I Hope You're Unhappy

I'm a big fan of the original Record Store Day in April, and while I'll acknowledge it's corporate greed wasteful ugliness, I'll still embrace it for it's celebration of vinyl and record shopping. The Black Friday RSD on the Friday after Thanksgiving, on the other hand...yeah, fuck that. Fool me once a year, but I ain't buying into the scam twice.

So three days after Black Friday, I wandered into my local store for some record shopping. The purpose of my trip was to pick up the new Clutch record, but it seems as though the curse of RSD delayed it's production, and the release date had been pushed out...again. Flipping through the garbage of Black Friday leftovers, I found two albums that I didn't own on vinyl, and figured that this was as good a time as any to right that wrong.

I've always had a soft spot for Farside, but the big hole on my record shelf has been The Monroe Doctrine. This is my favorite Farside release, so when REV announced they were repressing it on colored vinyl for Black Friday RSD, I was looking forward to finally adding a copy to my record collection.

1,000 pressed on red vinyl.

Man, some of these songs hit home on some personal experiences...specifically Seven-Day Constant, as I remember driving around town with my daughter, who was terrible at going to bed, and would sometimes just cry inconsolable for hours. I'd pop her into her carseat, and drive until she'd calmed down and had fallen asleep. I specifically remember driving around at midnight, just waiting for her to fall asleep, and Seven-Day Constant playing on the stereo with the opening lines of "Sleep is overrated". Yeah, kids are awesome like that.

When Death By Stereo released their second album, Day Of The Death, back in 2001, I was all over it. They were probably one of my favorite bands at the time, and I listened to that album a lot. However, over the course of about 15 years (and with the help of a couple of sub par follow up albums), I've largely left Death By Stereo to be buried by time and dust. Over the past 10 years, I've probably only listened to this a handful of times, and seeing it in the vinyl bin I figured that maybe it was time to finally pick it up and give it another spin.

This was a nice reminder of how great they were. One of my fondest memories of going to shows in the early 2000's was seeing Death By Stereo open up for Good Riddance in Boston. The crowd was kind of lame, and the singer Efrem climbed down off the stage, jumped the barricade, and spent the entire set on the floor getting in kid's faces with the microphone. The crowd loved the interaction, and were soon climbing over each other to sing along into the mic.

Strictly limited to a billion on gold colored vinyl.