RECORD STORE DAY RELEASES
Fan-fleecing, vendor-supporting industry bean feast celebrates its seventeenth year.
Whether you physically fetch up to your local independent vinyl emporium on April 20 or scout about for the leftovers (and there will be leftovers, some of these beauties are being pressed in runs upward of 18,000 copies) online or in person, there really is an awful lot to choose from in this year’s moveable circa-Easter Black-Friday-esque feast.
Picture-disc afficionados can freshen their galleries with Fleetwood Mac’s
Rumours (Rhino, 8/10), X-Ray Spex’s odd-socked punk-era essential Germ Free Adolescents (Secret, 8/10) or T.Rex’s Zinc Alloy &The Hidden Riders Of Tomorrow
(Demon, 6/10).
Coloured-vinyl fetishists can delight in a broad array of contrasting hues from The Doors’ triple Live At Konserthuset, Stockholm September 20, 1968 (Rhino,
7/10) in transluscent blue, At The DriveIn’s feral ’98 live-in-studio In/Casino/Out
(Craft, 8/10) in purple ’n’ smoke green, a double clear Faces BBC Session Recordings (Rhino, 8/10) capturing turnof-the-70s Top Gear and Dave Lee Travis sessions, and a (safe as) milky-clear double deluxe version of Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band’s The Spotlight Kid complete with alternatives and out-takes (Rhino, 8/10), to the Ramones’ unsurprising 1975 Sire Demos
(Rhino, 7/10) on clear and splatter-black and The Sisters Of Mercy’s first two seminal Stooges-go-goth EPs Body And Soul and Walk Away (Rhino, 7/10) packaged together on blue galaxy vinyl.
The Hives, meanwhile, have doubled down on the coloured-vinyl front with
LexHives + Live From Terminal 5 on double pink and Black And White on, you guessed it, black and white with poster (both Interscope, both 8/10), while Mudhoney’s Suck You Dry box set spreads their corporate Reprise years across five LPs, all in different colours, for a fuck-me-that’s-sick 160 quid (Rhino
6/10). And for those with more modest resources there’s always the pink vinyl seven-inch of Queen’s Hot Space-era B-side Cool Cat (EMI, 6/10).Black vinyl still tickling your fancy? David Bowie’s
Waiting In The Sky (Parlophone, 9/10) restores Ziggy Stardust to its provisional track-listing with four alternative tracks fans already own to largely pointless effect, and there’s a veritable Gene
Clark bonanza with The Lost Studio Sessions 1964-’82 (Liberation Hall,
7/10) and a double, demo-packed, golden-anniversary selection of No Other Sessions (4AD, 8/10). Ian Fortnam