Who buys vinyl records these days anyway?

The same people who think playing vinyl is like flyfishing. Here's why...  

I’ve probably mentioned one too many times what a hapless record store junkie I am and how my fixation with music once got to the point where it was all about the buzz of shopping — retail therapy — and acquiring CDs and records when perhaps it should have been about experiencing it.

I’m better now thankfully. It’s been years since I’ve purchased music by the kilo and what was once an incessant preoccupation now resembles nothing more than a serious hobby (I hope). Yet even after that big reality check there’s an aspect to the pursuit of music collecting that never fails to set my heart racing: the thrill of getting my hands on vinyl records.

Whether it’s flicking through a dusty op shop (even if 93 per cent of op shop records consist exclusively of Kamahl, Gilbert & Sullivan and Scottish bagpipe waltzes), gazing longingly at the rock and metal picture discs at my favourite record store, or expectantly unpacking a pizza box-sized package in the mail, there’s something about these thin pieces of round plastic that just keeps me coming back for more.

I want all of them! Except maybe the new Morbid Angel at the front left.

And yet, vinyl records must surely be an anachronism in this day and age.

The photo below was taken after I spent money on three records (this one, this one and this one, all from noise-x-change). Yet I could have so easily downloaded or purchased the same tracks for considerably less. I got a grand total of eight tracks for my money yet I’m limited to a large and bulky setup that involves a turntable, speakers, an amp, and of course somewhere to store the damn things. With a download (legitimate or otherwise) I could have enjoyed this music far more often, in the order I choose, on my portable media player.

Why indeed?

I’ll preface this by saying that once upon a time I fantasised about DJing hard-hitting, balls in your face electronic music in clubs and suspicious abandoned buildings. I bought dozens of records but the closest I got was my bedroom with me as the crowd (although I did once manage to play track B1 on this Nasenbluten album to a bunch of goths). Yeah, I had some semi-serious aspirations — for one thing it looked like sooo much fun. And while that dream has long since faded, it didn’t stop me from attempting to practice my DJ skills (or total lack thereof) on the two turntables I acquired.

Anyway. Having said that, I have a theory about why I believe people still think vinyl records are wonderful — and it has nothing to do with what the posers claim is the superiority of analogue sound. Yes, if you have a perfectly balanced stereo that’s connected to an equally refined stylus that happens to be playing in a room with excellent acoustics then chances are you probably can pick a mild, ‘warmer’ difference to the sound.

On the other hand, if you’re like pretty much everyone else then all those years of gigs and clubbing have almost certainly caused irreparable damage to your hearing and you probably can’t hear the difference anyway.

So no, I don’t believe much in the mystical ‘warmer’ superior sound of vinyl. And making vinyl records even more of a pain in the arse is the fact that they require maintenance — and my two cats never cease to indirectly remind me of this fact. Hell, they cause the maintenance.

One’s a fluffy ginger long-hair and I am forever removing statically accumulated orange fur from records. Then, recently, I found the other one (at seven kilos he’s something of a fatso) actually sprawled out on the platter! I’m certain it’s not the first time he’s done it and I suspect he has something to do with the two or three hundred dollars I had to spend on repairing suspicious damage to the tonearm on my turntable. That, and he somehow managed to switch the damn thing on (I can just see the pro-digital brigade here, waggling their fingers as they dish out patronising reminders about how your cat would never log into iTunes and mess up your settings).

Yeah, he might look cute now, but when nobody’s looking he spreads his FUR everywhere.

Worse still, there’s the eternal risk of permanent scratch damage to the not-so microscopic grooves or even the risk of record breakage. And then there’s the problem with storage. A modest collection can take up a disproportionately large amount of a good bookshelf.

Indeed, who in their right mind would accumulate these things?

You might also ask why there are certain people who actively collect valve radios, hand-powered model aircraft, old woodworking tools and wooden boats, when in each instance a far more advanced alternative is readily available.

