Secret Vinyl Download #9

On this long weekend, I have so many emails to respond to, and I'm hoping to get a good dose of listening to recent purchases in. I bought A LOT of records the other day, and I've got a few more on their way to me as I write this. I was hoping to have something a little more expansive for this post, especially since I've gotten a lot of interesting stuff recently, but I haven't had much time to examine any of it in depth, so instead I give you some vinyl rips as the equivalent of comfort food. Actually, they're both really good records, but the content is quite a bit easier to get a hold of now compared to a few years ago. Still, I'm pretty proud of these rips, as they're almost entirely needle drops, which is to say there is no declicking, apart from one utterly pointless bit that no one will ever notice anyway, as well as the editing, though none of that is messing with the rip. Minor hints follow.

The first rip is an album from 2002 that was out of print on vinyl since it's release until 2019. It's a lot easier to get now, though I haven't went looking for it since I got my copy so maybe it's not that simple. It's in high demand though, that's for certain. The version I own is a VMP exclusive pressing. I used to love VMP, and while they still get really cool stuff from time to time, I refuse to have anything to do with them after how badly they treated their customers. So enjoy this one, a loud and heavy album that was also one of the last gasps of a previously cool service. You can hear some very minor pops and clicks if you're listening with headphones on, but it's nothing that will destroy your experience.

The second rip is from a record that came out in 2019, though the majority of it's content was recorded during the 80s and released in different forms mostly throughout that decade. I see it as a love-letter to old-school bootlegs, at the least the good ones. If you never bought a bootleg in the 80s or 90s, what you missed is either the wonder of something filled with gems you've never heard, packaged in a way fans would love, or the agony of crummy packaging and awful sounding recordings. I like to use Prince's Chocolate Box as a good example. It was filled with excellent unreleased songs, some in good or decent quality, others sounding awful, along with a few that were already officially released by the time most people heard it. The packaging was ugly and cheap, but the music was very good, so good it got bootlegged over and over again as parts of other bootlegs, including the awful sounding Royal Jewels vinyl box, which was ugly and sounded even worse but was also loaded with interesting gems. The album I'm sharing with you though, a completely official release, captures that bootleg style really well, with a wonderous collection of alternate versions that sound wonderful, which did occasionally happen in the bootleg marketplace. The cover art and packaging is funny, as it uses a photo from a completely unrepresented era, but that's how a lot of bootlegs worked, and at least the photo is nice. Hell, they made the weird decision to leave the name of the album off the cover of the vinyl, but included it on the CD and digital versions, which definitely feels like an old-school bootleg mistake, the kind that doesn't really hurt anything, just makes it more memorable. As for the content, it's completely different from the previously mentioned album, instead very funky and danceable. I'm sure you got the hints.

On another note, I'm considering looking into getting some of my favorite songs that are ridiculously difficult to get on vinyl pressed to wax. It'll be only for my own use, and if there are extras possibly given to friends who'd want one, but only 5 or 6 copies max. Just something for me. It feels silly, possibly spending a hundred dollars to do this, but when you see how much they're charging for these records elsewhere, you'll understand why this is actually far more affordable. I'll post something in the future if this happens.

 Secret Vinyl Download #9