Looking back a year, I had put Drain's 'California Cursed' LP in my top 10 records of 2020. Interestingly, only a year on and I have barely listened to any of the records in that list other than the Drain record. It wasn't my stand out favourite of the year at the time, but I go back to it regularly. It has a couple of key ingredients that ensure it pulls me back in. Firstly, it's hard as hell and secondly it's pretty short. These days I generally listen to music whilst doing stuff, being either working out in the gym or household tasks, but I hate turning something off before it has played all the way through. So if I'm doing a relatively short chore then I want a relatively short record. And if it's a boring task then i need a hard record to keep me awake and to push me to complete it. So this Drain LP ticks the boxes, whether I'm doing benchpress, raking up leaves or cleaning the shower. Haha.
Anyway, it seems I am not the only person who enjoys this record. The band got signed to Epitaph last year, so I am sure are heading for big things in the future. But I had missed out on a couple of versions of their LP due to just being slow, mainly due to not wanting to spend money. I really need to learn my lesson here. But I was keen to pick up the versions of this record that I had missed before the only remaining option was to pay $100 to the kind-hearted people on discogs.
First up is the clear green vinyl version. This was part of the first press, and was the color exclusively for independent record stores.
The second one was a third press from last year. I'm not sure how many were made, but it sold out very quickly. There were none at all at RevHQ when I visited in December. I managed to find this one at a distro in Singapore. It was their last copy and was not a bad price. Including postage, it worked out cheaper than it would have been to buy one from Rev directly. Crazy.
Anna saw this one and said that it looked like 'birthday cake', which made me chuckle and I think is surprisingly accurate (and hence the title of the post.
2 comments:
Cool story for the distro from Singapore! I think I know which one.
I didn't like this record based on the 15 seconds of attention that I gave one of their songs a couple years ago. With this post, and fact that the singer had a guest spot on the Scowl record, I might have to give it another shot.
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