The Ascendant - The Spiritual Death EP

Today I got something nice in the mail:-)

This is the first release from the band The Ascendant. The 7" EP is called "The Spiritual Death EP" and contains two brilliant songs.

This new band consists of members from bands such as Excessum, Marduk and Ad Hominem. I remember hearing some of the first takes of the first song "The Becoming" back in 2007 or 2008 and it was a really interesting piece of music. For me it felt like a really fresh breathe of air in a tired black metal world. It still feels as fresh at the time of its release. Let's hope they can find the inspiration and time to record some more material!

You can hear the EP here on Spotify.

Record Store Day releases.

As  I said in my previous post, I am gonna post about some of the releases I got for myself on RSD.

As mentioned there were a lot of records released for this day and the two biggest releases for me were these two:

These are two split singles by Mastodon. The pink one is with The Flaming Lips, where both bands perform their own versions of the same Flaming Lips song "A Spoonfull Weighs A Ton". The other one is a split with Feist. On this one Feist performs a Mastodon song in her own version and Mastodon performs one of hers. Since the style of music is so different between these two it's very fun and interesting to hear the different takes on these songs. Both songs taken from two of the best albums last year.

Hidden gems from my dad's old collection.

I owe my huge music interest more or less all to my dad. As a kid I remember looking through his vinyl collection looking for cool records to listen to. So I picked out The Beatles, David Bowie, The Clash, Eagles vinyl etc. etc. from his collection and I've been listening to it for a long time.

Recently I've been going through his collection once again picking out vinyl that I want in my collection and I think I left with about 200 vinyls when I did that. Most recently I took all of his 7" singles as well. There are about 3-400 of them from his collection and I can add about 200 probably that I've bought through the years. I add all of these into two different databases, one is a simple excel form that I simply put in the information of the record: artist, title, record company, year, format, genre. The other one I use is Discogs.

Today I was adding the last batch of singles that I've gotten from my dad, and to my surprise there was one single that is worth quite a lot of money

Mandarines - EP

Mandarines is a Swedish band from the late 70's that I hadn't really heard of until today I listened to this EP and it's actually quite good. Some nice powerpop/punk. The guitarist, Janne Andersson, later came to play with Japop, Ulf Lundell and Gyllene Tider to name a few. 

I searched them on Discogs to add this release to my collection and when I get to the release page I see that there is one copy of this for sale. The price is an unbelievable £115.99! Sometimes the sellers on Discogs can put insane prices on quite random releases so I went to popsike to see what it had sold for on ebay and it's selling for somewhere between 80-150 US dollars! A recent sell on ebay (from february this year) shows an ending price of $142. Insane, to say the least!

Opeth record store day release.

The 16th of April marked the fourth year of the "Record Store Day", celebrating independent record stores such as The Garden for example.

On this day there are several releases that are supposed to be available only on this day. I've got my self two of these releases. The first one I've already written about (the Foo Fighters "Medium Rare" vinyl). The second one I got I had to order of of Discogs as I wasn't able to get it in the store.

The release is the second 7" vinyl release from Opeth. The song featured is "The Throat Of Winter" which was featured in the video game God Of War and on the soundtrack of said game. It has only been available as an mp3 download earlier so it's about time it saw a "real" release.

The song is quite different from anything that Opeth has ever done before and the singer and main songwriter Mikael Åkerfeldt said that this is what he was aiming for so I guess he succeeded.

7" singles.

I found this relatively old picture today.

 

It's from back when we moved to the new appartment where we now live and I was sorting all the vinyl singles in alphabetical order. 

To be honest most of them belong to my dad and I'm "borrowing" them since he doesn't play them. This christmas though, I gave him a pre-amp to his reciever so now he can play his old vinyls again... Bad move on my part? He hasn't claimed them yet:)