The 2009 Tilburg haul, that is, the batch of CDs I bought while at the 2009 Roadburn festival, was unquestionably the year’s best. Nothing else even came close, and though I didn’t get nearly as many records this year, I think I may have trumped it in a quality-over-quantity kind of way. Time will tell on that one, but in the meantime, killer discs were purchased by Comus, We, Pentagram and more, and I think the dude working the table where they were selling the Roadburn/Burning World Records merch remembered me from last year’s fest. I had a little laugh.

Here’s the list, with notes where necessary:

Anathema, Alternative 4 (digipak version)
Black Shape of Nexus, Black Shape of Nexus (metal tin)
Comus, Song to Comus: The Complete Collection (signed by band)
Fu Manchu, No One Rides for Free (the reissue)
Gomer Pyle, Idiots Savants
Horisont, Tva Sidor av Horisonten (tight-pants Swedish retro rock; meh)
The Machine, Shadow of the Machine
The Machine, Solar Corona (man this band sounds like Colour Haze)
Master Musicians of Bukkake, Totem One
Master Musicians of Bukkake, Totem Two
Pentagram, Sub-Basement
Pentagram, Show ‘em How
Red Sparowes, The Fear is Excruciating, but Therein Lies the Answer
Solitude Aeturnus, Adagio (rules; catalog now complete)
Spiritual Beggars, Mantra III (2007 reissue)
Temples, Temples (On the Radar here)
Totimoshi, Untitled (a demo with three new songs)
The Desert Sessions, Volume 3 & 4 (life is good)
VA, Welcome Back to MeteorCity
We, Livin’ the Lore
White Darkness, Nothing (given to me for free because it’s on Roadburn/Burning World and I’d spent a bunch of money)
Witchfynde, Play it to Death

Some of it I bought just to own. Like Black Shape of Nexus. I got their other full-length last year and listened to it all of once, but figured I’d keep tradition alive by buying this one and probably not listening to it. Plus it was in a metal tin. And yeah, that’s my third copy of that Anathema record, but fuck it. I’m looking forward to getting to know many of these albums — Temples, Fu Manchu‘s first (I’d been holding out for the original but couldn’t find it, so finally acquiesced to the reissue), Comus — and with The Desert Sessions and those Spiritual Beggars and Solitude Aeturnus discs, I managed to find some stuff I’ve had an eye on for years. Good times all around. Mark it eight, Dude.

Truth be told, I wasn’t exactly fiending for a record shopping excursion after Roadburn (the Tilburg haul I’ll post at another time), but I’d have kicked myself in the ass upon my return home if I didn’t at least visit one shop in London while I was staying there, so I hopped in a cab and took it up to Camden High Street in to check out Resurrection Records, which everything I’d read about said it specialized in “gothic, industrial and metal.”

Now, I put that in quotes because of the word order. Somehow I had the feeling there was going to be way more of the former two than the latter one, and when I got there and went downstairs into the shop, that did turn out to be the case, but the metal section was still bigger than what you find in most mainstream CD stores. And by that I mean it existed. I managed to grab Reverend Bizarre‘s In the Rectory of the Bizarre Reverend (because I haven’t yet convinced myself I just don’t like the band), the 1999 reissue of Celtic Frost‘s rare tracks comp., Parched with Thirst am I and Dying, and Cathedral‘s In Memoriam.

Not bad finds — the Cathedral I’ve been chasing for a while and you don’t see that Reverend Bizarre around much, so whatever. I was reasonably satisfied. I went to grab lunch and check my email quickly, see if there was anything else nearby I needed to do. One ham sandwich later, I discovered one of the several Music and Video Exchange shops was on the next block, so I (and my luggage, which I was trailing with me) walked down the five or 10 storefronts and there it was.

As I said, I was reasonably satisfied before, but while checking out the wares at the Music and Video Exchange, I noted there was a section apart from the heavy, extreme and contemporary (labeled “cont.” by someone who hopefully has a phonetic sense of humor) metal sections called The Pretentious Intellectual Avant Metal Section… Also Stoner Rock. And so I found my home.

They had a roughly alphabetized system of cards with the album titles — they wouldn’t have been able to fit everything otherwise — but the pickings were thick. I grabbed two separate Queens of the Stone Age promo singles, for “Burn the Witch” and “Everybody Knows that You’re Insane,” the self-titled Debris Inc. album, which I somehow let slip by when it was initially released, a Monster Magnet CD single for “Negasonic Teenage Warhead” — not their best work, but I miss New Jersey — a Japanese version of Firebird‘s Deluxe with the Obi strip, and the entire trip’s closest rival to the copy of Desert Sessions 3 & 4 I bought off Fatso Jetson, the 1997 Burn One Up compilation on Roadrunner, featuring acts like Beaver, Acrimony, Spiritual Beggars, The Heads, Sleep, Fu Manchu and others, the vast majority with previously unreleased cuts.