The people who love crappy-sounding valve radios and wooden boats that take months of painstaking labour to restore (I’ve heard of wooden racing skiff hulls that have as much 80 per cent of their timber removed during the 'restoration') do it for some weird nostalgic reason that inexplicably give them hours of enjoyment and satisfaction.

It’s fun.

And for that very same reason I love playing with vinyl records and fantasising I'm DJing somewhere else, nowhere near the masses of cat fur and expensive repairs and rapidly diminishing storage space.

The best analogy I can come up with is a comparison to the sport of flyfishing, a specialised and gentlemanly pursuit that takes years to perfect.

Yet behind the mysticism and cult following lies the fact that it’s really nothing more than a specific means of delivering an artificial lure to a fish — one which just happens to be far more challenging than other methods, according to fishing celebrity Steve Starling. There are many far more effective means of catching those fish but the flyfisher chooses the fly rod. It’s a self-imposed limitation that’s highly challenging. But its practitioners reckon it’s the most fun there is.

So too is it with vinyl records.

They’re light years behind current technology. They’re a costly pursuit. They take up space. And a proper DJ setup can be a raging pain in the arse to maintain. 

But it'smuch more fun to do it that way.

Which really, if it’s anything but that, isn’t worth doing.

Plus, mechanical devices with moving parts are kinda coo. Except maybe valve radios.

Anthrax (the band, not the virus), heavy metal and September 11

I’ve been a sub-editor, journalist and magazine editor for just over five years so I tend to remain un-phased when I come across sensationalised new stories. If I’m going to ‘feel’ outraged about something then it’s usually because of the cynical way in which the lowest common denominator media portrays it, rather than what happened in the actual ‘story’.

So hopefully you’ll forgive me if I sound a bit dramatic when I say that the recent eleventh anniversary of the September 11 attacks and the associated embassy violence are sad reminders of how the world has become that much more darker and fearful.

Just as those belonging to the western generation before us remember where they were on the day Kennedy was assassinated, so too does almost everyone from this generation recall where they were on September 11, 2001. For me, it was a quiet evening when mum called me to the lounge room, where we watched the horror unfold on TV. Both aircraft had hit by the time we tuned in. And then the towers collapsed, one after another…

Understandably, this singular event threw the public into a fit of fear, but just when you thought things couldn’t get any worse, along came those anthrax spore-coated postal letters. Five people died after envelopes containing anthrax-infused powder were mailed to American politicians and media outlets, and while most people don’t remember the names of the victims, everyone knows Democrat senator Tom Daschle — who is still alive — was one of the targets.

 Anthrax the virus. I made the mistake of searching for “Anthrax virus”

images on Google. Don’t do this if you’re at work or have a weak stomach.

The first of these deadly letters arrived a mere week after the September 11 attacks and the subsequent national attention it commanded pushed the fear-meter into over-drive. The pervasive mood of paranoia that followed was unprecedented, and for newspapers, magazines and television stations this could only mean one thing: gold rush!

From the murder of innocent people who just happened to look vaguely Arabic, to a massive drop in the value of the share market, to an unprecedented crack-down on privacy and civil liberties, no moral panic was exempt — and the media made damn sure you knew all about it (well, except maybe the civil liberties bit).

While news outlets did their utmost to ensure that the prospect of opening your mail was almost as terrifying as boarding a plane, a hell of a lot of people started searching for “anthrax” on the internet as news of more postal attacks came to light. This inevitably led them to www.anthrax.com — the website for the American metal band that was founded in, and had been using the name ‘Anthrax’ since, 1981.

Predictably, accusations of tastelessness and insensitivity started flying, and a band that had never enjoyed so much as a smidgen of support from commercial radio stations was suddenly inundated with interview requests from the biggest media outlets in the country.

Anthrax’s guitarist Scott Ian reminisced on this absurd turn of events in a recent interview while promoting the new Anthrax album, Worship Music.

