A.V. Club Blog: Vinyl Retentive

VINYL RETENTIVE #1: PINHEAD GUNPOWDER

"First, a note: I received a USB turntable for Christmas. After a couple months of software hassles (which continue), I finally started ripping some of my dormant old vinyl. My collection is small to moderately sized and overwhelming dominated by obscure ‘90s punk, but there are noteworthy gems hidden in there—and in the collections of my fellow A.V. Clubbers, covering all genres. Here’s the first write-up of what we find while crate-digging in our own houses…"

Just when I think things couldn't get any better, a new feature at the Onion A.V. Club turns up this morning. The A.V. Club Blog is where a lot of the really interesting stuff on the site turns up: Permanent Records (see my previous post here), Noel Murray's Popless.

This feature reads actually like an amalgam of those two, with an in-depth description of the band and the scene it came from, a sample track and at-a-glance descriptors ("File Under: The sound of a dam about to burst"). A cool thing is that he puts in the 'Vinyl Inscription', which is something I've only found out about since I started buying vinyl. I am definitely looking forward to more of these.

As for Pinhead Gunpowder, the only release of theirs I have is the album Shoot the Moon. This sounds a lot more hardcore; and I guess linking it makes up for leaving the band out of my top Mike Kirsch band poll last year. The winner of that was of course "the popular melodic post-hardcore band" Fuel. And also, I'm a major Green Day fan, in case you didn't know.

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Talking of other cool things that happened today (and this fits in very well with the rest of the post) I found a package from 3819 Beecher St. NW waiting on my doorstep. So far I've bought mailorder from Polyvinyl (they put in a candy bar) and No Idea via Interpunk (that was coloured vinyl, so it was cool in itself... and the inscription on Fuel For The Hate Game was pretty funny) but this was the first thing I got from Dischord so far.* Two Crownhate Ruin records, the Intermediate 7" and Until the Eagle Grins. The package was brown cardboard, rather than the white stuff I got the other times, and the address was handwritten (and the return stamp had a name written above it too). And inside there was a little handwritten note, which I scanned in above (it kinda had my name on it, but I blanked it out before posting it onto the interweb).

I know this is the kind of thing you'd expect from Dischord Records, the greatest independent punk label ever, but it's still a very nice, personalised touch.

Thanks, Dischord!

* Dischord have, quite properly, released pretty much all their catalogue on eMusic, the independent download music site, so, pre-vinyl, I've never really needed to mailorder anything from them since buying Repeater + 3 Songs in a store over here.