Just how hip is San Francisco‘s Aquarius Records? Well, I knew going into it yesterday that it was gonna be some hip shit, but if you’d like a real-life example, Aquarius Records is so hip that, in the metal section, there is a section devoted to one-man black metal act Leviathan and not one for Black Sabbath. To be fair, there may have been a Sabbath section under the “Rock” heading, but I didn’t see one. Doesn’t mean it’s not there.

In any case, damn that’s hip.

Being a fan of Aquarius‘ regularly-updated website reviews but never having seen the inside of the store before (unlike either of the two Amoeba Musics around here), I didn’t know what was coming in terms of size. It’s a mid-size store, more on the side of organized than not, with a really good selection of stuff you won’t see everywhere else. Hip is a specialty, but it’s not like it was all girl jeans and swoopy hair in there either. I found some killer discs in a decent environment for doing so. It wasn’t as dream-fulfilling as Amoeba San Francisco was, but it was also roughly one-fifth the size, so I’m not about to complain.

Here’s the full report:

Bong, Gilgamesh Lives
Lord Vicar, Fear No Pain
Planet Gemini, SuperGod DevilMan
Primordial, Spirit the Earth Aflame
Thumlock, Emerald Liquid Odyssey
Unearthly Trance, In the Red
Various Artists, Listen Without Distraction: A Tribute to Kyuss
Yearning, Frore Meadow

Nothing really groundbreaking, but, surprisingly, was much better than I did at Amoeba Berkeley or Rasputin Music this rainy afternoon. After taking the BART into Berkeley and hiking it up there, my list in hand, all I found was For Octavio Paz by Six Organs of Admittance. I went through the racks for nearly an hour at Amoeba alone, and by the end of it had to hang my head in shame. I felt like everything I wanted must have been hiding in some section I just couldn’t find. Man, what a bummer.

The thing was, I know it was completely situational. Last time I was there, in 2008, I blew at least $200, and I’m not at all prepared to say it was some fault of the store’s, just luck of the draw. I had some pretty specific requests, and none of them especially easy to come by, so I probably shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was anyway. As The Patient Mrs. quoted Orange Goblin when we met up at the Peet’s coffee shop on the next corner, “Some you win, some you lose.”

Needless to say, another trip to the San Francisco shop is scheduled for Tuesday. And my disappointment was short-lived anyway, since at the Shakespeare & Co. bookstore, I found a first edition James Thurber from 1945 and an instructional paperback from 1982 called How to Master Pac-Man, from which I look forward to drawing any number of important life lessons.

If there’s a footnote here, it’s Rasputin Music, which I popped into after Amoeba. I didn’t buy anything (almost grabbed a record from a band called ¡Pendejo! for $7.99, but decided otherwise), but it looked like a decent shop that, on another day in a better mood, I’d probably hit up again in no time. They had a used metal section, which is always a plus.

Tags: Amoeba Music, Aquarius Records, Berkeley, California, Rasputin Music, San Francisco

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 4th, 2010 at 11:20 pm and is filed under Buried Treasure. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.