Nomos - Notes From The Acheron 12" and Demo 7"

I Got into Nomos after a mate sent me mp3's of their demo 7". God bless the Internet. I loved it but for some reason never thought to actually look into what else they'd got going on. They hail from Brooklyn, NY and play a kind of Infest influenced, fast, no bullshit hardcore, with a scuzzy punk influence in there too. Dark lyrics & rugged production, its good stuff. I was browsing for something else when I came across this 12" - Notes From The Acheron.

Pressed on purple wax, limited to 100 and with an etched B-side. I was powerless. Released on Deranged Records. The B-side is etched with a portion of the artwork.

Big ass fold out poster with the lyrics on the back. 

All artwork is by a dude called Vinnie Smith and it's trippy. I checked out his website, he's got some pretty cool stuff on there. Similar pieces to this Nomos art and photography of American counter-culture. And so in the name of completion, I also grabbed the aforementioned demo from the same store. Also on Deranged Records, on black out of 900. 

The place I got this from still has some of the 12" in stock. I wouldn't imagine it's many seeing as they were only out of 100 so get in there, you won't be disappointed. And it's UK shipping for all you local readers, so it won't cost an arm and a leg to get it posted.

Touch Amore - Parting The Sea Between Brightness And Me - Deluxe Edition

Briefly jumping forwards through my backlog to post about this one for a couple of reasons.

Reason one is the fact that this has taken forever to arrive. Pre-orders for this went up on Deathwish's Estore without much warning at the start of May and such was the rush of people to buy it, Deathwish broke. The site went down for around 2 days in total before fully coming back on line. During this time judging from forums and DW's tumblr and twitter feeds there were a lot of people flipping out desperate to know if their order had gone through and wether they had sold out or not. Confusion and chaos in this tiny corner of the interweb in full effect. Anyway, store went live eventually, and I snagged the Deluxe Edition (naturally) of Touche Amore's Deathwish debut - Parting The Sea Between Brightness And Me. 1000 of these made, never to be available again. Encased in a 28 page 12" LP sized hardcover book and on 180 gram black. And then I waited.

And waited.

And wai.. yeah you get the point. Many a delay stopped this from shipping out and from Jake and Tre's regular updates it had something to do with the huge ass book the record comes in. Months went by, to the point where I wasn't even sure if I was bothered about it anymore. I was seeing pictures online of other people's standard editions in a variation of pretty colours and began to wonder if the extra cash for the Deluxe, the chaos of the order process and the long wait was going to be worth it?

In short, yes.  So reason two that this jumps the queue  - it's fucking gorgeous.

Deathwish & Touche Amore have really outdone themselves with this one.

The 180 gram record comes inside a sleeve inside that hand written lyric sheet. While we're on the subject of how nice this is, you should head over to this great post by my man Gav Weir. He drops all kinds of science about paper weight and stuff.

And it's got a really fucking cool label.

I'd be into it if all Deathwish releases had this label, a bit like how A389's are all the same. So, in the words of the Partridge Family, how long is too long? Well when it comes to the finished product being this brilliant, it's pretty irrelevant.

Fucked Up - David Comes To Life pre-order 7" set

Arriving a lot later than I would have thought, the final part of the Fucked Up LP 'David Comes To Life' pre-order. A set of four 7" singles only available through this package. And on Ebay when someone needs to pay their phone bill. Matador Records say that there were somewhere in the region of 2000 of these pressed.

Each 7" has two songs on it (except for one) and they serve to tell a backstory to the characters and places which feature in the story told on David Comes To Life. That's an 18 track concept album as it is, which I already don't understand that well. And now there's these additional 7 tracks, along with an exclusive digital track 'The Truest Road'. Oh, and the RSD 2011 release -  11 track LP 'David's Town' which is apparently a soundtrack to the whole thing. A musical soundtrack to music? Ok then. So yeah, 37 tracks in all to this epic undertaking. That's one hell of a concept album. Anyhow, back to these 7 inchers. Each track has individual artwork, so flip them over :

They also have individually coloured centre labels:

Again, different for each side.

Blank flip side on 'Octavio Made The Bomb' which is the only one without two tracks.

This is also the only track outside of the concept. The lyrics tell the story of how they came to write the album, what it's about and some sarcastic 'aren't we very clever' bollocks. Each 7" has it owns lyrics & credits sheet. 

The family together at last :

I'm not too sure that I care all that much for the story, or understanding it. There's some really solid songs amongst all of it, different to older, punkier Fucked Up (if you've listened to some of the Zodiac series or the last LP you would have an idea of where they were heading) but I'm into it. And the track 'The Other Shoe' is one of the best songs I've ever heard. All in all, a cool set. And a good pre-order package from Matador.