Vinyl Vacation: L.A.M.F. Revisited - The Heartbreakers

Doesn't the world of pop music ever seem hopelessly expansive to anyone else? And by "hopelessly", I of course mean "thrillingly"... unless it's the first one.

The thing about being an intellectually inquisitive (at times veering dangerously towards acquisitive) person, especially in the 21st century is that there will always be infinitely more stuff to know than anyone, even one guided by supposedly impeccably high standards of taste could possibly hope to take in. So even as someone who's spent far more time than most reasonably socialized people diving into snobby depths of various strands of pop, punk, hip-hop, R&B, folk, indie and whatever else meets my very high and somewhat arbitrary standards of worthy music, I still have more glaring gaps in my knowledge than I like having to admit.

Just as declaring oneself a history major makes one keenly self-aware of the vast amount of recorded humanity of which you have only the very faintest hints of knowledge, writing semi-seriously about music will drive the self-aggrandizing intellectual into spasms of guilt over their own shortcomings.

Vinyl Vacation: "Sooth Me" - The Sims Twins

Record Store Day is fast approaching and though the event has started to take more than a little flack of late, as a relative vinyl neophyte, I thought it might provide me with a handy excuse to talk about some of my own recent acquisitions and, wax rhapsodic about, well, wax.

I'm the kind of guy who approaches life like a kid in a candy store, which has its ups and downs. Although I love trying to sample everything life has to offer (because, let's face it, life kicks fucking ass), actually attempting to sample EVERYTHING life has to offer is also kind of insane. Add to that my decision to try to write about many of those things I just can't get enough of and I often find myself perilously falling into "The Busy Trap" wherein the pursuit of things I love becomes a stress creating end unto itself.

This is especially dangerous for a music writer as there's not only always infinity great new music coming out but there's also way more stuff that you should have already listened to popping up on your radar every day. Many's the night where a simple thought like "you know, I can't believe I only have three Superchunk albums" ends with me on the other side of an internet wormhole with six more hours of music on my iPod that I'll never have time to listen to.

It's times like this that I've been walking over to my stereo and throwing on "Soothe Me". Everything about acts as salve to the over-connected soul.

Vinyl Vacation: These Are A Few Of My Favorite Singles

Once again I must apologize to On Warmer Music readers for my de facto summer vacation  (although it really wasn't so much a vacation as a "work somewhere else time" which has less of a ring to it and paid just as nothing as this blog). As a way of easing myself back into the ol' bloggin' mode, I thought that I'd share with you a smattering of what's been gracing my turntable these past few months as I've been pleased (and my wallet's been dismayed) to dive further and further down the fetish-property hole that is vinyl music. The more I listen the more I sound like one of those people you hate who tell you how great it is to be able to own a physical artifact and how much better the records sound and blah, blah, blah. So I'll just say that while all that is true, every song here sounds pretty baller, even if you're cuing it up on the most electronically-created iPod playlist know to man. Enjoy!

Vinyl Vacation: "Talking About My Baby" - The Impressions

Yes, this is exactly what it looks like.


Now's right about the time when you mutter to yourself, "as if the whole 'indie music blog' thing weren't bad enough, now he's upping his pretentiousness game with some paen to vinyl?"


And to you, fair reader, I can only answer honestly, "Yes, yes! A thousand times, yes!" Well, at least those three times.


Maybe it's my freakishly completist nature run amok but I have recently come close to burning out on music. The seemingly upstanding desire to stay informed can, when combined with the seemingly beneficial creation of a vehicle for delivering near-infinite music day or night, become a cruel curse.


I have to just admit it - there's always going to be more good music out there than I can listen to. By an increasingly widening margin. This fact may be a mixed bag in terms of how we consume music but it seems immutable, at least until we're bombarded by Chinese EMPs or something. My reasons for not turning to vinyl (the cost, the pretentiousness, the bulkiness, the COST) were utlimately outweighed by the fact that I knew it would help me slow down and narrow my musical focus. Let's just say that after many years of resistance, I was finally forced to concede a point to my high school economics teacher, the limited nature of physical product has not only increased its value to me, but been a sanity-inducing limit I so desperately need.


Therefore, after a long struggle I finally gave in, bought a garage sale stereo, asked for a turntable for Christmas and myself the hip new bourgeois fetishist collectible. The Vinyl Vacation feature here at On Warmer Music will be my outlet for sharing the fruits of my stroll down the garden path of outdated musical technology, tempting you with the, if not forbidden, then at least forbidding fruits of 45's and 33 1/3's.