Ack! I can't stop playing this game! It's a game where you have like twenty seconds to match nine album (or CD) covers with the names of the record. I'm not very good at it, though. The category I most find myself in is "alternative" although if they had a category called "records Gary's brothers had that he rifled through continually when he was a young kid" I'd be awesome at it.
There were certain records I would never have listened to, not in a million years, but whose sleeves I found amazing, like a panel of a long comic book the rest of which existed entirely in my head. For example, the cover to Queen's News Of The World (the image doesn't show you how the record folded out), which I would never, even as a kid, have listened to of my own free will, although, of course, I've heard the songs "We Will Rock You" & "We Are The Champions" more times than my mother ever told me she loved me. But the cover! An alien made of stone killing all those hippies! The stories that album cover brought into my head!
There were other memorable ones, but I can't find images of them online - I guess they were not as famouss, or maybe I'm remembering the names wrong - but games like this do make me miss vinyl & the attention lavished on album covers. Maybe I suck at the game because most of the records in the "alternative" category are from CDs & who the fuck pays attention to a CD cover?
Record collecting friends back in the day often would distinguish between a "great package" - the music & the presentation were both great - & great records that had shitty sleeves & great sleeves hiding awful records. Middle- to late-period 4AD records often got that last complaint - 23 Envelope did a smashing job with the sleeve but the record is unfuckinglistenable. Do you hear me Ultra Vivid Scene? Do you?
(That's not really my opinion. I was in character! Plus, that first Ultra Vivid Scene record, the one with the toothbrush on the cover - that's not a very good presentation for a decent pop record.)
I do miss vinyl, but not enough to actually buy it. Ack! What a pain in the ass! It's so much easier to be digital. & maybe I'm a philistine, but it sounds fine to me. But perhaps the vinyl-o-philes are winning. Which is great. There'll be more records whose sleeves I don't recognize in work-habit-destroying games like this one.
No worries! My iPod will tell me what the sleeve looks like!
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