Big Creative Eclipses

Anyone who reads this blog regularly knows that I am a big Cave In fan. Always have been. This year saw a remastered reissue of one of their 'classic' releases - 'Creative Eclipses'. This was a hugely significant release when it came out back in 1999. It marked a big step away from what they had done on 'Until Your Heart Stops' towards the more rock sounds of 'Jupiter' which would follow a year or so later. Of course, I lapped this up when it came out. I didn't care that it sounded 'softer' because, despite the vocals moving from screaming to singing, to me the guitars sounded even better.

Well, sixteen years later and Hydrahead decided to reissue this by adding the two 'songs' that were originally previously only released on the CD version. This meant that a 7" was no longer big enough to fit it all on, so it got put out as a 12" instead. Obviously I had to invest in all three colour versions available.

Hydrahead pressing info is rarely divulged, but someone has suggested that, just like the original 7", the clear vinyl is the rarest, being out of only 100 copies (and before someone points it out, I know that there were actually 118 copies of the clear vinyl 7"!).

Red vinyl is supposedly out of 300 copies.

And the third colour is white, of which there are apparently 500 copies.

One very cool thing about this release is that the sleeve is just like a scaled up version of the original 7" release, with the front cover having a lot of die cut circular holes in it. It even has the exact same number of circular holes, although I suppose anything different would technically constitute different artwork.

The weird thing is that I can't make up my mind what I think about this reissue. I mean, on the one hand it seems pointless, as the two extra songs are not really songs at all, but 'sonatas', which are basically just musical interludes, the second of which is nearly eight minutes long. Personally, I just don't think they're necessary. But being more positive about things, the release was originally 5 songs long, and those of us who bought vinyl sixteen years ago got shortchanged. The whole notion of 'extra tracks' on CDs always seemed a bit shitty to me. I guess in reality it was all just about using up the available space on the disc, but as somenoe who always bought records it just felt slight favouritism towards those who embraced the new technology... the fools.

So basically I still can't make my mind up whether I like this reissue of not. But while I try to make my mind up, here's a picture of the three 12"s together with the original 7". Just because.

Oh yeah, nearly forgot... but when these things got repressed, the 2011 album 'White Silence' also got repressed on a solid red vinyl. So I had to grab one of those too.