Under The Lost Smile

A few months ago I was doing my usual round of eBay searches when I came across a great little find. I came across a test press of an album called 'Under The Lost Smile' by a band called Empathy. I've had the record in my collection since it came out way back in 1995 and I'm pretty sure that I had never seen a test press before. I'm not sure how much I would have paid for it if it had been an auction, but the one thing I knew is that I was more than happy to throw down the $15 required to 'buy it now'. Easy.

The record is as most test presses were in the 90s. A black record with plain labels in a white paper sleeve. No frills.

I'm not sure whether anyone reading this will either know or remember this band, but I always enjoyed this record. The band were from Detroit although for some reason in my head I always thought that they were from Louisville. I suppose because they had a split 7" with a band called Empathy (who actually were from Louisville) and they seemed similar to Endpoint in a ball park kinda way, with their songs straddling 'emo' and 'hardcore'. Oh yeah, and also there was a dude in this band called Jay Palumbo who later went on to play in two Louisville bands (By The Grace Of God and Elliott). So kind of easy to see how I got mixed up.

The interesting thing about this one is that I then discovered that there ust be two different test presses that exist. Upon taking my other copies of this record out for a group photo, I did what I often do with test presses and I compared the matrix of each. At this point I realised that the two other copies I have are actually different to each other.

As you can see, I have two other copies of this record. The black vinyl copy comes in a normal card sleeve with cover art whilst the other ia a green vinyl promo tour version. You can actually see the difference between the records in this photo if you check the amount of dead wax in the middle of each black record. The test press has less dead wax, and it turns out is the same as the green vinyl version (even though this is not visible in the photo). So all I can conclude from this is that this test press is of the version that was then pressed on green vinyl. The normal black version is different, so was pressed from a different stamper, which means that there must have been another test press. This seems pretty obvious, although the reasons for this are completely unknown.

Anyway, there you go. Some great information that absolutely nobody needs. Glad to be of service.