“The fact was that all this very, very mainstream media — I'm talking from CNN to the Wall Street Journal to the New York Times, the biggest mainstream media in the world — are suddenly calling our publicist trying to get interviews with us,” he is quoted as telling the Georgia Straight (no, I hadn’t heard of that publication either).

“And my attitude right from the start was, ‘Well, these guys, they didn't want anything to do with us when our record came out not that long ago,’ you know. And now they want to talk to us because they need to fill space because this is the story of the week — which is gonna disappear in the next two months. And of course it did,” he said.

I remember hearing about this on a community radio metal show back then. The band put out a media release that scathingly said they were going to change their name to ‘Basket Full Of Puppies’ before promptly stating that, actually, under no circumstances would Anthrax change their name.

The band finally put an end to the media-manufactured rumours of a name change at a 9/11 benefit concert, when each of the five members came on stage in white overalls that spelt out the words “WE’RE NOT CHANGING OUR NAME”.

NOT changing their name. See what I did there?

It was a fitting and necessarily dramatic end to one of the more obscure (and certainly one of the silliest) legacies of the September 11 attacks. The media attention surrounding the ‘controversy’ vanished as quickly as it appeared, and Anthrax are thankfully still around today, still going by their original name and still kicking ass. In fact, I’m very much looking forward to seeing them at the Soundwave festival. Thank goodness this whole dumb saga was an isolated moment of fear-induced frenzy that…

Oh wait. That’s right, shortly after the attacks the largest owner of radio stations in America issued a directive to all its 1200+ radio stations. It was basically a list of ‘questionable’ tracks that included all songs by Rage Against The Machine as well as such riot-inducing works like Walk Like An Egyptian by The Bangles, Led Zeppelin’s Stairway To Heaven and What A Wonderful World by Louis Armstrong. In hindsight it seems that the direcetive wasn’t quite the black list it was thought to be (it was more of a suggested black list). However, the fact that someone not only bothered to come up with a list in the first place but actually turned it into some kind of official policy says so much about how fantastically warped public perception had become.

Oh, and spare a thought for hip hop group The Coup, whose new album at the time, Party Music, was all set to go and be released in mid-September 2001. In one of those “you couldn’t make this shit up even if you tried” coincidences, the cover depicted two members of the group standing in front of the twin towers, detonator in hand, the buildings exploding into flames behind them.

Woops.

Astonishingly, the album was hastily recalled before it hit shops, whereupon it was re-issued with less ‘questionable’ artwork…

“That probably deserves some kind of public service award…”

I’m a big fan of legitimate free music downloads, if only because I’m probably one of four people in the whole southern hemisphere who hasn’t used a torrent or P2P service for the last seven years.

It’s not what almost everybody else I know does (and I’ll confess that over the years I’ve spent a tear-inducing amount of money on music that may not always have been up to scratch), but like almost everyone else I also still have my shame pile of unlistened to music. That's because I occasionally go through spates of looking for new music by hunting for free downloads provided by bands, which means I end up with a pile of MP3s in a forgotten folder on my desktop.

One such small collection of tunes that my computer tells me has been on my desktop since January 6, 2012, consists of three free tracks from American electronic goths The Crüxshadows. Founded in 1993, they’re not a band I know much about and I guess they play what would pass for the equivalent of modern darkwave.

 Serious business.

To start, I only owned three tracks from various compilations so when they released three free Christmas tracks (go HERE and download them from the right hand column) it doubled the length of my Crüxshadows playlist.

It got me thinking about this band, and made me realise that there are a couple of things I really like about them, even though I don’t know their music anywhere near well enough to consider myself a fan.

First, from what little I know, they seem to have some variety going for them. Yes, it’s that electronically driven synthy darkwave sound that has been done a trillion times before, but they also seem to make use of some cool sounds. They use ‘real’ violins during their recordings and main (male) vocalist Rogue seems to have a fantastic, almost operatically clean voice. The track Citadel (from a Fiend Magazine sampler) is a good example in my view of a track that uses what could be an old-school synth, or at least a modern one that sounds pretty retro.

