Annica

I've been losing interest in Record Store Day releases for a few years now. I remember a time when I would study the list of upcoming RSD releases, queue up in line the day of, and easily drop over $100 on them. The last couple of years have definitely seen me relax, and with a few rare exceptions, I generally don't really care about those RSD records and I just use the day to hit a few used record stores in town. With the covid-19 pandemic delaying Record Store Day from April, and eventually seeing a phased release over a few weeks, I had basically checked out on the entire event. Only so many people were allowed in the store at a time to allow social distancing, and the whole process of showing up, putting your name on a list and then waiting in your car to be called seemed like a huge pain in the ass so I just skipped the whole thing. It is sad really. Even though I wasn't too bothered with the RSD list of releases, I did miss getting out there and digging through the bins for a day.

There were a couple of RSD releases that I had my eye on this year, but the one that I really needed to own was the latest Dio picture disc single. I've set the precedent by picking up the three previous Record Store Day singles for Dio, so I needed to continue the tradition with the fourth in the set with Annica.

Annica was a bonus song from the Magica sessions that originally only showed up on the Japanese release. It's cool to have it show up as a single, I guess, but as an instrumental, it wasn't really necessary...and with the b-side containing an 18 minute track of Ronnie James Dio reading the story of Magica basically means that I'm going to listen to this once and put on the shelf and never touch it again...but hey, it looks good.