An Accumulation of Great Records

I've had a pile of stuff I've wanted to post about sitting on my desk for like ever. I think it's time we bundle this shit up into a nice quick post. Let's begin.


This is the record show pressing of Capital - Givers Takers on Underground Comminique. Not sure how many were pressed of this.


This is Spraynard, which is Ex Get Bent from Westchester NY I believe. Great record released last year on Runner Up.


Runner Up also sent me this Dave Hause record because there was some shipping confusion. Always appreciated.


This is a good record that I have yet to listen to on vinyl. Direct Hit! who I think is from Milwaukee. I also think they self released this one. You can listen to the album here.


Here's a great band from Ohio that I've been getting into lately called Mixtapes. Try googling that! I think this LP is a combination of 2 releases, one called Maps and the other called Companions, which was an EP. It was released by Animal Style Records, which if I remember correctly uses Limited Pressing for their store. Smart move :).


Finally this is the latest Daytrader 7". These guys self released this 7" and they're currently working on a full length with Rise Records.

I got more stuff I need to get up here. Bunch of Long Island test presses I was excited to pick up. Hopefully I can get to that soon. Later.

Unorthodox Repress

Here's the repress of indecision's Unorthodox. This one is mastered. I know the jacket says "Remastered", but for it to have been "Remastered" it would have to have been mastered in the first place. Which it was not. The story goes that when they recorded the album the guy who did the recording asked them if they wanted it mastered. It was a couple hundred bucks, so they decided not to. What's funny is the guy probably assumed that they were getting it mastered by someone else. But the dudes from Indecision probably thought he meant you could do it, but you don't have to. Pretty ridiculous if you think about it.

Not really sure of the pressing info on these. I could probably dig it up, but I'm too tired.


This is the 180gram pressing that came with a silk screened sleeve. The back is stamped and numbered. I got 22/150.

He used the old Merciless sleeve to silk screen them. Good idea I think. Cheap and it keeps it within the scope of the band. Overall the pressing was good. The quality was pretty nice. The jackets weren't glossy like the original which I kind of like cause it's different.

I didn't get the test press on this one. I guess I could have contacted the label and asked to buy one, but it didn't seem necessary. To be honest, since I have the only test press from the original pressing, it doesn't seem right to get one from the repress, when there's probably a million people out there who would love to have it. I have too many Indecision/MPB tests anyway. It's out of control.

Gulag - Greece not Soviet Union

This post is going to surprise a great many of people. Most have never heard of this band. For a long time I wasn't even sure what this record was. I've seen it around, and I've done a lot of research, but it's rare and the label release designation can be confusing unless you're a really dedicated collector of Wreck-age.

The name of this band is Gulag. They're an 80s Greek punk/hardcore band. You can't really find much information about them written in english, but from what I can gather they were one of only a handful of talented bands in the Greek music scene. They were also the first band ever released on Wreck-age records. That's correct. Even before Bad Trip's Positively Bad from 1990. Gulag's Big Talk was released in 1989 and has a release designation of WAR-001. The same designation as Bad Trip's 7". The question is why? Well I don't have the answer to that, but I can speculate. Let's take a look at the record first though.

It was only released on clear and Wreck-age put out 1000 copies. That's a lot for a greek punk band. The jacket is made of thin paper, that I'm surprised has lasted 20+ years. Here's where it gets interesting. I've seen this 7" before, and I've seen the insert pictured many times. But never in my life have I ever seen this promo sheet for the record.

In fact, I've never seen a promo sheet for any Wreck-age release. This one happened to be inside the 7" that I bought. I didn't even know it would be in there. Definitely a great surprise. The promo sheet gives a great english description of the band. It even points out that they released a full length in 1987, which I couldn't find information on anywhere. This is also where I got the pressing info. Originally I thought there was only 500 copies pressed.

It gets better though. When I turned the promo sheet over, I found this...

A 20 year old note written by Pavlos and Amber telling a zine the price of the record and that their new full length "Showyard" would be released soon. You can't get much cooler than that. What's really interesting is Gulag's full length from 1990 was not called "Showyard", it was called "In The Showyard". Small mistake, but not for the label set to release the record.

So back to it, why does this release have a 001 designation and Bad Trip's Positively Bad also have a 001 designation? Well here's my thought, I think Pavlos decided in 1990 to focus on NY releases, and I believe more specifically, english releases. The hand written note says their new full length would be out soon. But Wreck-Age didn't release that full length. It was released by Lazy Dog Records in Greece. I think Wreck-age intended to release that full length, but decided to start the label over and release only US bands. If you look at the releases from Wreck-age there's a pattern. The band releases an ep and then a full length. Yuppicide, Bad Trip, Mind Over Matter, SFA, Milhouse, etc, all did this. This is what Gulag was going to do, but either they said no, and Pavlos decided to reboot the label for US bands, or Pavlos said no because he wanted to reboot the label for US bands. Either way though, the Gulag 7" is the long lost Wreck-age release. One that's going to screw up a lot of collections.