Secondly, I like that they have dancers. This makes sense in the live setting given that a major component of the music is electronic (it’s hard to jump around on stage holding a big synth), and for all the pretentiousness — be it the umlaut, the main-man’s pseudonym, or the fact that they’re successful goths — I’d like to think this adds something to their shows, in the same way that The Prodigy’s human stage presence was basically made by two guys who couldn’t sing.

The fact that they’re not-at-all-unpleasant-to-look-at dancers certainly helps, as does the fact that they thankfully seem to have a sense of humour (below).

The above video from an Ayria show (another superb electronic artist who is very underrated, plus she’s from Canada so that has to make her 50% better to start) has the dancers bust out of nowhere and do a full routine.
Check out their mad moving skillz.

The third and by far my most favourite thing I love about this band which, as I said, I really don’t know very much else about, is the fact that once upon a time, back in the United States of America in 2006, for one very brief moment in time they did the unthinkable and managed a number one Billboard single with the track Sophia.

I own the (radio edit version) of this track and I really didn’t think that much of it. Yet that's merely a matter or personal taste and I throw my hat in the air for these guys — an independent band that was virtually unknown by the standards of the commercial music industry — for managing to outdo corporate-backed mega artists.

Never mind the fact that it was a short-lived blip, or that it didn’t break their career and propel The Crüxshadows into mega stardom… for one fleeting moment back then and now forever frozen in time, a song by a bunch of mopey-looking people with funny hair wearing corsets and fishnets was officially at number one — and in September 2006 this meant it outranked P. Diddy.

Take that P Diddy.

To quote Iron Maiden singer Bruce Dickinson, when the Bring Your Daughter… To The Slaughter single did much the same after sitting for one week (and one week only) on top of the UK singles charts, where it consequently knocked Cliff Richard off his perch: “That probably deserves some kind of public service award.”

Look what the cat dragged in

Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction. And sometimes there's selling out... and then there's Bret Michaels from Poison releasing his own line of pet products. Yeah... It's all here.

This is my favourite part. It seems there's a promotion to win a one-on-one with Brett Michaels. And according to Bret, it involves the following: "Afterwards we're going to sneak out to that rock n' love bus, have a little party, and talk about pets." This man's career just keeps going from height to height...

Mexican madness

The great thing about having good friends is that they’re, well, rather good to have around. A common interest, for example, is highly conducive to spending hours talking about a mutual favourite topic. And if your residences happen to be geographically close then the likely instances of sharing those interests thoroughly increase.

I have one particular friend who lives just three minutes’ drive away and when I called him the other day the conversation went something like this.

“Hello?”

“Hey mate, how’re you going?”

“Good. You?”

“Yeah pretty good. Hey listen, do you have a spare sombrero I could borrow?”

“Sure. But I’m leaving in 10 minutes.”

“No probs, I’ll be there in three.”

Admittedly it was more like four minutes — the one traffic light on the way delayed me — but I got there in time and he was more than obliging in allowing me to choose one of his half a dozen hats. The occasion was Fiend Fest Festival: the biggest gothy industrially darkish alternativey festival ever held in Australia, consisting of a long streak of bands, an extensive dark fashion show, and the always-awesome twice-annual (I think) event that is The Black Market.

I love the fact that this kind of subculture even manages to still exist, let alone manifest itself as a big all-day party, but I wasn’t actually attending the last two components. Specifically, I was seriously looking forward to Mexican electro-industrialists Hocico (if you haven’t heard of them, make an effort to look them up) which also happens to be the reason I acquired a sombrero. I covered mine in industrial tape because, you know, that would make it an industrial sombrero.
Yeah, not many people got it.

This sombrero is industrial.

There’s a lot to be said about Hocico and it deserves a lot more space than I’ve got here. There’s the fact that two poor, Mexican teenagers who just happened to be seriously into their Skinny Puppy subsequently became one of the most influential acts in aggrotech or terror EBM or whatever the kids are calling it today.

