Where Buried Treasure and Euroventure Meet: Camden High Street, Apparently
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.
Nice. I got Burn One Up when it came out and still listen to it. Great compilation. Did you get that copy of Elusive Truth?
Camden is really cool, was there sunday but with little cash. Still a nice day though.
Burn One Up sounds like a good candidate to be posted over on the swamp… just sayen.