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HOOD: Silent ’88 (LP, Slumberland SLR 59, 1996)

Hood always felt very much like an English band – specifically, Northern English. Their songs had a gritty, blurred, romantic, hopeful and bleak combination of things going on. For a while, it seemed like they were on their way to becoming a bit of a Big Deal; Silent ’88 represents their ‘let’s break America’ album, in […]

HULA HOOP/HOOD/BLAIRMAILER: 3 Band Flexi With… (7″ flexi, Tangled TANGLED 006, 1993)

Flexis are cool. People don’t make them that much any more, as far as I know. Maybe it’s difficult to make them these days. Maybe I should investigate, and if I can, just make a flexi for the hell of it. And hey, if I did, it might be like this one, as it’s a […]

HOOD: A Harbour Of Thoughts (7″, Orgasm SPASM 08, 1995)

On the insert that comes with this photocopied-sheets-hand-pasted-on-sleeve record, it states ‘Theres [sic] plenty more where this came from’ before giving the band’s contact address. They’re certainly not kidding – in the early days of their career, Hood put out a relentless stream of music on all kinds of labels and formats. I was always […]

HOOD: Rustic Houses Forlorn Valleys (LP, Domino WIGLP42, 1998)

To my recollection this was Hood’s first ‘big time’ release, marking their shift from sporadic flurries of records coming out of tiny microlabels in bagged, hand-folded sleeves to a proper, ‘real’ label. (Bear in mind that in the spectrum of labels releasing Hood’s work, Domino were and remain independent yet Geffenesque in scale compared to […]