Strange days.
If there's one place I can kill serious time, it's a record shop. The nearest city, Syracuse NY, has a good one - one of the Sound Gardens.
But the last few times I have visited there, I find myself looking for stuff they don't have - what I want these days is either too old or too obscure or too deep in the catalog.
It's the 'Amazon effect,' I think - you strain at the limits of even a really well curated record shop because, well, because you can't pursue every connection that occurs to you. Today I was looking for some instrumental hip-hop and a couple of albums on Rune Grammofon, and they had...nuthin.' And I can't fully decide whether that's a good thing or a bad thing: by not letting me indulge absolutely every path I want to run down, a good record shop may nudge me toward better selections. (Assuming you believe in better and worse...) Or if the store isn't well tuned, I may miss something worth knowing.
Or I may just be beyond reasonably obsessive (or worse, really, really pretentious) for looking at things that way.
Anyway, I walked out with:
This is the afterlife for my much beloved Stereolab. The first play or two is not winning, but we shall see.
And...
I'm 40 years or so late to the dance, but this really is all it's cracked up to be. If I had bought this back in 70' - along with 'Surf's Up' and 'Lick My Decals Off' - it would've been one of those life long favorie albums, I think.
s.