AlexH.

3 minutes ago, kylet said:

Jesus, guess I shouldn't have sold my Bad Astronaut on White Vinyl (more rare) for $80 bucks Buy It Now. Moved as soon as the box set came out. His Blue copy is over $200 already. 

Lol I sold my blue copy for $40 in 2016 and I remember being pretty stoked about it

Like are they making 20 at a time or what, just keep the listing up and move the ship date back every so often

Cool, I sold my copy of this a few years back once it passed the $50 mark and regretted it even at the time. Definitely a band that should've been huge but just petered out instead, destined to be a cult classic that only put out like 30 songs, all of them bangers. I'm holding out hope for a repress of The Cradle someday.

Really though I do think this is good news...

...for me to poop on 

Circling back to my stance from the last time this was reissued, after trying and failing to A/B a meaningful difference between the different versions, which I stand by:

On 7/21/2016 at 9:36 AM, AlexH. said:

Honestly, if you noticed a difference, you are a huge nerd. Sorry if this offends

This is not one of those albums where the timbre of every drum hit is carved into my brain though, more like I listen to it every 18 months or so and am just kinda like "music... very cool". I understand how you might feel differently if this album meant a lot to you. Still a huge nerd though

https://asthmatickitty.com/announcing-convocations-by-sufjan-stevens/

Quote

Convocations, a new instrumental album by Sufjan Stevens, will be released on May 6 digitally, and on August 20th, 2021 via 5xLP colored vinyl boxset .

Convocations is comprised of five volumes—Meditations, Lamentations, Revelations, Celebrations and Incantations—the project is a two-and-a-half-hour, 49-track reflection on a year of anxiety, uncertainty, isolation, and loss. Read more about the project here.

You can hear the first song from the project, “Meditation V,” right now by clicking here. 

The full volume of Meditations will be out this Thursday, April 8. We’ll be releasing the other four volumes each week for the next four weeks. See schedule below for details.

Each of the volumes and tracks of Convocations are accompanied by a generative video art piece created by artist Melissa Fuentes. 

Also: please save the date and join us on Thursday at 12pm ET, when we’ll be premiering Meditations in full, alongside with Fuentes’ visuals, via YouTube livestream here. The livestream will remain active during that week to come, and we encourage you to join in the stream’s chat throughout to reflect, respond, meditate, lament, revel, celebrate, and incant what we’ve gained and what we’ve lost over the last year, and what we see on the horizon.

We are also releasing Convocations on 5xLP, both of which will ship on August 20th. You’ll be able to pre-order those items on Thursday, April 8th at 1pm ET here or over at Bandcamp here. See photos below.

Very annoying to have apparently missed the 4 hour window where I could buy the analog cut of Loveless without jumping through hoops or ordering from overseas. 

Boxes are the worst part of box sets, especially oversized ones with a big lid/flap. They certainly look cool and it's neat how to see a specific artist/album encapsulated in a nice package, but they're annoying to retrieve records from especially if you're listening to the whole thing. And be honest, you're not listening to the whole MxPx box set at once, unless you have  really want your day to gradually get more mediocre over the course of 8 hours.

Pretty messed up that Underoath gets top billing over Converge on Friday, and I say that as someone who has listened to far more Underoath in his life.

Also, could there be any more mid-2000s Tooth & Nail representation on here? I mean, was Terminal's one album really seminal enough to justify a 15-year reunion, or did Jonezetta just not respond to their emails?

13 hours ago, Derek™ said:

gaps between the tracks meant to flow together on DTGL

lmao WHAT

I remember this being a not-uncommon thing in the early days of the Vinyl Revival™, specifically with Pirates Press - the VC Norma Jean box set and the Asbestos Records pressing of Bomb the Music Industry's To Leave or Die in Long Island both had gaps between gapless songs. It was confounding then and it's even more confounding now! Listen to your test presses!

8 minutes ago, etphonehome said:

So has anyone here actually gotten their copies yet and can confirm this sounds like shit?

One person said they heard somewhere that it was bad and 3-4 other people took that claim as fact, what more proof could you want?

15 hours ago, Oblivions said:

I stopped listening after Before Everything & After came out. Is there a Cliffs Notes guide for all their albums since then? I seem to remember them getting away from the poppier, polished sound of their major label records but I could be misremembering and why listen for myself when I can ask on VC.

This may be controversial, but Panic is their best album. Best-sounding production, tight songwriting, and some lyrics are actually good. After that, for me, they settled into a groove similar to most punk bands that have been around 20+ years where every new album is perfectly serviceable but there's truly no reason for anyone who's not a super fan to give it a listen.

I don't understand what is so bad about the Gold Rush graphic - is it because they call out long wait times and they themselves have had long wait times (like everyone else)? This is boilerplate marketing verbiage. Looking at Discogs I own at least one record they've pressed (JPEGMAFIA's Veteran) and it sounds good to me.

