Hey all... I know there is talk about the Mineral repressing so I just wanted to chime in and let you know the latest.
We've been getting a *lot* of requests over the years for us to repress a whole bunch of the crank! releases - with all the Mineral albums being at the top of the list (of course that's no surprise on my side, I'm as big of a fan of Mineral as anybody!).
We finally decided to do a repress and we made a very small allotment of special blue vinyl copies as well. (Of the many thousands of Mineral albums sold, I think there are a total of 150 colored vinyl available... so they are definitely rare!)
To answer a few issues and questions that have come up:
* We *really* apologize for some of the mailings that got bent or destroyed. As I hope you can imagine, that was completely unintentional. We have since fixed the issue and are sending replacement jackets to those that were effected.
* The band does, in fact, get royalties from all of these records. In fact, one of the reasons we did a repressing is because crank! still owes the band members some royalties for past sales - and this is the type of thing that keeps me up at night. I don't like owing bands money for their music - it goes against the integrity we always have adhered to in running crank! I won't go into the economics here of running a record label, suffice to say, there's little to no money in an indie label these days. By doing a repress, not only will the band get royalties from all these sales, but it gives us a few extra dollars to pay the band back for what we owe already them. Suffice to say, anytime you buy a Mineral record from crank!, it helps the band. (And anytime you buy one on ebay, it doesn't).
* The Power of Failing artwork is the original artwork, with a few extra changes that had to be made this time around. For the most part, it's the same thing as the first release. The picture on the front is a couch in the snow. It's a picture that the band members had when we were originally pressing the record. It may or may not have been owned by one of the band members - I don't remember that specific - we all just thought it was pretty cool. As with all Mineral and Gloria Record releases, the band's bass player and graphic design genius, Jeremy Gomez, had a lot to do with the design. In terms of there being a bar code on some records and not a bar code on others... we originally released the album without a barcode. Frankly, we thought it looked a lot cooler that way. Barcodes are ugly. Lo and behold, we soon found out that it was tough to sell the record at retail stores without a barcode, so our distributor forced us to put one on. Barcodes are still ugly, if you ask me. Unless it's made into a Black Flag logo... but that's a different topic altogether.
* We would *love* to repress EndSerenading too, and it seems the demand is huge for it. Our big problem is finding the original artwork. Give us a little bit of time on this one and we'll try to get that done for you.
I hope this helps answer a few questions. Let me know if you have any others.
And, as always, huge enormous heartfelt thanks for everybody's continued support of crank!
Jeff
crank! founder
