Larkin' With The Strangler

Unless you've been living under a rock for a few months, you'll know that pretty much the most hyped and sought after records of the year is the MUDLARK LP. Even though I latched onto the hype myself at some point, I don't really know where it came from. I would guess a hot demo tape and a few live shows. But regardless of the how, it seemed that everyone was eagerly awaiting the release of the LP. So unsurprisingly, when it came out, it sold out immediately. Not only that, but copies were going on eBay for insane amounts. And not a single limited version in sight. No colour vinyl, no limited sleeve. Just plain old black vinyl. Kinda cool that in 2012, where every record seems to have at least 5 different versions by default, that the most essential release of the year is black vinyl only.

Well anyway, I finally managed to get one, after months of consistently being too late. Here's the proof. Photos of my Mudlark LP:

I think the first place I tried to get a copy of the Mudlark LP was in The Essence records online store. Adam had ten copies and they were going to be available at 9am on a Saturday. I figured that getting one would be easy. I got up and had my laptop on at 8:50, and every few seconds I hit refresh to see if the LP was in stock. After about 100 clicks, eventually the LP appeared in the store as 'available'. So I clicked 'add to cart' to then be greeted by a weird message. It said something like 'sorry, you cannot buy this item because all items are in other user's carts'. Basically, the ten copies sold out in literally ten seconds. There must have been probably twenty more people doing the same thing as me that morning, and I just wasn't in the top ten of fast clickers. This was of course a flavour of what was to come over the next couple of months. Every now and again Mike would send me a message, or there would be a message on the Livewire board, saying "more Mudlark LPs available - check the Painkiller store" or "check the Grave Mistake store". And every link I followed lead to the same "SOLD OUT" mesage when I got there. So I gave up.

Then finally, a couple of weeks ago, Mike sent another message linking me to the Fun With Smack online store. They had a few more LPs in the store. The only slight catch was that you had to buy it as part of a combo package where you were forced to pay $16 to get the Mudlark LP plus some bullshit record that nobody has ever heard of by a band called Boston Strangler. This is either the biggest con ever known to man, or a genius way of selling leftover copies of a record that nobody cares about. One of the two.

So yeah, I got sent this Boston Strangler LP that I would never have bought if I wasn't forced to take it as part of this package deal. As you can see, there's a whole lot of BS going on here.

As it turns out, I have to say that this LP is alright. I have played it & I did enjoy it. Maybe this idea of being forcing people to buy a record they couldn't care less about isn't so bad after all.