Tuesday 31 May 2016

My World Be Free

A little over a month ago I had a parcel go missing. Inside was 98 records, a mix of old and new, rare and not so rare. The last month has been a roller coaster of emotions, but I'm now finally coming to terms with it. The parcel is officially lost and the records are gone. Fuck it.

Bizarrely, one of the records I was most excited about was the debut album by World Be Free, which came out at the start of the year. A friend had kindly picked me up a copy with a limited sleeve made for their tour in February, and I was looking forward to it. The band's logo is rad and I loved that the tour sleeve looked like a Chung King tribute. I also had the regular green and orange vinyl copies in the box too, which I was less fussed about. Well, that was until I realised that the first press was now completely sold out. Then replacing them became pretty urgent as I figured that I may still be able to find them in distros for relatively cheap.

The eagle-eyed among you may have noticed that the labels used on this LP matches the labels on the Warzone LESC 7". As do the vinyl colours. It's details like that which can only really be appreciated by true Rev nerds.

The green vinyl wasn't too easy to track down. There were 553 copies of this made, and being the limited colour, this version was only sold by Rev and a couple of distros in Europe that order from Rev in bulk. Come mid May there were no labels or distros selling this as new, so I had to go to Discogs and pay double what I paid the first time around.

The orange was slightly easier to find. With 1,354 copies made, I was able to find a distro that still had copies available for new price, which was good.

This best bit about this release, aside from the crazy characters on the back cover, is the photos on the insert. When your band is made up of old dudes who have been in bands for years, and who are probably looking a little past their best, then why would you use current photos when you can just dig out pictures from back in the day? Ha!

Back when this came out I was hugely underwhelmed. But I gave it a few tries and in time found myself enjoying it. It's quite catchy stuff... although not immediately catchy. Definitely worth persevering with if you have the patience.

There's now a second press of this available, and it sticks with the Warzone vinyl colour theme. But it's not about the ones you have. It's about the ones that got away, and it's gonna take me a fair amount of time (and money) to find a replacement for my lost tour press. Fucking parcel losing cunts.

3 comments:

xtinox said...

man, the post losing a parcel with rare vinyl is 'the' collector's nightmare. you had an insurance which, at least, covered the financial loss?

Sean said...

Would be curious to know the monetary value of that lost parcel.

Henk said...

A few months ago a shirt I ordered got lost in the mail, and I was really bummed. But losing 98 (!!!) records in the mail is a true nightmare indeed...

On-topic, I really like the WarZone and Chung King references with this World Be Free record, but why no white vinyl with that CK one?? That would've made it so much cooler and collectible.