There’s the fact that they do a very cool and unique blend of what I think is particularly dark and energetic electronic music, which somehow still remains awesome despite its generally un-polished production.

And then there’s the fact that they are reputed to do amazing live shows. Legend has it (in other words, I can’t confirm this story) that Hocico’s first European tour saw them support several better known bands who, after witnessing Hocico’s ball-tearingly awesome and energetic performance, are said to have unanimously decided that they take the top spot for the remainder of the tour.

Yeah, there’s probably some extreme embellishment there but I still like that story. And even if it’s not true, the fact is they are a major drawcard on the European festival circuit in this kind of music.

That last point — the quality of their live performances — was seriously hyped up before the gig and so I, along with almost everyone else there with even a half-arsed interest in the band, had some very big expectations. Most of them would thankfully be met, but the whole caper came perilously close to unravelling as a result of some serious audio gremlins that had started before I even got there.

I’d hate to be accused of spreading lies and rumours so I hope I’ve got this right. It would seem that one of the earlier bands on the bill had their PA die after three songs; another band had another serious problem with a foldback speaker (subsequently, the main area had a noticeable whiff of electrical-fire smoke); and there may even have been further assorted audio problems. It seemed the venue worked around the problems as best they could but it all caused considerable mayhem to the band schedule. Consequently, Hocico started late.

Not that it mattered much to the crowd. The noticeable sense of expectation was all there, but then within two songs the dreaded audio bug reared its ugly head! I imagine that the sound mixer along with the stage manager were by now chowing down box-loads of maximum-strength aspirin, as the speakers seemed cut out. For a moment there the punters parked at the front of the stage directed their displeasure at the audio booth, but interestingly enough — and a sure sign that the crowd was filled with appreciation — everyone kind of started clapping in unison to those beats, almost as if to compensate for the drop in audio. Fortunately it got fixed, and that’s when the fun really started.

And the fun seriously begins (pic: Tarley).

There we were, with a blinding blaze of strobes, disturbing backdrop visuals, and a little Mexican guy jumping around in some rather large almost GWARish or Lordi-like shoulder pads. And that’s when I realised what made this band so great.

When you see live bands that you don’t avidly follow, it’s so often a case of getting into those songs you recognise and maybe even liking a few you don’t recognise. “They’re not bad,” is as absolutely stock-standard behaviour at a gig as is having a vaguely appreciative and not-very-responsive crowd for much of the time. But not so with these guys. I own a few Hocico releases and yet I can honestly say I recognised all of two songs that were played. Yet at every moment there was this powerful you-had-to-be-there energy, this awesome, dark, killer world complete with sensory-depriving lights and visuals. At the risk of running off an old cliché, it was much of a case of you could “feel” it rather than just see and hear it.

Cool backdrop (pic: Tarley).

The only down-side for the night? Other than Hocico playing a short set and not getting around to doing an encore?

My back.

I groaned vigorously the next morning at my fiancée about how my lower back ached. I couldn’t figure out how it got so sore until she pointed out that (along with me getting old, of course) I did my fair bit of jumping around. It was the only plausible explanation I could think of until, still buzzing from the gig, I swayed back and forth mildly (I think I was brushing my teeth and was reminiscing about it all) when oh boy, that’s when it hit me. Sharp, jabbing pain, right there where I’d been moving around (not jumping) all night.

You see, the thing about a sombrero, even one wrapped in industrial tape, is that it’s kind of light. You can’t headbang like you’d normally do because it will fall off, so instead you have to do a kind of keep-your-back-straight-while-moving-your-head- forwards-and-backwards-type of motion. Turns out, doing this repeatedly is very bad for your lower back.

Anyone who is genuinely into dark and heavy music knows that a concert-induced injury is worn as a badge of honour. I wouldn’t have minded so much if I got cut from a spike or bruised from someone’s boot or even severe whiplash from too much headbanging (though not to the extent experienced by Jason Newsted and Tom Araya, who both had to stop headbanging due to nasty neck injuries).

No, my latest concert injury came form wearing a hat.

