Oct 29, 2011 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.

Oct 23, 2011 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.

Oct 20, 2011 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.