Oblivions

For real, the next time the National or their club does something half-baked or unfair for their fans without fixing it soon afterward, it will be the first. They had a "debacle" with their tour pre-sale the other day, lots of members did not get access to the actual ticket selection page, and within a few hours they coordinated a second pre-sale on a different provider for people who missed out. As far as I've seen, they are pretty attentive and care a little.

Yeah. The subscription dashboard and the shop are two different systems/databases, so there is some kind of delayed or manual dispatch of shop logins after sign up. I signed up for Cherry Tree the very first day and received my shop password/login the next morning at 8am. The good news is that they're limiting this to 1 per member and they have consistently been super cool about making sure things are somewhat fair, so I can't imagine this selling out in 4 hours to members and today's sign-ups missing out.

I went with the 3xLP and the CT exclusive 2xLP and berry pink shirt bundle. Only band I'd ever dream of pre-order variant collecting for.

I AM EASY TO FIND Format: Cherry Tree Exclusive 2x12" Vinyl Release Date: May 17, 2019 Pressed on 2x12" standard weight colored swirl vinyl. Includes code for digital download. Ships on or around release date, May 17, 2019. Date subject to change. Tracklist A1) You Had Your Soul With You A2) Quiet Light A3) Roman Holiday A4) Oblivions B1) The Pull Of You B2) Hey Rosey B3) I Am Easy To Find B4) Her Father In The Pool C1) Where Is Her Head C2) Not In Kansas C3) So Far So Fast C4) Dust Swirls in Strange Light D1) Hairpin Turns D2) Rylan D3) Underwater D4) Light Years Limit 1 per customer, including as part of bundles sales. Duplicate orders and/or copies are subject to cancellation. This item is exclusive to the CHERRY TREE SHOP. Please note product images are digital renderings actual vinyl and t-shirt colors will vary.

Cherry Tree members log in and check out the club exclusive vinyl and shirts.

This came up on "next videos" after the trailer on YouTube desktop: In typical National fashion, they make a small change to their sound that, to the outside world, probably seems insignificant but, to National fans, feels like a bold new frontier. I'm wrapping my mind around some of the non-National choices in this one but I think I dig it.

Goddamn. I haven’t been a big fan of Rylan when I’ve seen it live but the clip on that trailer sounds beautiful.

There was an article that mentioned this could be some kind of collaboration and/or a departure record. I really really hope this feels and sounds like a proper new album and isn't a Virginia style EP with instrumental pieces from an art exhibit mixed in. Light Years and Rylan don't strike me as a departure for the band, so I'm hoping that was a detail meant for another project or that the art collaboration stuff is overstated and won't influence the album too much. Whatever. New National is always welcomed.

The dudes doing Petty stuff now seem like they're old timers so I wonder if that's an old school model/approach? I feel like MoFi also keeps some of their "limited" hand numbered releases in print even after they reach their original # max. "We don't got no Instragram or Facebook for you to complain about our inaccurate numbers, so, deal with it. Peace, love, music and reefer, man."

The people currently handling Petty's stuff on vinyl are doing a great job on quality but they could not care less about accuracy of their advertised pressing totals or whether to ever stop pressing copies. I imagine these will be readily available for the rest of time.

I dunno. The post seemed pretty fine to me. It was made on their Facebook page to their customers who are pretty used to transparency and probably did have questions as to what happened. They got the story off their chest and expressed their disappointment without switching into making declarative statements about the character of Lou or the band, which is probably as good as a balance of honesty and professionalism that you can get without defaulting to the boilerplate "We're excited to see our friends move on to their new home!" press release. The only thing it really whiffed on was defending the band from having the unsavory details shared publicly, which only really means anything if you're invested in covering for the band. As a mild fan of each side, it seems like JNR is bummed and sharing what happened is their way of dealing with being blindsided as people and they're not interested in going after the band beyond telling what happened. All that said, JNR needs to step up their quality control of their actual physical records and tighten up their white label release choices a tad. If anyone wants to get on them for that stuff, I'll join your hate squad.

I'll probably miss out again because such is life and limited events suck but I do give them a big thumbs up for thinking about club members like that.

If you write "fight off your demons" on the spork, I feel like you could find someone who'd pay $200 for it. Otherwise, it's a 4 cent Weezer spork.

Refreshed the page starting at 7:55 and the tickets for LA were sold out by the time the page loaded at 8am. It sounds like a ton of people who were there right at 8 got bumped aside with the initial sold out message and then, from there, it was a crap shoot as to whether you tried again at the exact same time that holds expired and tickets became available again. I tried for 15-20 minutes and got nothing. Some people logged on at 8:05 and checked out with no problems. I'm not a member of any other fan clubs and never try these pre-sale things so maybe this is standard but this felt very poorly executed from a fan experience perspective. They either had way too few tickets reserved for club members, just have way too many club members, and/or the ticketing system was not the most intuitive as far as letting the first people have first pick. Tickets were also $90 + fees. I would think being a member would either grant you a reasonable amount of access or a discount. Oh, well. Not going to bother trying for tomorrow. I'm reverting back to my standard policy of not even bothering with limited events.

Not sure how serious they will be in practice or what the consequences would be but there was a rep from the Cherry Tree club on the National’s sub-Reddit reminding people that the codes are only for the club member who receives them and can’t be shared or sold or gifted.

Very curious if the Green Day and R.E.M. bootleg reissues will be mastered or improved from the original bootlegs that I have. If so, I might have to ring up some French friends.

Rivers is trolling.

I ended up getting a refund via PayPal due to a lack of response. What's funny is that, a week earlier, I got a 2nd "Hey! Sorry we missed this! We'll get on it!" response from SmartPunk followed by silence once again. No idea if they're understaffed, incompetent, or consciously hands off with helping customers to save on replacements/refunds.

I had to search for this for a year, buy two copies, and deal with an insane, threatening seller from the Netherlands before I could get one decent copy of this boot and now kids can just waltz into the hours long line of one of the busiest and claustrophobic events of the year and elbow their way to the RSD bins–actually, I think I got the easier, better deal. I see there's a now offline Rough Trade URL for this bootleg release. Does anyone have any info on who is releasing it? I had no idea that RSD featured bootlegs as official RSD releases.

Boxer and Alligator have the advantage of being their breakthrough albums that established their trademark sounds (and, although I am not a huge High Violet fan, it’s A TON of National fans’ first and most nostalgic album of theirs) but, IMO, Sleep Well Beast in all its under-stated glory is their best written and best recorded album. I am so incredibly excited to hear the new record.

DEAL ENDED

Not entirely sure what you’re describing that’s in your head but the Flipbin is a sturdy, high quality ‘now playing’ holder that holds a stack of records and is more practical than a single record stand. They are expensive and easy to scoff at but, for real, they are super well made and well designed. You get what you’re paying for in those departments. And the dude who runs the company is pretty solid (in other words, he donated to my kickstarter and has given me discounts before haha).

It’s listed as Bingo Handjob which was the fake name they used for some unannounced live shows.

I own the actual version of that R.E.M. bootleg and it is one if their better vinyl bootlegs but I’m so very curious whether this is a real repress of a bootleg and what changes or improvements a proper release would look like.

This is a no brainer, especially if you’re lucky enough to be new to the BN catalogue. Also I interviewed Dave for my old RIP podcast and he’s a good dude!