“The first new-release vinyl record I ever bought was Jupiter by Cave In, on Hydra Head Records in 2000. Cave In was an adventurous hardcore band from Boston; I bought the record at Greene Records in Santa Ana. Jupiter was a breakthrough for Cave In, who went on to major label RCA Records to put out a follow-up that kinda sounded like Foo Fighters. Greene Records has been out of business for a long time. Brian McTernan produced the album, as well as a lot of my other favorite bands from the underground at the time, like Piebald and Recover.”
“I’m listening to that Jupiter record right now. It’s pretty scratched—I’ve always been irreverent at best about physical stuff, including vinyl, which is ironic since I have like a thousand vinyl records in my living room. One of the things that stands out about Jupiter is its sonic warmth, which you can hear on Mp3s too. It’s got all these tape delays on everything that give it an analog orange glow.
(A lot of people say that vinyl sounds warmer or just better, but I think that’s an overstatement. A lot of new vinyl is not pressed well and it sounds tinny and squashed—but grab a Rolling Stones album from the ’70s out of a bin at the thrift store for $.50 and you will be knocked backwards by the sonic depth and detail.)
Jupiter is a blend of hardcore, modern rock, and psych and there aren’t many other albums that sounds like it – imagine a metal band covering Dark Side of the Moon—although it’s not a “difficult” album at all.
Something else that’s interesting about Jupiter is that it wasn’t recorded to a metronome. The drummer plays waaaaaaay behind the beat, which is obvious on long fills. It came out in 2000, which was the tail end of the era when you could record an important album without a click. (I started recording around then, and always to the metronome. Not all the LA Font records have been done to a click, but some have. As a musician, I like the challenge of grooving around a steady pulse. People say that the click “kills the groove,” but hip-hop, which is the grooviest music of my lifetime, is all made to drum machines, and drum machines are just fancy metronomes.)
I like vinyl for a lot of reasons—rich sound, having a cool keepsake thing, vinyl records often appreciate in monetary value because of their scarceness, and I tend to like indie labels and indie artists and often they’re the biggest purveyors of vinyl. Plus I need coasters like anyone else. But you don’t like vinyl in a vacuum—you like vinyl because you like the artists on vinyl.
I like Cave In because Mason, who played tuba with me in the high school marching band, gave me a mix CD in 2000 of stuff he was getting into, and it mapped out a lot of things that I had never heard and would like for quite a while (and still do): At The Drive-In, Piebald, Death Cab for Cutie, and one of the most important bands of my high school and adult life, the Dismemberment Plan. (When I went away to college, my younger sister inherited my station wagon and told me she needed me to send her a copy of the Plan’s album Emergency & I because the car didn’t sound right without that album playing in it.)
I downloaded Jupiter from Napster, but I bought it on vinyl. I got Emergency & I on CD as a Christmas present, then I burned it for my sister. Music comes at you from places you don’t expect, like a tuba player or a station wagon. Melodies hold emotional power almost to a fault—you’ve turned off a song that reminded you of something that you didn’t want to think about. Bands don’t last long, a miraculous confluence of personalities, shocking when they stick together long enough to record a document of their chemistry.
Vinyl is temporary. Record stores are temporary. Musicians are temporary. Songs are forever.”
—Greg Katz, Bass
LA Font’s new LP Diving Man is out November 19 via New Professor Music—and is available on transparent yellow vinyl!