Yeah, I must be getting old.

I'm at the bottom right of the shot, slowly receiving a mild back injury (pic: Tarley).

Not necessarily funny this time

A sneak preview of the Paul Stanley from KISS “1974” action figure. Yet another product from the never-ending stream of merchandise from this band-turned-corporate-mega-brand. Did you know Gene Simmons is said to be worth $300 million?

Then there's this video is very much in the vein of some funny flash animation videos that became particularly popular on the web some years ago. Basically, foreign-language songs would receive additional phonetic English subtitles and matching animated photos and images, often with hilarious and crazy results. The most famous at the time was called French Erotic Film (originally a Dutch song with no lyrical connection of any kind to its new title); one version of the infamous Numa Numa video did it momentarily by superimposing an image of fettuccine over a vaguely similar-sounding moment in the original Rumanian lyrics; and there were a few others I believe, with the craziest spoofs being Japanese songs.

Now here’s another one in the same glorious tradition, in the form of alternate lyrics for the instantly recognisable O Fortuna epic. Except, I find this one particularly interesting because of the choice of music. Specifically, I own at least three releases that were later retracted because the bands sampled O Fortuna, including Ministry, Apoptygma Berzerk and Apotheosis (in this last case, the release was actually called O Fortuna and ended up shooting up the Belgian charts at the time, so that was something of a giveaway).

Personally, I feel this militant hunting down of copyright violators is morally stupid, seeing that the lyrics that appear in Carmina Burana consisted of “previously published” material — specifically, a large book of poetry written by Medieval monks which Carl Orff transcribed for his composition. Hell, I even knew some people a few years back who got a take-down because they posted a short YouTube video of them dicking around at home, set to this music. It couldn’t possibly have attracted more than a few hundred views and that got them some unwarranted attention.

So, I seriously wonder if this fantastic video is going to be around for long.

Oh, and last but not, Axl Rose is still a douchebag. It seems he’s now banned fans from wearing Slash t-shirts at his gigs. I wish I could think of some appropriate Guns N’ Roses lyrics to make some ironic point about this total douchebaggery but nothing’s forthcoming. What an arse.

You spin me round like a 50 cent record

 

Dead Or Alive front-man Pete Burns is best known these days for his disastrous experiences with plastic surgery (do a Google image search for Pete Burns if you’re brave) but once upon a time in the that mystical, glorious period known as the eighties he was a hand grenade of outrageousness and flamboyance actively subverting pop culture with his unique brand of trashy decadence.

Well, that’s what I told myself when I picked up a second hand copy of Brand New Lover. The 50 cent sticker was a warning that I promptly ignored.

 He's changed a bit since this photo was taken.

I’d hoped that when I picked up this record from 1986 — which is like, totally more than 20 years old — that it’d be a nostalgic treasure from when ‘the eighties’ were yet to be invented and a gender bending ex goth / post punk performer could somehow find relevance in the mainstream pop charts.

Alas, the thing about this release is that it was a catchy radio-friendly tune transformed into a nine-minute remix. The operative word here is “was” — it’s done in that instantly recognisable analogue eighties style that nowadays seems so very primitive and limited. Nine minutes of the stuff, seemingly stretched for the sake of filling a whole a-side. Simple and unnecessarily repetitive and unimaginative extending of music. Was it considered crap for the period? Who knows. The music industry was profitable back in them days so record labels could presumably afford to offload more rubbish.

The b-side is not much better. It features a shorter albeit instrumental version of the title track which I guess must have taken the studio engineers all of three minutes to put together as they removed the vocals. It’s followed by a live version of the track In Too Deep.

Assuming this is a genuine enough recording and not a blatant overdub, this last track probably has one redeeming quality. Namely, you can really make out just how strong Burns’ voice was. If Wikipedia is to be believed, he was asked to join a band purely on the merits of his outrageous attire. The strength of his voice was supposedly discovered later.

The rest of this record, unfortunately, doesn’t do it much justice.