Well, Son, A Funny Thing About Regret Is...

..."That it's better to regret something you have done than something you haven't."

An appropriate lyric beyond the fact that it's from the album in question: I've said that immediate first impressions are unhelpful, and so I tend not to do them--few (if any) of my rules are hard and fast. I'm breaking that totally and completely right now--or, well, near enough to it.

In celebration of an upcoming "holiday" of sorts, as well as an increase in pay and a more palatable job and things like that, I went out to the last stores I'd not visited recently, namely the Nice Price Books in Chapel Hill, CD Alley (I know, isn't it surprising I hadn't been there?) and the Edward McKay in northern Raleigh. I managed to fill a bunch of gaps as well as start myself on a few paths I'd been meaning to over the course of time anyway.

One of those, I'm going to preface with a bit of peculiarity: I have a strange relationship with labels. Record labels, I mean. I have some I trust almost implicitly (DeSoto springs to mind), some I'm pretty sure I trust, some that give me genre indications, some that make me wary, so on and so forth. But I've often developed these impressions with no overarching awareness of a label's work. I identify them with a single artist I know, or work backward from the first artist I saw on the label. In this case, that's the "problem" in question. In my days on eMusic when I first began attempts to expand my horizons, I started going alphabetically, so I ended up with one band before any other: !!!. Yeah, that's their name.

What Do You Call That Noise That You Put On? -- XTC and Obsession

This is pop?

Right now I'm listening to the Replacements and dipping into some early 90s hits for my own entertainment. I've been listening to Paul Westerberg's (of the Replacements) solo material for a lot of the day, spent last night listening to Ryan Adams and the rest of today listening to early Bee Gees, Dinosaur Jr, Meat Puppets, and Badfinger.

Despite all that, though, I went out to Charlotte's Manifest Discs and Tapes, which I last visited about eight years ago, yesterday, and though I walked out with some of the Ryan Adams and Meat Puppets I just mentioned (as well as some long-desired Thin Lizzy and Church reissues), the find of the night was an object that's been in my peripheral vision for a while, then suddenly went out of print. I'd seen a copy at my old friends CD Alley but it had even left there--and they often have box sets that just hang out until they go out of print and one of us stumbles in and goes, "Hey, waitasec..."

Somehow, this thing was sitting there with that TWEC-style sticker¹ denoting their online usage of TWEC's SecondSpin.com (not worth linking to, I'm afraid) and consigning many of their prices to absolute weirdness (see: unusually long footnote). Sometimes a great deal, sometimes a horrendous one not worth touching. Indeed, this particular item is out of print, as I noted, so that makes the price a huge gamble. The list price, when in print, was around $60, and that's become the starting used price for most of the year. This one, though, was marked $37.99. So, screw anything else I was going to find--this was coming home with me.

So, what was "this"? Well, here, of course, is a picture: