Physical media adventures August 2024

Physical media buying adventures over the past couple weeks:

1) I stopped by My Vinyl Underground/Jigsaw Records last weekend to grab a gift certificate for a friend's birthday and picked up Corridor's Mimi and Family Fodder's best-of. Corridor are doing good, unpredictable things in a vaguely jangly direction, and their cover art is always delightful. The cover feline bears a bit of a resemblance to my father-in-law, and I love the two pink leaf blowers. I wish they'd include the (French) lyrics for us cheapskates who prefer the lower price and perfect sound of compact discs, though.

2) Polyvinyl was doing a "garage sale" thing, so I bought a Good Morning CD and t-shirt on deep clearance, then bought their newest album Good Morning Seven too. (Go for the CD - it's cheaper, and flipping records every 12 minutes for a 50-minute "double album" is no fun.) I like the song "One Night," particularly its dreamy arpeggiator B-section, and its "cloud vision" video:

3) After thirteen years of living in this house, my mailbox key was worn out to the point of no longer functioning. Not a problem I was familiar with after a decade of averaging two years per rental house!Anyway, East Portland Locksmith just happened to be across the street from Crossroads Music, so I bought Pere Ubu's mighty live album 390 Degrees of Simulated Stereo on vinyl at a relatively reasonable price and brought it home. Any version of "30 Seconds over Tokyo" inevitably gives me the chills, but this one is something else:

 

4) I went to pick up some holds for the kid at the library and stopped by their book sale, where they had a tranche of $1 Richard Thompson live CDs. Mr. Thompson shreds hard live (particularly on More Guitar) and I dig it.

 

They also had some Gen Xer's indie-rock collection from 1994 or so, so I picked up a few things that I had been too snooty for in the day but wanted to reconsider. Turns out my younger self's dismissal of Vel*city G*rl as "wack" appears to have been correct, as was my dismissal of U*2*'s Oct*ber as "boring." 

 

Kicking Giant's Alien I.D. holds up well, I think. The taut guitar-drum duo sound is a little of its era, but they change things up well. The CD design has aged much better than much other edgy 90s I-have-a-computer design, though the lyric sheet went all Raygun and ends up being an illegible blob of sans-serif. I guess the spoken-word bit "The Town Idiot" is good for what it is, but spoken-word bits are still a bad bet on rock albums (unless you are Captain Beefheart).