Record Shop Blues or
My Goat and How to Get at it
1. The House compilation
At work we have a system whereby the first seven or so people in get to put a marker down as their album choice for the day. Each day a colleague of mine who shall remain nameless, gets in early and puts on somnething that fits the following criteria.
i) it is House, or one of its frivolous sub genres (e.g. Click House: House you scratch your beard to!)
ii) it is by some European guy with silly name (see Juri Hulkonen or Simone Cervantes or Xavier Alfonoso Vermillici) Although often its impossible to work out who the actual music is by because its other peoples 'tunes' 'mixed' by the 'DJ' who might include their own 'tune' but not the 'original'. Keep Up!
iii) it often employs the most annoyingly kitsch female vocal lines, saying something like 'come on', 'uh-huh!' or 'yeaahh, sexieeee', its suppose to be alluring but ends up making you want to commit murder.
iv) it is
always 70 plus minutes long
This is what happens when you do too many drugs and read DJ magazines.
2. The Drum + Bass 12"
Why oh why do they insist on including absolutely NO information on the sleeve.
Is this some kind of council estate, sports casual battle for secrecy and underground cred when releasing
'Whites' (self-released 12s with no artwork, just white inner sleeve hence the name).
It appears the blander the better, and thats before we even get to the music sometimes.
Hence it is impossible to know what record you are handling and often the punter is as confused and could be taking anything home.
Honestly
3. 'The'
Why is everyone using 'The' to name their bands, it wasn't too clever the first time round.
Now it seems to be a good selling point judging by the endless conveyor belt of workaday actswho have adopted the moniker. This mass lack of imagination seems to translate to the music.
So why not make a band called the Shits and save everyone the trauma.
4. Remastered/Reissued/Repackaged/Regression
Rolling Stones, you pointless money grabbing skeletons, you might not care or even make the decisions, but surely having
a million different versions of the same album is clearly a pointless rip off.
There's the Remaster, the ABKCO Remater, the Remaster in a Digipak, the ABKCO Remaster in a Digipak, who's ABKCO? probably some intern at the record company who decided to turn the the treble up slightly to con more money out of balding lovestruck men to buy an album they already own because it reminds them when they swore in front of auntie. In fact I don't know what annoys me more the people who churn out this crap or the people who gobble it up.
Crap bands that look like raisans aren't the only ones at fault as the recent Eno re-fest testifys.
Someone decided to release his entire back catalogue as a Remastered Digipak but I think they forgot to do one important thing
make it sound different
Brian should be turning in his space pod
more to come, depending on whether I calm down enough ...
5. New Releases
Why do we bother?
