Battered Battery

Only The Diehard Remain by Battery is an LP that is hard to come by, at least if you want to go for the real deal and not that ugly as hell picture disc Lost And Found Records put out. After scouring eBay, message boards and Discogs for months I finally came across a copy and snagged it. When I got the record, I was a little disappointed because the sleeve is banged up a lot. The seller put the description in the wrong line of the excel sheet. It can happen I guess. The record plays fine though and that's the most important part. It will do for listening purposed but if I can upgrade the sleeve, I'll jump right on it.

Battery / Ignite

I'd long wanted to close the considerable gaps in my Battery collection, if you can even call it a collection. After seeing them live two months ago I vowed to myself to make that actually happen. So, here we go. Two really good songs by Battery plus two pretty good songs by Ignite. There are way too many variants out there, so one will do just fine for me.

Collector's Choice 2017

So many good records made it into my collection this year again. I'm more than happy with what I managed to pick up in 2017. I didn't make a whole lot of progress with my want list, but I was able to cross off some items at least. Plus I picked up a few records that weren't on that list and some that I didn't even know of one year ago. That's what makes collecting fun though. The other element that makes collecting really fun is the people you get in touch with. Quite a few people have helped me in my efforts by pointing me to records, selling, trading or straight up giving me records for free. All of which I'm very grateful for. My favorite pick up is the test press for Bane's It All Comes Down To This LP, because it embodies everything I like about collecting: great music, incredibly rare, release by one of my favorite bands, and I was tipped of by fellow collector.

Here's to 2018, which will hopefully add more new good music and some old records to my collection and get me in touch with more people. Let's keep collecting fun.

XXX

Ralf

Battery

Battery played a bunch of shows in Europe recently and for the last of theses shows at Conne Island in Leipzig there was a special press. A buddy had told me a few weeks before the show that something was in the works, so I was even more looking forward to the show. The whole show had everything a great show needs: fun road trip, great food, meeting old and new friends, record trading, record buying and of course a band that played an awesome set and had a message. Man, that was a great evening. To top everything off, there was the aforementioned limited version of Battery's debut 7". The label putting out this repress has done a really good job with these. You also get a flyer explaining the relationship between band and venue. Looks like this might be a new collecting thing: venue/Conne Island presses... 200 copies on white vinyl, 100 copies on gold vinyl for friends and crew.

For The Rejected By The Rejected

Picking up a copy of this LP was long overdue. With the Battery shows in Europe coming closer, I finally picked up a copy, and what can I say, the band and Rev have done a great job. Even if you already have everything by this band on vinyl or CD, this releases is worth picking up alone for the booklet. Incredibly well done.

RSD 2014

Everybody and their grandmother has already posted about their Record Store Day scores. Or so it seems. Well, with only two and a half weeks of delay, I'm finally chiming in here.
But first of all, let's talk about Record Store Day here for a minute. Introducing such a day was a really good idea and it still is a cause that is worthy of support if you can help out your local record store and bring in some extra cash. It's also cool if long out of print records are re-issued and you can save some money by buying reasonably priced re-issues rather than paying an arm and a leg for originals. Originals are way cooler of course, but sometimes I'm not interested in having an early edition, special colour or things like that and I just want to have the records for the music. There are also some records that are just waaaaay too expensive, so if RSD provides an opportunity to pick up some cheap re-issues, I'm all for that. That's the upside of RSD. On the downside, RSD could also be called Record Flipping Day nowadays since a myriad of people crawl out of the woodwork, who probably buy records once a year and that is - you might have guessed correctly - on RSD, just so they can run home and put them on eBay to flip them. If you're not interested in the records and buy them just so you can make money off of them, fuck off. End of rant.

One of the more bizarre developments surrounding RSD is that you can actually pre-order certain records from labels directly. Defies the whole purpose of RSD somehow, but that's the way it is in 2014. I shouldn't really complain about that thought, because without being able to pre-order, I probably would have never got my hands on these two records. I'm talking about the re-issues of the two The Fix 7"s released by Touch and Go. Well, actually only 300 were up for pre-order, the other 700 were sold on RSD in stores. I don't want to twist the truth here just for a dramatic effect. These records are classics, and rightly so, and I really dig them, but there's no way I'd have ever spent the kind of money that these two records usually go for. So I'm really happy that Touch and Go decided to re-issue them and I'm even happier that they didn't botch these re-issues like they did with the Negative Approach 7". If you've ever seen the new cover, you know what I'm talking about. What I don't like about this re-issue at all is the fact that they come with autographs. Really? Like, really? Autographs on hardcore 7"s? Why? Who cares about shit like that?

I didn't actually go out on RSD to hunt for records. Partly because I didn't really care about most of the records that were released, except for the two The Fix 7"s, which I had already pre-ordered. Partly because there are no record stores I could have gone to where I live.
However, I went to Prague the day after RSD and spent a couple of days there. On our last day, we had some time to kill and I checked if there were any good record stores close by. So we went to Rekomando, a record store with a rather large hardcore and punk section. They still had copies of the Battery and Up Front LPs, among others, and I finally caved in and bought both of them. I had wanted the Battery LP for a long time, and would have been pleased with a black copy, too, but since this orange version was sitting right in front of me, I decided to pick it up. I kind of regret it now since Rev has released a maroon version in the meantime, which looks so much better than the orange vinyl. Maybe I'll 'upgrade' it soon.