Saturday, January 08, 2005

rounder sale

The best record shop in Brighton, the redoubtable Rounder Records, held their annual sale today (prices starting at 19p per CD), which meant I got out of bed early and struggled down the hill in a tremendous gale so that I could be amongst the first in the store. To no avail. It was busy already, and getting to the racks involves much careful feinting. In the end, I completed my dash around with the following CDs in my hand ready for evaluation and whittling down:

1. St. Etienne - Foxbase Alpha: wonderful record I never upgraded to CD.
2. Faust Vs Dalek - Derbe Respect, Alder: left field rapping krautrock crossover.
3. Tyrant - Fabric Mix (CD1): gorgeous packaging, and the (second) best mix CD of the year but...
4. Tyrant - Fabric Mix (CD2): ...mystifyingly separated into two CDs, meaning hardly any saving of price, sadly.
5. Wu Tang Clan - Disciples of the 36 Chambers: wonderful live recording and presumably one of ODB's last stuff on tape.
6. Wedding Present - Hit Parade: Another one I never got round to getting on CD.
7. a Javanese Gamelan collection which looked ace.
8. Kathy Davey - Something Ilk: I was impressed by a Kathy Davey track I heard on fluxblog so tempted by this one.

Couldn't buy them all, obviously, but trimmed the selection down to 3 which I'm pleased with. More interesting is this year's 'hall of shame'.

Jonathan's Rounder Records Hall of Shame*:
1. Claire Sweeney LP
2. second Electric Soft Parade LP
3. Westlife sing Brat Pack LP
4. some Stereophonics LPs
*participants being the five cheapest, most often-seen CDs on the racks. The Bargain Bin, in other words.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

which were the three you ended up getting then? were they worth it?

Jonathan said...

Erm, I got the St. Etienne, the Wu Tang Clan and the Faust CDs. Yep, they were worth it; that St E album is criminally under-rated in my opinion - as good an example of post-rave indie as 'Screamadelica'. And the Wu Tang record is incredible, as I've since commented. Not had much time to listen to the Faust thing yet but it sounds, erm, challenging. Still, one doesn't exactly go to Faust for cheerful melodies...