this isn't a particularly rare vinyl release at all - it's still widely in print and very affordable. it's an album very very widely considered a classic. but it is, I think, the moment when I realised what makes buying music more satisfying of an experience than the lifetime of piracy I'd built up to that point. it comes with a handful of prints and illustrations that really expand upon the feeling of the album. the record itself isn't even labelled, there's no tracklist, the sides are engraved with their descriptions "nervous, sad, poor" and "bleak, uncertain, beautiful". but most notably of all, each of these releases comes with a penny flattened on train tracks behind the studio it was recorded in. I've heard stories of copies of this album coming with handwritten notes of thanks from the label. it was the first time I think I realised the love and the immense effort that goes into putting music out independently like this, even long after the recordings are done. I mean, I get that this one's a very special case - a lot of high-effort touches to really drive home the art, and to keep doing them decades after the album released. but I think picking this up is a big reason why I'm still buying vinyl ten years later. the album still absolutely rips, of course.
this drops soon but it’s fun to come back to something you love but everything’s a little more there. a little extra bass, a little something from live tapes we don’t get on the original. honestly I wish this was the record they toured the anniversary of.
Even if you end up having to go somewhere else, there still will be culture to get involved in, people to meet, things to learn, realizations to be made. All of that is still right there for you and it will be open in a way you won't even realize until you've done like a year or two. So it's truly still exciting times. As long as you feel generally good about the place you ultimately choose, your time is coming.
