I’ve read a lot of the “best of 2012” lists and I can’t believe how many of them didn’t include Bob Mould’s Silver Age. I don’t really like ranking albums so I’ll just say this is my favorite album of the year. The day I got my vinyl copy I probably played both sides two or three times before I took a break.
To me, Silver Age picks up right where Copper Blue left off. I can also hear some influences from bands that Hüsker Dü had influenced; specifically Foo Fighters. That’s not surprising, since Bob played on Wasting Lightandtoured with Foo Fighters as the opening band and also DJed between sets.
I hope you’ll take a few minutes to check out the video for The Descent and consider the buying my favorite 2012 music.
2012 was a fantastic year for music. I can’t remember a year where I was as excited by this many new releases. Usually I have no problem finding a handful of great records at the end of the year but this year I just couldn’t keep up. Thankfully, my wife also buys records, I get some of them from photographing bands, and we trade in old records for new ones. I still have The Evens, JEFF The Brotherhood, Crocodiles, and a few more on my 2012 must buy list. As you can see, I prefer vinyl (with a digital download please/thank you) but I did buy a few CDs and a couple of digital only releases this year. This list is in alphabetical order. I’m not going to rank a them and please remember these are my favorite albums, not a best of 2012 list. We all have different taste. I hope you’ll discover something here and feel free to comment with some of your favorites.
…And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead – Lost Songs
I had just found a Ryko remaster of Copper Blue when Merge Records announced that they would be reissuing the full catalog by the quintessential band. I sold my copy and waited by the mailbox after work each day. The remastering sounds great and over all the songs don’t seem dated or any less amazing.
Smashing Pumpkins: Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness
The remaster sounds great and at least 50 of the 64 bonus tracks were new or different for fans like myself who have the two or three different bootleg MCIS era demo collections.
Even though this demo was widely bootlegged, I had never heard it until now. The demo sounds more like a mixtape or sound collage than a “normal” recording.
Mellon Collie & The Infinite Sadnesswas originally released October 24, 1995. I was a sophomore in high school and still listening to cassette tapes. On Christmas day 1995, I got my first CD player, a copy of Green Day’s Dookie and Kerplunk!, plus gift card to Record Town. The very next day I spent what seemed like hours walking around the store deciding how best to spend the gift card that was burning a hole in my pocket. I chose MCIS for the amount of songs I could get and the fact that I liked side two of Siamese Dream (side one of my cassette copy didn’t work very well).
Almost exactly seventeen years later, The Smashing Pumpkins have reissued a deluxe remastered edition and so I decided to photograph my original copy of Mellon Collie & The Infinite Sadness, which I have only preserved for posterity or maybe just for my own nostalgia. For years I took this copy of MCIS everywhere–camping, long family trips, college, my first car, my first apartment, etc. As you can tell, I eventually I had to purchase a new copy. Inside the tray I taped my ticket stub from the July 7, 1996Hampton Coliseum show, which was less than a week before the death of Jonathan Melvoin and the end of the original Smashing Pumpkins lineup.
By the way, if anyone out there has a copy of the July 7, 1996 Hampton Coliseum show please get in touch!
PJ Sykes Photo Blog 