Too Tired To Skate Tuff

When you have a few thousand records by several hundred bands, it's easy to forget some. Recently I was discussing trading away one of my Atari 7"s, which got me to listening to the band again for the first time in a while. I had completely forgotten how good they were. They were never my favourite youth crew revival band back when they came out (I always preferred Rain On The Parade & Floorpunch back then) but I know people who firmly rank them as the number 1 of that era. I can kinda see why too. Anyway, I decided to go to Discogs to see what was going down on the Atari scene, and realised that they had a discography LP that came out back in 2010 which completely passed me by. I hate discographies these days, but I found a copy of this one on limited clear vinyl for a really good price. Plus it's a 12" whereas all other Atari records are 7"s. So basically I got sucked in.

This was released on CD on Broken Man Records, and the vinyl edition was pressed by a couple of German labels - Prügelprinz Records and Drastic Actions. There were 400 back vinyl, and 100 on clear.

The clear vinyl copies also came with a pretty cool sticker made from griptape. Even better is that it's pink, which seems to have become my favourite colour.

Well, I got sucked in even more, as I spotted a test press for sale. The price wasn't too bad, but it also had a 'make offer' button, which I used to successfully get it a bit cheaper. The tests are numbered out of 25 copies, and I got number 8.

The test also came with a sticker, but this one is just a regular sticker. It's not made from griptape this time around.

Now, please excuse me while I got find my skateboard...

What Can I Say?

Finally kicking off the 2016 test press campaign, and I think I'm starting off with a pretty good one:

Dischord's 19th release came out in 1986. It made zero impact on me at the time because I was 11 years old and not really interested in music. But I think it's fair to say that it made a pretty big impact on the rest of the world. It would take me about 7 years after its release to get around to hearing it, after which I would never tire of it. There's not many records that you can listen to over a 20+ year period and not find boring or dated, but here we are thirty years later and it still sounds good to me.

When I saw this pop up for sale I wasn't sure where it would go, or whether I would make a serious play for it. I only really made my mind up near the end, and was actually surprised that I won it, as I would have expected it to sell for more. Maybe people were sleeping, or maybe this alum isn't as iconic as to other people as I think it is. Who knows?

Despite this coming only in a plain white paper sleeve, it's customary for me to snap a pic with the proper cover as it makes for a more interesting photo:

I've already bought a few tests so far this year, but not received them yet. I've picked up way more than the one per week average that I was aiming for a couple of years ago, so I'm thinking that maybe this year I could hit the target of 52 for the year. Time will tell I guess...