12 hours ago, shenanigans said:

Yeah, but it's not like Shook Ones is touring and needs to sell merch. Anyone who wants these records can easily buy them for $15. 

FUN FACT: When a band is not touring, its members do not need money in order to live!

I gotta say I think Homestar Runner still holds up as much as anything. I think it helps that they never relied on reference-based humor (well, current references anyway) or crudeness (nothing at all against crudeness, it just doesn't age well. Don't see a lot of nostalgia being expressed for Happy Tree Friends). They're just weird little cartoon people executing a very specific brand of humor.

And they do put out new stuff every so often - probably 2-3 toons a year plus random side project things like the Trogdor board game. They just put out a DOS game play-along video with puppet Strong Bad two weeks ago: 

https://www.fangamer.com/collections/homestar-runner/products/strong-bad-sings-vinyl

Appears to be available now? Nothing about pressing information, but uh, this exists!

On 7/30/2010 at 12:08 PM, dreamover said:

As great as it would have been to have the band facilitate a great deluxe retrospective double LP with bsides and more art, it didn't happen and it never will.

[The words "never will" echo across the endless expanse of time itself as we smash cut to dreamover staring at his monitor, mouth agape]

Where are these pressed generally, and how do they sound? I noticed the original pressings of Virgin & Mean Everything go for decent money these days and was thinking of swapping out mine for fancy colored copies, but probably not if they're Pirates Press jobs.

All I want pressed is the Staind Glass episode of U Talkin' U2 to Me:

On 1/26/2021 at 8:55 PM, cammm said:

With that said I'll cut to the chase and say a college of mine that originally introduced me to this vinyl addiction and myself wanted to try to fill what we see as a gap here with a company that has realistic prices, amazing and unique product selection and sells everything and anything related as well all with lifetime warranties and amazing customer service. that really cares as enthusiasts ourselves. 

https://www.theonion.com/somebody-should-do-something-about-all-the-problems-1819583263

49 minutes ago, youspinmeround said:

Shit like this is not needed.

 

Single lp is readily available. 2xlp with demos came out 5 years ago. 

 

Its essentially the same pressing repackaged as color vinyl

The key difference is this version is on Matador. Their whole catalog which was previously on Merge was reissued by Matador last year, and this album and Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga are the last two holdouts. I imagine they move enough units that you won't see any Merge copies in the wild in a year or so. Same sort of thing happened with Arcade Fire when they moved their catalog to Sony.

This just opened up to another 10,000[!] artists. Still through Pirates Press, lots of details: 

https://daily.bandcamp.com/features/bandcamp-vinyl-pressing-service

https://bandcamp.com/vinyl 

https://get.bandcamp.help/hc/en-us/articles/360035500754-What-is-Bandcamp-s-Vinyl-Pressing-Service-and-how-does-it-work-

My thoughts: this may sound elitist or gatekeep-y, but I worry that making this as simple as a checkbox on the Bandcamp backend takes vinyl further down the path of lifestyle accessory/fetish object/Funko Pop alternative. As that classic single-panel cartoon put it so well, the best things about vinyl are the impracticality and the expense. The current system where you have to pay upfront & navigate all the logistics with manufacturers obviously locks out a lot of smaller artists from being able to press LPs, but also likely leads many artists to say "you know what, this is a lot of work, is it worth it? I don't even own a turntable". Now artists can be totally insulated from not only the upfront costs, but also the planning and headaches required to execute a vision for a nice looking and sounding LP.  It creates a false sense of how easy it is to make vinyl, and I worry the result is going to be a lot of half-baked vinyl releases from artists that do it just because it would be cool to have, filling the backlogs at the pressing plants even further. And like I said initially in this thread, Pirates Press puts out generally low-quality vinyl, especially the splatters and swirls that people love so much, so at best these Bandcamp Vinyl releases are going to be fine. Sort of like how Teespring and the like are convenient ways to offer shirts, but then you get fewer people offering nicely screenprinted shirts that last longer than a few years.

Not to mention, from the screenshots I've seen, the prices are pretty substantially marked up compared even to what you would pay for an all-in-one package direct from Pirates. Obviously everyone loves Bandcamp because they're one of the only companies in the music industry that's not actively evil, but I think this is kinda wack all around.

On 11/22/2020 at 10:02 AM, mmhmm said:

https://www.smlxlvinyl.com/collections/retired-exclusives

Bizarre to me that they wouldn't keep Air for Free in print. Surely they own the rights to it free and clear, I can't imagine why there would be any issues preventing them from just doing a few hundred at a time. Was it not a big seller?

Also, still waiting for that "not limited" black vinyl of FIF's Our Newest Album Ever to come back in stock.

I get why it's $40, it still fuckin sucks