Sorry Marcus :)

Britney's 18th Birthday

One of the few variations I didn't have from Indecision was the Britney Spears 18th birthday cover #ed out of, what else, 18. Luckily my friend Dan had an extra and traded me for a Quicksand Slip t-shirt. I had not even seen one of these before the other day.

All it is really is a standard jacket with an 11x17 color print out glued to it and numbered. Now I see why I've never seen one before. Jeff Jawk never sold these cause they're really just a gimmick variation he made from left over jackets. Still pretty funny. And since he numbered them, they're collectable. I got number 10. Never asked what Dan has. I assume he gave me the higher one, so he has a single digit. Not bad.

This locks up the To Live and Die in NYC collection. There's actually one more gimmick type variation Jeff made which is a punched metal cover. Yes metal. I think he made 2 of them. One for him, and one for the metal worker who actually did the bending and punching. I think I offered him 100 bucks or something for his copy. Nothing doing though.

Hope Came Through!

You might remember about 2 months I wrote about Marcus and how he rebooted his label to release Doug's (We Will Bury You) band Hope Defeated's demo on vinyl. Well Marcus and I traded some favors and next thing you know, I got copies!

I love the folded cover. Lot of people are doing these covers now a days. Not only do they save you some cash, but they look better. Plus I hate inserts, and this completes negates the need for an insert.

Here's the white version. Mine is more like a pink though. Marcus will probably explain this in the comments but I assume most whites are like this.

This is the reason for the pink version, the red /60 blog press variation. This one is pretty cool cause the label is stamped with both Doug's blog and Marcus's blog. And of course it has the custom cover.

Last but not least the big man hooked me up with a test. He also did a nice custom cover for it. Simple, straight forward, but custom and that's what counts. I really get annoyed when a label doesn't put any effort into a test and then gives them out. All Marcus did with this cover is take some black stock, reduce the standard cover down, print it out on some heavy stock, glue it to the black stock, then write with a silver paint marker on the back. But it's super clean and neat. I wonder if he wrote that himself. If he did Marcus has some skills. Either way, that little bit of work makes this a really desirable variation. I discussed this in Part 3 of my Vinyl Bailout series on my other blog. Just put the effort in and people will reward you with a desire to collect your releases.

If you haven't bought a copy of this record yet I suggest you hit up Marcus's store and buy a bunch.

You're Not Man Enough To Open This Cage

I thought I'd post the Kinghorse ST record I picked up a few weeks ago. It's not super rare or anything, but it does have something cool that you never really see. A little background on this record if you've never heard of it. Kinghorse is a thrash metal band from the late 80s early 90s. This is their first full length which was released in 1990 and was produced by Glenn Danzig. This record really has Glenn written all over it to be honest. It was released by Caroline, and the artwork is by Pushead. The artwork is actually the interesting part I wanted to talk about.

Take a look at the cover. You see how the horse and the spears are cut off on the left hand side? Kind of strange considering the name of the band is Kinghorse. Why in the world would Pushead do that? An artist like Pushead has integrity and I highly doubt he would have allowed Caroline to just chop his drawing up to suit a 12x12 format. Not only this, but Pushead does artwork for a specific purpose. He doesn't just do art and someone takes that art and uses it for something. Meaning, if someone wants an album cover, he will do an album cover. When I put that together I remembered that this record is stamped for promotional use only on the back. Vinyl was not the originally intended format for this record. And since 1990 was too early for CDs to be the #1 format, their left only one other way to listen to music. Cassette. So I dug around looking for a picture of the cassette artwork and found this...

The artwork was specifically designed to fit a cassette. Never in my life have I seen something like this done. There was probably only a small window in music history where this was possible. 1990 fits right into that window. It's right when vinyl was dying, cassette was at it's peak because of the portable player war of the very late 80s. This is when Sony released the WM-DD9, which is considered to be the best portable tape player ever. Used ones still sell for $100 to $500 because of the sound quality. A lot of people forget that cassettes were analog, just like vinyl. And this walkman could play the full 20-20,000 range. I assume Caroline thought cassette was the future, and CDs would probably never take off. Maybe their sales dictated a decision like that. Pretty crazy if you think about it. They basically said this album will probably never exist of any physical format that's square. They thought CDs would never take off, and vinyl would die completely. Unfortunately for them, the complete opposite happened. Cassettes died, vinyl never seems to die, and CDs took over the world. Now the great art of Pushead is chopped off like a shitty photoshop job.

P.S. I wonder if this decision by Caroline to go heavy on cassettes affected the sales and place in history of this record.

Yes...

I still collect records. I just stopped collecting spare time! Damn, ok this weekend I'll sift through these boxes and find something good to post.

Also I posted this from my phone using the new blogger iPhone App. Pretty easy but no preview. Hope it looks ok.