It wouldn’t be such a big deal, but this compilation is considered a touchstone in the development of stoner rock because it’s one of the first times the genre acknowledged its own existence. Burn One Up regularly goes for $70 on more on Amazon and eBay, and I paid a whopping 12 pounds for it. That alone might make it find of the trip, as opposed to Desert Sessions, which cost me 25 Euro. In any case, I was fucking thrilled. Grabbed and ran like Charlie with the golden ticket. Haven’t had a second to listen to it yet, but am very much looking forward to doing so as soon as possible.

The reason this is a Buried Treasure and not a review or something — aside from album’s having been already reviewed — is that I just finally got around to buying a physical copy last night at Vintage Vinyl. I was there for the Crippled Black Phoenix, The Resurrectionists/Night Raider box and figured since opening track “As Horizons End” has been in my head for a couple days, I’d grab the 2009 Paradise Lost release as well. Maybe there was some subliminal connection because both bands are British. In any case, I had some store credit to burn.

Faith Divides Us – Death Unites Us is not an album I’ve consistently gone back to, but for some reason, I recently clicked open the folder of promo mp3s from which the review was written and gave it another shot. It’s still formulaic, but as I stood with the copy of it in my hands and debated taking it to the register, I realized formulaic was exactly what I wanted. There’s no question there’s some filler toward the record’s back half — I know that now even more than the first time around — but that’s what I wanted. A metal album. Something I could put on and not think about. A couple catchy choruses, some decent guitar work, and done. Mind-boggling complexity is wonderful, but sometimes you just want to relax.

I felt way back in August and still feel “As Horizons End” is the strongest cut on the record. It’s the one that led me back to Faith Divides Us – Death Unites Us, and a good portion of motivation for any subsequent listens will be to hear that one song. But what follows it, at least for the next four songs until you get past the title track, isn’t half bad either. I doubt the purchase will instill in me a wholesale new affection for the album, but hey, at least I know it’s on the shelf should I decide to pay it another visit half a year from now.

The issue was that I’d been standing in Vintage Vinyl for nearly an hour already and wasn’t any closer to finding a single thing I wanted to buy. Okay, that’s not exactly true, but there was nothing I was willing to shell out for at the new or used prices. I’d been all through the used bins, back and forth through the alphabet of the new stuff too, and nothing.

I could have just left. That probably would have been the reasonable course of action. But I’m not a reasonable man, and so — as I stared at the racks one more time and the archetypal cute record store girl behind the counter in the SunnO))) hoodie and Mastodon t-shirt with the dyed red hair began, increasingly, to give me funny looks because there weren’t that many other people in the store and I was the guy who’d been pacing around for almost 60 minutes — I finally just decided to grab something and go. That something was Across Tundras‘ 2008 full-length, Western Sky Ride.

It was right there, I was standing in front of the ‘A’ section, and I just wanted to get out of there. I panicked. And because I remembered liking the first Across Tundras record, 2006′s Dark Songs of the Prarie, well enough, I figured I’d be alright.

Wrong-o.

Out in the parking lot, I disrobed the disc of its shrinkwrap and popped it in, taking out the Them Crooked Vultures CD which I’d been listening to for the umpteenth time. The first song up was “Carrion Crow.” I don’t know what I expected of it — maybe something more atmospheric, ? la Earth — but what I got was sloppy post-metal that sounded like it was recorded in a basement (and not in a good way) and immediate buyer’s remorse. And the only good riff in the song? They fucking WHISTLED over it. Hey man, I’m all for experimentation, more than most, but throw me a bone.

I didn’t make it all the way through “Thunderclap Stomp” before just skipping to the last track, “Gallow’s Pole” to see if it was a Zeppelin cover. Once I ascertained it wasn’t, out came Western Sky Ride. Maybe permanently. There goes $14 I’ll never see again. Too much hip, not enough good.

Check eBay for defunct doomers Slow Horse and you’re going to find that for either of their two records, 1998′s Slow Horse or 2001′s Slow Horse II, will cost you over $50 a pop. It’s a big internet and there are cheaper options available at least for the second album (including through the band), but it speaks to the kind of cult following the band has garnered over the years before and after their breakup. I’m willing to wager less than 0.0001 percent of the world’s population has ever heard of the band, yet those who know what they’re looking for are willing to pay to get in on the action.

