#7 Beach Boys - Pet Sounds LP

 

Oh boy, The Beach Boys Pet Sounds. Possibly the most discussed & loved album ever made. Just what I wanted to pull out at random and review...

 

I bought this for 50p at a charity shop a couple of years back. It's an original early pressing, but by the looks of things, it's been played an absurd number of times. Just check out how worn the label is near the central hole! The vinyl is worn and scratched, and I ended up playing just side one, as it sounded like the needle was being dragged along the pavement with the Beach Boys being faintly heard from a distant car radio.

 

This was owned by Sheila Holmes. Who she is, I don't know, but she must have absolutely loved this record, playing it hundreds of times. I've played a lot of records to death, but I've never worn through the label!

 

To tell you the truth, having it in my collection makes me a little sad. This record is the definition of 'much-loved' and it feels like it should be back with Sheila Holmes where she can take it out every once and a while and remember the days she lay by her dansette and listened to 'Pet Sounds' over and over again.

 

 

#6 Devo - Peek-a-Boo 12" single

 

Ah, Devo. They were my favourite band in my all-important 6th form years. My love for them really extended to their first two albums and their video compilations, bought at absurd cost in the days that VHS was still battling Betamax. Later albums were fun, but not world-changing.

 

I bought the 'Peek-A-Boo' 12" second-hand some time in the mid 80's for £2 and it used to get a lot of play for the b-side - 'Find Out'. The A-side 'Dance Velocity' & B-side 'Devo Dub' versions of 'Peek-A-Boo' added little to an already lightweight song. In fact in the' Devo Dub' version, it apparently just got rid of the vocal! This was back in the day when lazy record companys would apparently just pay a lacky to lean on a few buttons, extending a song by a few minutes and voila - a dance version for clubs.

 

Jerry Casale has described the album it comes from (Oh No, It's Devo!) as being what Devo imagined an album made by fascist clowns to sound like, and 'Peek-A-Boo' certainly fits the bill. Catchy & sinister in equal measures. I've never really enjoyed the song, and am always pretty eager for it to be over and for the next song to start, so the extended version just prolongs the agony. 'Find Out' makes up for it being an urgent tribal thumper with a darker feel, and much more lasting catchiness. It really should have been on the album, rather hidden on a b-side.

#5 Nirvana - In Bloom 12" Picture Disc

I'm doing a batch of 12" singles at the moment as I'd picked 16 records off the shelves at random and 3 turned out to be 12"ers and one was a 10". It seems quite a high proportion as I've never been overly keen on the 12" as a format. Sure, they sound a lot better than 7"ers, but they are often filled with remixed dross rather than the original song you wanted. Only rarely do they have an extra original song not found on the 7".

My Debut turntable also requires me to switch between 33/3 & 45 manually by switching the belt (essentially a rubber band) using a little tool they provided. To get at the belt, you've got to remove the 'platter', so the who production is sufficiently annoying to leave most 12" records unplayed for years. This wasn't the case with my old cheapo record player that was automatic, and I'd bought amost all these 12" records back then.

Anyway, that's enough whittering on about the annoyance of the 12" single and onto Nirvana. In Bloom is a weighty picture disc which was supposedly 'strictly limited'. Yeah, right. There's a bunch on eBay as I type, and not many bidders. The more I think about it, the more of a meaningless phrase 'strictly limited' becomes.

I bought 'In Bloom' at a short-lived record shop in Didcot, Oxfordshire. Suffice to say, I didn't pay much for it as local record shops were 'chart return shops' and record companies used to pile their new releases in them to be sold cheaply & therefore get them in the charts. Nevermind had already been out for over a year, and this release was just milking its success. Nirvana were still one of the very few bands that I liked that had got anywhere near the charts, though, so I snapped it up.

How often do I play it? Perhaps once before? What's the point - A-side just like the song on the album, so that's been heard enough times already. B-side - live versions of sliver (which I used to have on 7" before someone with light fingers filched it from my collection) and Polly. Live versions are almost wholly a waste of time unless they do something dramatic to the original song, and these two just rumble along, sticking closely to the original versions. They are pretty well recorded, but that's about it. So, a record that's more of an object than something to be played.

