Tubelord - Our First American Friends & For The Grandparents

The vinyl's coming thick and fast now. In the past 3 days I've received 3 albums in the post, and I've still got a backlog of a few things (including something very special). I'm going to try and work my way through them over the coming few weeks in between revision sessions, so expect a fair few posts.

This morning I went to the post office to collect some undelivered post, and inside the parcel was this plethora of Tubelord-related goodies. Now, there's a handful of non-vinyl things here but I feel they all tie in together nicely and I want to write about them, so I will.

Let's start with the vinyl though. This is cover of the band's debut (and thus far only) album Our First American Friends. I'm not entirely sure what's going on here, there seems to be shiny paper spread like lava onto a hill. It's nice, although the colours are a little muted. personally, I'd prefer them to be a bit brighter but this is pretty good as it is.

This is a nice touch. The dust sleeve is made of card and has more lovely artwork on it. This appears to be some kind of bear in a cave on the mountain from the cover. Okay then.

Yessss, we've got some coloured vinyl again! A lovely, lovely white. I really like the look of this, it's just such a big contrast to the regular black. Behind it is the other side of the inner sleeve, and to the left of that is the back of the outer sleeve. I like both, they look nice. Not a lot more to say.

As I don't have my USB turntable at uni, I slightly presumptively sent the band an email asking if they'd include a burnt CD of the tracks. Thus, they did. What a lovely group. it's about here where I should probably describe the album a bit. Tubelord are a kind of like the halfway point of Dananananaykroyd (who I love) and Los Campesinos (who I don't). If you don't know what any of that meant, they're yelpy with loud guitars but also lots of melody. They're brilliant, as is this album. there are so many out-and-out awesome songs, but my personal favourites are probably Night Of The Pencils and Synthesize. I'd describe them but you can stream the entire album on the band's Bandcamp page, which you definitely should do if you are even faintly interested in what I just said. Let's not forget though, there were some more things in this parcel:

So this is the "summer package" the band did last year. It's an acoustic version of the entire OFAF album on CD and a tote bag. I like both, a lot. Not fussed if the tote bag doesn't suit me, it's comfortable and awesome. I like the mountain.

So this is the CD. The artwork folds out into a mini-poster, which is odd but nice. In terms of the music, I really like it. It's interesting to hear what are at times fairly loud songs reimagined acoustically. Sure, there's a couple of bits that don't quite work but there's a lot that does. I may even prefer the acoustic version of Stacey's Left Arm to the full one. This is also streaming on the band's Bandcamp page linked earlier, so you can listen to it there and stuff. What also makes me happy is the centre strip of each of these CDs is numbered out of 300. Mine is number 50. I like that as a number. It's fairly low AND even AND divisible by 10. Lovely.