Beautiful Reasons

A few weeks ago someone in my instagram feed posted a picture of a record that had me intrigued. The band is called The Cry and the record is titled 'Beautiful Reasons'.

This album is a bit of an underground classic. The band is probably best known for two songs that appeared on an old H-Street skateboard video, 'Hokus Pokus'. The song 'Alone' is used as the soundtrack to the Euro tour section of the video. When I used to watch skateboard videos a lot, I would often find that I would watch them for the skateboarding at the start, and then as time went on I would want to watch them for the music. And frustratingly, back then, most of the music on the H-Street videos was by local Californian bands who didn't have any actual music out. Not that I would have known where to get it back then even if they did have records out, as there was no internet and few shops in the UK that sold US hardcore type stuff.

This album was originally released on cassette only, way back in 1990. The band was from San Diego, but sounds more like they were from Manchester in the UK. The singer sounds so much like Morrissey in one song that even the most diehard Smiths fan would be forgiven for thinking that this was a rare, unreleased Smiths track.

It seems that the reason that this album has been pressed to wax nearly 30 years after its initial release is kinda cool. Back in 2016, another skate video used the song 'Alone' in homage to the old H-Street video. At the time, the band had their songs up on something called 'Spotify' and noticed that their streaming numbers increased, which helped them realise that there were still people interested in their band, resulting in them setting up an instagram account, and then the interest culminated in this album being put out on vinyl all these years later. The first pressing is 500 copies on blue vinyl, and it's apparently almost sold out.