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TRANSPARENT THING: Car (7″, Wurlitzer Jukebox WJ 35, ?)

I don’t know when this record was released – the sleeve or insert doesn’t offer any hard information. Why can’t these people include the correct information for efficient record-keeping, eh, eh? In fact, it’s very likely that the year of release could in fact be printed on the rear of the foldover sleeve, but the […]

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 […]

SWELL MAPS: A Trip To Marineville (LP, Rough Trade/Rather ROUGH 2, 1979)

This album is an insight into a strange set of minds. I bought it in around ’92 or so after hearing Swell Maps’ name dropped in the context of a variety of indie-pop and fanzine mentions of – very vaguely and very possibly wrongly – music that prefigured the Pastels and was ‘shambolic’ before the […]

SONNEVILLE: 46 Tours EP (7″, Alienor ALIEN µ, 1994)

Lumme, this is the second of a sparse few releases that Alienor put out that’s come up for discussion as the result of my wacky scientific random number generator tool. So be it, I can’t argue with fate, it’s like the Dice Man or something. It does, however mean that I had to find the […]

THE GRAVY TRAIN: St George’s Way (7″, A Turntable Friend TURN 13, 1993)

Now, this isn’t a record from the hip edgy band The Gravy Train!!! [exclamation marks theirs, not mine] who have released stuff quite recently on Kill Rock Stars. No, this is the early-to-mid-nineties Newcastle-based (I think) indie-pop outfit, who don’t have the exclamation marks but who have enough of a sense of Manic! Pop! Thrills! […]

HEY COLOSSUS/LORDS: The Money Will Roll Right In/Back Up! Back Up! (7″, Theory Of Nothing WANTON, ?)

I can’t quite remember why or how, but I was aware of this record being on the cards for some time before it came out, and so was corresponding with a fellow called Manj about it, his forthcoming first Theory Of Nothing release, for a little while. I’ve got friendly connections with both Hey Colossus […]

JASON AND THE ASTRONAUTS: Burn Down The Boys School (7″, Unlabel UN015, ?)

I bought this 7″ a few years back. I’m not entirely sure when. The label unfortunately didn’t feel fit to include a ‘released on…’ date anywhere within the package. Shocker! Don’t they know that some people live for these facts? Cataloguers of the world need information. Just like in The Prisoner. And like that show’s […]

GANGER: Geocities (7″, Wurlitzer Jukebox WJ16, 1997)

Never sure whether the title of this single refers to Geocities as in the legendary free webspace provider that was responsible for around a billion home-built websites, almost all featuring those early graphical hits of the internet: The multicoloured rainbow horizontal rule The animated .gif showing letters flying into a mailbox According to Wikipedia, the […]

THE NATION OF ULYSSES: Sound Of Young America (7″, Diskord 46 1/2, 1990)

The first Nation Of Ulysses record, released on the cheekily-named Diskord imprint – a combination of Dischord and K Records, you see, I picked up this record around ten years after it came out, as Nation Of Ulysses were a band that I retrospectively discovered and explored, having first got into later associated bands Make-Up […]

RAZORBLADE SMILE: This Accurate Pain (7″, Chocolate Narcotic CHOC 01, 1992)

Another artefact from the mire of early-to-mid-nineties indie-pop that I got myself so deeply into: I’ll never have enough seven inch singles in wraparound sleeves with photocopied inserts, even if the wraparound sleeve in this case sports a very unpleasant image that looks like it was printed out from an Atari ST with a low […]