So this weekend is Record Store Day, which isn't like Steak and Blowjob or National Cleavage Day, because it actually happens. It's a day when the last remaining buyers of music in its physical form get together to try and raise their sinking ship from the icy waters of apathy with a day of limited releases and in-store performances. It's no secret to anyone who's tried to buy a Led Zeppelin quintuple box-set recently that record shops (we're in Britain, we don't call it a "store", this isn't Empire Records) aren't what they were. They're a bit like sex shops now, really; backstreet dives with sticky carpets and little or no stock. Whilst the death of independent music retailers is no doubt A Bad Thing, I'm not gonna get all Mojo on you and recount some story about digging through "dusty crates" and finding an original copy of Trout Mask Replica for only a tuppence. Because quite frankly, that didn't happen.
The vast majority of my purchases at record shops between the ages of 0-23 turned out to be entirely regrettable (the first single I ever bought was a comedy lounge pop version of "Wonderwall"), but in my early teens it really hit overdrive due to a perfect storm of babysitting jobs, a Kerrang! subscription, my own bad taste and a lack of Spotify. (Back then, before the internet, we had to judge acts by their trousers.) Here's my tribute to some of the terrible, terrible albums I bought on spec – each one a reminder that, in these difficult times, all record shops should employ staff who are as helpful and as wise as possible (like this guy).
Korn - Maximum Korn (£8.95+pp from Inandout)Boy, these albums really sorted the rookies from the old pros. They were a series of records designed to cash in on the success of (mostly) nu-metal bands by hastily knocking up a "CD-audio biog" and filing it alongside the real shit. The album contained absolutely no music by Korn, just a heavily medicated young woman rattling of music journalism cliches like "a forward-thinking beast that disregarded the mistakes of its poodle-permed 1980s predecessors" and a series of muffled audio interviews with the band, which sound like they'd been recorded either surreptitiously in the coat pocket of a sneaky hack or at the bottom of a missile silo. One online reviewer sums up the injustice better than I ever could, stating that the album "offers a hot poster of Jonathan Davis, but no insight on the band". Alan Carr: Chatty Man, this is not.
28 Days - Upstyledown ($11.75+pp from CD Universe)What was it about bands in that era eschewing traditional punctuation? Fucking up the system, one missed space bar at a time. Although, I'm not sure 28 Days really knew what the hell they were doing. They were an also-ran Australian "rap-punk" group who had a blink-and-you'll-miss-it spell on the MTV2 playlist. I think at the time they seemed pretty street to me, the kind of guys who might spend their days riding around some sleepy town in New South Wales, tormenting the normos from their BMX stunt-pegs. Looking back on it, they look more like bungee jump instructors (which they probably are now). The album itself was a terrible mish-mash of Aussie Rules-style macho posturing, chuggy guitars and youth club standard turntablism. If Toadfish from Neighbours had a band, they would sound like 28 Days.
Various Artists - Short Music For Short People ($8+pp from Fat Wreck)Short Songs For Short People was a compliation album that pioneered a format I don't think has ever been replicated with any genre since. It was a record that really took the "quantity not quality" mantra to heart, and was comprised of 101 songs each under 30 seconds long. Of course, the only genre that posseses the requisite levels of humility and grace to pull this off is pop-punk. The artists ranged from crossover superstars like Blink-182, to the kind of bands that even their members don't remember being in (Aerobitch, anyone?).
Rage Against The Machine - Renegades (£6.99+pp from EMP)Eventually, even the most creative of powers can hit a writer's block. Most artists go off and live in a wood cabin for a while, or take up transcendental raiki or some shit. But Rage Against The Machine weren't just about making music, they were about bringing the whole of Clinto-facist Bourgeois middle Amerikkka to its fat fucking knees. So, they made a covers album. The songs range from the predictable ("Maggie's Farm") to the even more predictable ("Kick Out The Jams"). It was a crushing disappointment, the track choices reading more like a suburban dad's jam band setlist than a G4 summit riot.
Popchop - Cut The F*ck Up: The Remix Project (£2.60 from Norman)Yep, before their omnipresence on music blog aggregator sites, people actually paid for to listen to mash-ups. Well, I did anyway. I think I heard this playing in HMV one day as I was walking around looking for something else, and for some reason it sounded like what I'd been waiting for all my life. Novelty rap songs with 80s pop backing tracks. I think this amused me from about the time I got home until The Simpsons came on. Luckily it only cost me about three quid, which, given the number of samples they'd shoehorned in, was probably about as much as Popchop made from it.
Mark B and Blade - The Unknown (£0.01+pp from Amazon)UK hip-hop has always been a patchy genre, and when I say patchy, I mean one big patch of shit (apart from Council Estate Of Mind by Skinnyman, that shit cray). But these were the days when UK rappers still sounded a bit American, so you could easily be fooled by the transatlantic inflections. Buying this album was literally a schoolboy mistake; I'd bought it off the back of a remix (by Feeder's Grant Nicholas, the song in question that still has the dubious distinction of being the theme tune to mid-morning rape banter outlet Soccer AM). It kinda rocked, but sadly the rest of the album's guitar work was mostly acoustic, and it again adds to the unfortunate motif of turntablism within the list. Lyrically, it sticks firmly to the school of rhyming lots of words that end in "ion" (as in "yun"), or "dropping science" (to those in the know).
Milburn - Well, Well, Well (£5.77+pp from Tesco)Yes, I know this came out in 2006, but sadly my blind forays into record shops continued well after the world of the internet allowed me to try before I bought. Personally I blame the fact that I was still living in a dial-up world when this album came out, in fact I was suffering from a connection quality which made the Dead 60s album sound like a work of freeform experimental jazz-fusion. Milburn came along at the same time as the Arctic Monkeys, and I think somebody must have told me they were the superior band. It's hard not to feel sorry for them now, they were the other guy in Bill & Ted's to the Arctic's Keanu Reeves. If anybody's interested, Joey Barton recently started a "BringBackMilburn" hashtag. But I'm not even sure Milburn want themselves brought back.Follow Clive on Twitter: @thugclive
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