More Than A Feeling

As a general rule these days, I will often decide that I want to listen to something new and different, but I will go looking for OLD releases to satisfy this urge. I think this is partly because I have a lot of band names in my memory banks and I have a vague idea of what I think they may sound like, which is slightly easier than new band names, which mean very little to me. Plus I think it's enjoyable to go and listen to a band 20-30 years after I used to flick past their records in record shops. There's an element of me preferring to see if my tastes have changed, or to see whether I was wrong all those years ago, because a lot of the time I used to judge bands based on either the cover art for their records, or from my own perception of what they would sound like based on their name. There are some bands from back in the day that everyone else seems to like that I never bothered with due to name, cover art, record label or some other factor.

Anyway, earlier this year I became aware of an old band from the early 90s that I had actually never heard of before. I'm not sure what brought them to my attention initially, but when I learnt that the band contained two ex members of Dag Nasty (Peter Cortner & Roger Marbury) I was interested enough to give them a chance. Initially it didn't grab me too much, but I gave it a few chances and soon found myself going back to it, and it has ended up being one of my most played records of this year. And finally a cheap copy popped up for sale in the UK, I decided to buy it.

'More Than A Feeling' was released in 1993 by Selfless Records, which was an interesting label back in the early 90s. They did colour vinyl for most releases, and sometimes did different versions. So this LP, for example, was released on either clear vinyl or red vinyl, but the red vinyl copies come with a bonus 12" EP, which is quite a cool bonus item I think.

Like a lot of releases from this period, the songs suffer slightly from not the best mastering or sound quality, but once you get over that the songs themselves are really catchy, singalong type numbers. There's even an Abba cover which I find myself singing along to when it comes on, which says something.