By my entirely subjective standards, there are few albums as “essential” as Belly’s Star. The fancy-pants 180-gram double-LP reissue of the band’s 1993 debut was one of my first “new” vinyl acquisitions, which was covered (among other tangential ramblings) in a previous post. It has also been spun a grand total of four or five […]

I really wanted to write a detailed analysis about how the Cool World soundtrack manifested from a space-time fold which curved above and below the temporal brane of the Grunge Era, past and future coexisting as pits on photonically agitated polycarbonate… …but I can’t stop wincing about the separate listings for the Thompson Twins and […]

“There is always a disco version.” That qualified truism became a recurring in-joke in our house last autumn, as my excavation of childhood nostalgia hit a rich vein of film and TV soundtrack singles from the latter half of the 1970s. The film-score-to-dance-floor phenomenon didn’t start with Meco’s “Star Wars Theme/Cantina Band,” but the stratospheric […]

Ever since YouTube became a (increasingly problematic) thing, there have been a pair of clips for which I’ve been waiting to get the streaming video treatment. One is of Greg Evigan’s musical performance on Pink Lady and Jeff, where the Man Otherwise Known as BJ attempts to give more than his talent can actually deliver. […]

My love of Josie and the Pussycats dates back to mid-Seventies, when syndicated reruns of the animated power trio triggered early stirrings of Young Andrew’s sexuality. My ignorance about the nature of those feelings, combined with prevailing notions among my peers of it being “a girls’ show,” shamed me into hiding that love through my […]

Although our living room has been reconfigured to accommodate my return to record collecting, space remains a pressing issue. It’s why only about a fifth of my older library got incorporated into the present one, and why I’ve turned to compilations and 7-inch singles for the sake of shelf-maximizing efficiency. The crunch has driven the […]

Most of the singles in my collection are either non-album tracks or one-off favorites where it was easier (and cheaper) to opt for the seven-inch over a full LP. There’s no point in springing for, say, The Best of The American Breed when I know deep down that my turntable’s stylus will only traverse the […]

This site emerged from a primordial stew of influences, one of the most prominent being the wave of “archival” mp3 blogs which sprung up in the middle Aughts. Sites with names like Little Hits or Phoenix Hairpins or Last Days of Man on Earth would post digital rips of out-of-print vinyl obscurities alongside enough written […]

The mobile Discogs app has a feature where you can shake your device and it will throw up a random entry from your collection. I’m going to let it pick the subject of this installment, since I ‘m having trouble deciding upon one. Here goes, and…. Dammit, I’ve already done that one. The second try […]

If nothing else, the process of putting together a collection of personally significant records has been an interesting exercise in mental inventory taking. Don’t let my writings fool you — for every memory recounted here in excruciating detail, countless others have utterly evaporated or only exist as cryptic scribbles in the margins of my psyche. […]