Somehow I totally missed the first 7 inch from The Killing Flame when it was released back in 1999. I'm not sure how that happened. I think that Livewire just escaped my radar at the time. I did hear the Another Breath album in 2000, but honestly, it didn't really do much for me back then, so I never bothered to check out anything else that the band did.
In recent years, I've come to appreciate that Another Breath album a bit more. Good solid melodic hardcore. I dig it. When I was recently picking up a record from a Discogs seller, the only other thing of interest was that first 7 inch from The Killing Flame. I quickly downloaded a copy to see if it was worth chasing, and five minutes later it was in my cart and I was checking out. This record is great and it is quickly becoming one of my favorite older finds this year.
Hardcore was weird back when The Dream Dies was released. The 7 inch contains four songs, but the CD has six. I don't understand why hardcore bands were doing this. How did this make sense to anyone? I guess that even hardcore was putting nails in the coffin of vinyl at the time. I mean, I know that I was out of touch and didn't think anything about this at the time, but were hardcore purists and record collectors up in arms over this kind of negative attitude towards vinyl?
3 comments:
From the point of view of someone who was buying vinyl constantly through the 90s and early 00s, I was never annoyed at CDs having extra songs. At certain points when it felt that vinyl was on its last legs, I definitely just felt grateful that some things were still coming out on vinyl, and that heavily influenced my purchasing decisions. A lot of CD only releases I just ignored, some of which I still haven't heard to this day.
From a label's point of view I'd say that there were probably a couple of things going on.
Firstly, I think that CDs were so popular that a lot of labels could have easily given up on vinyl completely for financial reasons. Especially as there would have been outrage if 7" prices would have gone up beyond like $3 or whatever. But I assume that some labels would have used the money from CDs to subsidise a vinyl pressing. But if a band recorded 5 or 6 songs, then they couldn't physically fit them all on a 7", so had to trim.
Secondly, I would say that the extra songs thing was also an attempt to justify the higher prices of CDs. For whatever reason, a lot of people (fools) back then were choosing to buy CDs, and I think labels probably felt that they needed to provide something extra for the money. This was probably still at a time when hardcore was (seemingly) more political maintained a DIY ethic, and any attempt to make money was seen in a negative light.
All things considered I think that the labels that kept pressing vinyl were doing so as a labour of love, and doing whatever they could to keep the format going. But I can see how it could potentially be viewed the other way around.
PS I think the word count on my comment may be longer than the actual post, haha!
Fantastic comment! Thanks for the insight!
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