Top Of The Pops 2016

2016 has been another really good year for new music. People always tell me that there are fewer and fewer new bands and records that get them excited, but in my opinion that's just a lame excuse for being lazy and just another way of saying "everything was better way back when". I get the sentiment of having the feeling one has heard that breakdown or that riff before, but maybe those aren't exactly the same and people simply have to keep an open mind. There are some old bands that had great releases in 2016 and there are some new bands that got me really excited with their records or demos. I can't wait for 2017 to come and bring me more good new music.

Record Of The Year 2016

Dangers - The Bend In The Break

7" Of The Year

Spirit Crusher - The Absolute

Demo Of The Year

Tie between Free and Lowest Priority

Discovery Of The Year

Rvivr and Erica Freas

Best Split 7"(s), Band With The Most Output and Most Loveable Band

Spirits

Honorable Mention (because it was played to me only once and I don't own the record)

Fury - Paramount

Me. You. Youth Crew 2016

Latest installment of this compilation series. Featured are - surprise, surprise - current bands that play Youth Crew hardcore. The cool thing about this series is that bands from all over the world are featured, not European or American bands only. It's also a collaboration by many different labels from all over the planet. My favourite bands so far are Spirits (of course), Tomar Control and Modern Problems. I'll have to give it a spin a couple of more times. Maybe some of the other bands will grow on me. I'm not sure which variant this is. Officially there are yellow (/95), green (/102) and dark green (/195) as far as colours go, but this copy is neither. It looks like solid green with some yellow marble going on. Could also be a 'dirty' green or a greenish yellow. So I'm chalking this one up as transition colour.

No End In Sight

Apologies in advance, because this post is going to be a little bit longer. The ever productive Spirits are keeping me on my toes collecting-wise, so despite taking sort of a break from collecting, I felt compelled to keep up with this band. And what do you know, they released more records with another gazillion variants these last few months. And I still love it. For this release they teamed up with Zero One Eight, a straight edge band from Naples, Italy.  The cover is part of a four records series that laid out tell the story of an animal rights activist freeing the ape. I don't have any of the other records of this series, but I might buy these at some point. For once I lucked out, because Goodwill Records is now located in Germany, so I could save a lot on shipping. And I lucked out even more with managing to acquire all the variants there are.


The first variant is on this dirty purple, which looks awesome in person. There are 106 copies of this colour. This is #24. The numbering is kind of interesting with this record. You'll see in a minute.




Next up is black vinyl out of 114. It's numbered '#182', which seemed a little weird at first. Here's what the label did. Rather than numbering all the different colours separately, the label numbered all the purple ones, then the black ones and then the yellow ones consecutively. Similar to what First Strike did for Chain Of Strength's What Holds Us Apart. So you get 400 copies in total for this first press. The numbers for each colour still seem weird if you ask me.



Last one of the regular first press is this copy on yellow vinyl. 180 copies, and it's numbered '#383'.

I also managed to snag a test press for this split. I love it when labels put in an effort and make the test presses special.

I love it even more when labels put in even more effort to make mispresses more special. While at it, I managed to get a hold of the two mispress variants of this release. The clear vinyl shows some very faint purple-ish streaks. Goodwill made a special sleeve for this one as well. The inspiration for this one was the Code Of Honor / Sick Pleasure split. #9/9.

The picture doesn't really show it, but this is yellow is rather a 'dirty yellow'. Again, the label came up with something special and made a Faith/Void rip-off sleeve. #11/12. The nice people at Goodwill really went out of their way with this release. Great job all around.