When I started assembling my list of “essential” albums to seek out on vinyl, Lush’s Gala was one on the first entries I added to it. The 1990 debut (actually a compilation of singles and the Scar “mini-LP”) by the shoegaze scenesters possesses all the qualities I look for in a record — a consistently […]

Oh, sure, you claim to be a fan of Danfourg, but can you name any other songs he did besides “Mothreer?” I bet you didn’t even realize he was the frontman for horrorpunk legends The Misfivets, who recorded such classics as “Astro Zerombies” and “Last Careights.” They played their first shows at C8G8′s in NYC, […]

In the late summer of 2001, I was sitting with Maura and my dad at my brother’s wedding reception on Salisbury Beach when Boston’s “More Than a Feeling” started blasting from the sound system. “I used to make fun of this kind of music,” I told my old man. “Now it makes me nostalgic.” “It’s […]

When I started getting back in the habit of buying records again, I shot my pal-slash-occasional-collaborator Daniel Butler a short list of albums to keep an eye out for at the place where he works. None of my requests were in stock at the time, though he did send me a copy of George Harrison’s […]

Due to some weird quirk of my former high school’s scheduling software, the third period AP English class was standing room only while the sixth period one featured a grand total of five students. I lucked into the latter section, which was less of a class than an conversational bullshit session for college credit. The […]

This week’s featured record buy should come as no surprise to anyone who has been following this site for a while. I first got into Lene Lovich through Rhino’s Just Can’t Enough series of new wave compilations, which provided a handy backwards-gazing refuge during the commercial peak of the Nineties alterna-splosion. “New Toy” (written for […]

There are some record purchases which require a bit of context to explain. Can’t Stand The Rezillos is not one of them. I can outline the process that led to the purchase of this 1978 punk-pop classic with absolute certainty, though I may not recall the actual moment: 1. I was thinking of Most Favored […]

JCI’s series of (ugh) “Baby Boomer Classics” compilations picked up where K-Tel left off when it came to shaping Young Andrew’s musical tastes. They were an attempt to cash in on the Reagan Era outbreak of Boomer nostalgia while elevating the quality bar for midlist collections. (All original master recordings! Chrome cassettes!) Each installment was […]

The first compact disc I ever saw in the wild was a copy of Al Stewart’s Year of the Cat that someone gifted to my mother in the mid-Eighties. Our family didn’t own a CD player, so she ended up handing it off to a co-worker who did own one in exchange for his vinyl […]

I got into the Throwing Muses because I was sweet on a girl in high school who was a fan of the band. Though it turned out her fandom began and ended with a copy of Hunkpapa she picked up on the recommendation of some music rag, my interest in the band managed to outlive […]