts. That’s OK; a mass audience was neither the goal nor expectation. Still, it is a little milestone worth marking, so I dipped into the VC catalogue and pulled out spreadsheet entries […]
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