Monday 10 November 2014

Weak

This week I'm gonna be featuring some of the test pressings I have bought recently. There aren't too many, so I'm not going to be able to go much beyond the end of a week, but at least it's a theme for me to focus on if nothing else.

Today it's Seaweed. I picked up this test press of the band's first LP 'Weak' on discogs. It was cheap, but then again, it's 'only' a test press of the German pressing of the record, rather than the US test press. On the positive side, however, it does come with a funky press sheet.

As you can see from the labels, this is unmistakably the German pressing. The labels don't lie.

Interestingly (or perhaps not, depending on your viewpoint), a lot of Sub Pop releases were pressed in both the US and also Germany back in the day. The thing I always found odd is that the German pressings had their own unique catalogue numbers which were different to the US pressings. So this LP, for example, was SP 144 in the States, but SP 38/196 in Europe. Not really sure why the Euro catalogue numbers were expressed as fractions. It didn't make sense back then, and it doesn't make sense now. But no doubt if this test press were carrying the SP 144 catalog number, it would have cost me at least 5 times as much.

2 comments:

alexander said...

as far as I know, Sub Pop had an early (i.e. late 80s) distribution deal with German label Glitterhouse. that is why even rather obscure releases by SP were available in Europe. I always understood that Glitterhouse was like the European department of SP (despite being a label of its own with unique releases). this does not necessarily explain the different catalogue numbers, though ;-)
anyway, the weak test/promo is a cool item.
greetings from frankfurt.

chris said...

Nice pick up. If I had known about this I would have picked it up as well.