Saturday 29 August 2009

Barfight!

I've said it many times before, and I'll say it again... the only thing in life that I seem to have good luck with is records. Here's another recent example...

A few weeks ago I got home from some kind of evening out to find an email in my inbox from Six Feet Under Records. The email had been sent to everyone on their mailing list, and was announcing a super limited 12" re-press of the Barfight 7". SFU had pressed up 105 copies of this record as a one sided, clear vinyl 12" with silkscreened covers. The record was strictly for SFU mailing list customers, and you could only buy one. The email had arrived like an hour or more before I had got to it, so I figured I would have missed the chance to pick it up. But fortunately the record was still in the store. So I bought one. I then sent the link to a friend and advised him to buy one. Immediately he got back to tell me the link was to a blank page. So I clicked the link again myself to find that there was nothing there. Which of course meant that all 105 copies had been purchased. So I must have got one of the last few copies. If I had waited 5 minutes, I would have missed it. Which is, I'm sure you will agree, pretty damn lucky.

The only thing I wasn't into was how the cover is covered in some sticky brown shit. Then I read the SFU discography where it says "covers are silkscreened, stamped and sprayed with real blood". Nice.

For anyone who isn't familiar with this record, I thought I'd post up a pic of the original 7" on Malfunction Records for comparison purposes:


Whilst ordering, I did my usual trick of thinking that I should order some more records in order to justify the shipping charges. So I pre-ordered the latest SFU releases. In the past when I have pre-ordered from SFU, I have usually got the most common versions of things. But this time I did pretty well.

Dealing with them in alphabetical order, the first record is a 7" by a band called AS WE LET GO. I got one of the rarest colour, which is out of 104 copies and is described as "Coke Bottle Blue"... although, come on, did you ever see a Coke bottle that looked anything like this?

Since the band is Japanese, more than half of the 104 copies on this colour went to Japan. The band sounds very similar to early Blacklisted to me. Interestingly, the band sings in English and the dude doesn't sound in any way Japanese. I would seriously NEVER have guessed that this band wasn't from the States. I even went to the their myspace to check that they were really Japanese... haha! I'm into this 7". Definitely worth checking out if you are into stuff like this.

The next record, which is my favourite of the lot, is a 7" from a band called GYPSY. This has people in it from Blacklisted, Cold World and Let Down, but Gypsy sounds nothing like any of those bands. The SFU site compares them to Jawbreaker, Seaweed, which isn't far wrong, but this really reminds me of a band and I can't think of who it is, but it's bugging me a lot.

There are 50 copies on black/white mixed vinyl, and 100 copies on Black/Grey mixed vinyl. I'm pretty sure mine is one of the white/black ones, although if I flip it over it kinda looks more like grey/black:

The final record is a 7" by STREETWALKERS. Dunno how to describe this band. Reminds me of Some Kind Of Hate. I guess for most people that's a bad thing, but I like it. 204 copies on white vinyl.

The best thing about these records is that they all came with a download code so I could put them straight on my ipod without having to mess about ripping them. There's nothing better than buying records and not actually having to waste time playing them!

2 comments:

Mike said...

Nice score on the Barfight record, and thanks for the tip on it...too bad I was too late to pick it up though. Damn!

Rousseau said...

After receiveing the email from SFU I clicked on the link and got the blank page. I was pretty pissed to have missed this record and deceided to email the dude to see if someone not on the mailing list ordered a copy. Luckily that was the case so he canceled his order and sold it to me. Pretty rad looking record.