I got lucky. My copy of the self-titled I picked up a while back at Vintage Vinyl in Fords for a whopping $4. Slow Horse II was ordered from this marvelous big truck we call the intertubes, and both records have proven to be enduring standouts among their shelf-peers. There’s something about the attitude and obscurity of the material that gives it a charm — like a secret full of killer riffs and stoned melodies that only a few people know.

Slow Horse formed in Brooklyn in 1997. Imagine that. In a sea of Korn-ripoff n?-metal awfulness, here comes three dudes with slow, sad, non-dissonant songs not about being the toughest guy in the world or being molested by their dads. Hell, on the first album, they covered Chris Isaak‘s “Wicked Game!” If you want to talk about not fitting in, “Wicked Game” in pre-irono-hipster-fascist Brooklyn just about covers it. And it’s a pretty killer cover too.

By the time they got around to Slow Horse II, their sound had developed into the eastern seaboard’s emotionally heavier answer to Goatsnake. Replacing that easygoing California groove with some raw New York intensity, the band managed to carve a niche for themselves that has yet to be duplicated to this day. I’m not going to say they never got their due, because anyone whose first record is selling for $65 and up is definitely being shown some respect (even if they’re not getting that money), but if you haven’t heard them in a while or never managed to track down either album, consider this a friendly recommendation. There are songs up on their MySpace and guitarist/vocalist Dan Buckszpan seems to be the guy to talk to about purchases.

Only bummer is it looks like when they broke up they had new material that never came out. If you look on their website, it says, “The band has been writing new material for their eventual third release, on a label to be determined…” which says to me there was a part of the story that never got told. Maybe they’ll get together in another decade like Snail and put it out. That’s a nice thought.

Along with the chance to meet two of the dudes in Cavalcade and to see Balboa MI (feature coming soon) in both Lansing and Detroit on consecutive evenings, this past weekend’s excursion to Michigan afforded me a little bit of shopping time, which, at the wizened behest of native/all-around-great-dude Postman Dan, was spent at Flat Black and Circular (“FBC” to the locals — website here), in the very much MSU infested Campus Town Mall in East Lansing.

It was my first time in the state let alone the store, which was well organized by genre and alphabet. Prices weren’t cheap for CDs or vinyl, but they had some stuff worth paying for. The discs were in bins high enough so it didn’t hurt my back to lean over and look and had been meticulously alphabetized, despite a lack of “Ab-Af” type separators. I scanned my way through the rock section and managed to come out of it with VALIS, a Type O Negative (I’m on a kick) single, the last Uriah Heep record, the 2005 Place of Skulls EP Love Through Blood (that Victor Griffin sure loves him some Jesus) and — the one that I’d have gladly driven to Michigan for in the first place — the first of the two Toba Trance releases by Los Natas.

I think I’ve made it pretty clear since starting this site I’m a fan of the Argentinian rockers in both their free-form and more straightforward incarnations. Pretty much whatever they’ve got going on is cool by me, and since I already owned Toba Trance II, I knew what to expect going into its predecessor. The album track listing is as follows:

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As last weekend’s New England adventures played out, I found myself Saturday afternoon in Providence, Rhode Island, tracing along the racks at Armageddon Shop. I’d never been there before, don’t know when I’ll get back, but found it on the Record Store Day website (which is pretty handy as a database of indie shops around the country) and after seeing the considerable catalog posted on their own site, decided it wouldn’t be such a terrible way to pass some time.

And it wasn’t. The racks of used CDs were horizontal so you looked at the spines of the discs, there was plenty of vinyl around and not much standing room, Hank Williams coming from the speakers in a store with one of the coolest Melvins posters I’d ever seen. Nothing to complain about. I picked up a couple odds and ends; some Grief, Roadsaw, a Blind Guardian live record, Mobile by Dutch rockers Beaver, the digipak version of the last Type O Negative (I don’t care what anyone says, those are stoner riffs Kenny Hickey is playing), a surprising find in the first Monolithe CD which is something I genuinely never thought I’d own, and solely based on the artwork, knowing nothing about it, for $6.99, the self-titled album from The Satellite Circle.

I stood at the counter and asked the good-humored guy on the other side, “That’s pretty much gotta be a stoner rock CD, right?” He took a look at the front, turned it over in his hand, said, “Yeah, that’d be my guess,” and continued ringing up my purchases. My wife rolled her eyes.

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