Fever Hunting

Last week I went to see Modern Life Is War. Now, I'm always a little skeptical when it comes to reunion shows. My emotions usually oscillate between sheer excitement and said skepticism. The show took place in a rather big venue, I guess about 800 fit into the room. Now, that is just a little bit too big for my taste. On the other hand, the show was sold out from the looks of it, so anything smaller would have robbed a lot of people from seeing a band they apparently really wanted to see. Worst case scenario: the show itself would be crappy, but I still get to hang out a lot of people I hadn't seen in a long time while eating great vegan food. Pretty good worst case scenario if you ask me. However, all my skepticism was blown away with the first chord. MLIW fucking killed it that night, and from what I heard all the other nights on that tour as well. Such a great live energy coming from that band. The audience went absolutely nuts from start to finish. Haven't seen that many (old) bodies in the air in a long time. Hands down one of the best shows I've ever been to.
While checking out the merch, I noticed that MLIW were selling records too. Taking a closer look, I saw that they had some first press copies of their last LP on olive vinyl with them. There are 3,500 (!) copies on olive green, but it was still a little bit surprising to see that variant since there is already a third pressing out there. Now, a few weeks ago I wouldn't really have thought about picking up this copy. I did have a pretty decent MLIW collection a few years ago. Then the price for the final show box skyrocketed up to the point where it reached four figure numbers. That kind of took the possibility away to have complete collection because I wasn't and am still not willing to pay that kind of money for the box. So I sold off or traded away a lot of records. I just kept the nicest looking copy of each release plus the Posi Numbers cover of Witness, since I really like that cover. With the show coming closer and closer, I listened to MLIW almost daily for a few weeks and my love for that band was rekindled and I thought collecting them again would be kind of fun. I also don't necessarily aim for complete collections anymore. Plus, the prices of the box have dropped considerably again…
On a sidenote: My wife got pretty excited about the idea of starting a MLIW collection, too, so I was pretty much sold on that idea. If you throw our MLIW records together, we actually have a pretty good starting point. Little advice for my fellow record collectors here: if your wife/girlfriend likes a band and doesn't think record collecting is a crazy pastime, don't tell her that you used to have a pretty decent collection of said band. Who would have thought our first quarrel as a married couple would be about an issue like that, haha...