 

#4 Rediffusion - Golden Instrumentals LP

Yikes! What a shocking cover! I spotted this in a charity shop for 50p, and I'm surprised I didn't just flick past it without giving it a second glance, given the cheap & garish cover. The Rediffusion label was never a byword for quality either, being mainly known as a TV company (http://www.rediffusion.info/). I'm glad I did, though. It's a great album full of hugely catchy guitar instrumentals from the 50's & 60's and it came out in 1973. It's in mono 'electronically reprocessed to give stereo effect',

 

The titles that caught my eye were 'Wipe Out', 'Pipeline', and 'Tequila', but the whole album is full of similarly great tracks. Lots of surf and twangy guitar sounds. Many were million sellers, which seems extraordinary these days when you only have to sell a few hundred vinyl singles to get into the physical top 40 chart.

 

The whole thing whips along at a fair pace, with most tracks being just a couple of minutes long. Almost all are standouts - Santo & Johnny - Sleepwalk, Lonnie Mack- Memphis, The Fireballs - Torquay, Johnny & the Hurricanes - Red River Rock, The Dartells - Hot Pastrami. The only one I'm not that keen on is 'Happy Organ' by Dave 'Baby' Cortez. (The organ sounds a little out of place).

As a fan of the incredible 60's band, The Monks, it suddenly struck me that perhaps the track 'Torquay' was the reason for their being called 'The 5 Torquays' originally. It always struck me as being a little off that an American band stationed in Germany would decide to name themselves after a little seaside town in the UK...

 

It's a real shame this album is cursed with a shocking cover and a title that ties it with 1001 awful instrumental easy listening LP's as it would have been highly sought-after if on a decent label with a credible cover. In fact the sleeve notes by one 'Strollin' Steve' go on to say, "No sore thumbs here like you get in the usual collecvtions, no fill-ins, but one hundred per cent solid gold right from start to finish. This album must surely be nominated for the most sought after collectors collection of the decade. You mark my ears."

 

 

 

#3 Guinea Worm \ S&M compilation split LP

Well, this one is a bit of an oddity. One side features the band Guinea Worm, while the other is a compilation that supposedly originally came with a magazine. Mine didn't, but then I bought it cheaply on the basis that there was a Steve Albini interview on it.

 

This is precisely the sort of album that I own that just doesn't get played. You pull it out of the shelf, and spend a minute trying to figure out whon it's by and why you bought it in the first place, and then put in back, looking for a more obviously pleasurable listening experience.

 

But that's what this blog is really about. Picking albums out at random, and giving them a good listen, no matter how much your heart sinks when you first cast eyes upon it.

 

So, Guinea Worm side - At a guess, I'd assume that these are the guys that put out the S&M fanzine, and that this is something of a vanity project. It comes across as good noisy stuff that I'd prefer to listen to in a club with a pint of beer in my hand. A cathartic blast of volume where it doesn't matter too much when the songwriting isn't too spectacular. At home, it's on mid-morning, and completely out of place with my mood, so I notch it up as one to spin when I'm in fiesty mood and want to listen to a bit of a racket.

 

S&M side - I doubt if this album features on any of the following bands discographies, but it includes Jon Spencer, Green Day, Girls Against Boys, Steve Albini, Steve Ignorant, Huggy Bear, and The Darling Buds amongst others - mainly in live mode & recorded in the early 90's. At this point, Green Day were still playing pubs (I saw them in a pub next to Euston Station around this time). A closer look reveals that all the live tracks and interview snippets were recorded in Wales, and you soon get the overall impression that this is a aural document of a boozy night out in Newport. Lots of noisy tunes, banter, and a snatch of 'Happy Birthday.' Steve Albini's part is simply explaing how Shellac is pronounced differently in North America and the UK. Perhaps the magazine explained a bit more about what was going on.  By the end, we have Huggy Bear bravely standing up to a drunken heckler who won't let them get on with it, and you think - 'glad I'm at home'.