Give Again

I'm sat here watching the 'Salad Days' documentary and thought it would be the perfect time to whack up this post about a modern day DC band. If you read this thing regularly then you probably remember seeing a few records by GIVE over the last few years. Heck, you probably even remember a few versions of their 'Electric Flower Circus' LP in recent months. Well, guess what? Yup, I got a couple more of the damn things. Both are pretty cool variants, and even though I don't really feel that I need four or five versions of this LP, I don't see how I could do without these two as both are super cool in their own right.

As we all know, Record Store Day is a pile of crap, but this year there was one thing that I wanted badly - a purple vinyl copy of 'Electric Flower Circus' with limited sleeve. The only problem was that this was only available from one store in the whole world - Joint Custody in Washington DC, which is approximately 3650 miles away from my house, and probably a little too far to venture to buy a record. So I was very kindly assisted by fellow Give collector Chris, who lives a great deal closer.

This version comes in a photocopied sleeve featuring another part time member of the band, Azriel Nathan Mendoza.

At this point I'm starting to wonder exactly how many temporary members of Give there are. I must have at least 5 records with limited covers featuring temporary members. And some other dude played guitar with them when they toured the UK this Summer. In fact, at this point I must be just about the only person not in Give.

The record itself looks like black vinyl in the above photos but as I said, it's a dark, clear purple. There's only really one way to showcase the colour:

The second version is a special Spanish version that was made for a tour of South America this year. This is the regular US version of the record but in a special sleeve and with special insert made by Amendment Records. This is a cool item. It's basically the same sleeve and insert as the Euro press, but with everything translated into Spanish.

The back of the sleeve is hand numbered out of 150 copies:

The only thing that slightly lets this down is that it uses the same vinyl as the US press, including the labels. So whilst someone has gone to a lot of trouble to translate everything into Spanish, the labels give away that this is a prime piece of American vinyl. And there I was about to award them ten out of ten for attention to detail. They'll just have to settle for nine I guess.

I've pretty much lost count of how many copies of this record I have bought now. But I still need a blue vinyl and a pink vinyl vinyl copies. The pink especially seems almost impossible to find. There are 100 copies out there but it seems that nobody who has one is selling. Surely someone must be starting to tire of this band now as they've been around for an age in hardcore terms. If so, sell me your pink vinyl.