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  1. Culture
24 March 2011

Sleeve notes

Records are more fun when you can see them.

By Tom Ravenscroft

I am in the process of moving house, again. Ever since university, this has involved lugging around huge piles of records to which I rarely listen; I haven’t even any idea what the vast majority of them are. I’m thinking of getting rid of most of them. Curb your gasps – I won’t be disposing of my 180-gram version of Nina Nastasia’s On Leaving, but there has to be a cull: my arms hurt.

The main downside to this is that I’ll miss the sleeves. I wander around record shops looking at all the bright colours, moody photos, funny shapes, sultry portraits and bad haircuts, wondering what these albums sound like. On many occasions, I have spent my earnings on these treasures only to return home to discover that I already owned them as faceless computer files.

So I thought I’d look up a few of my favourite new faceless albums. I’ll now describe some of them to you, so you’ll know what to look for when you’re out shopping. On the first, there’s a black-and-white drawing of a girl sleeping on a lion. This image doesn’t relate well at all with the music inside. The band is called the Finches and their album On Golden Hill (Ulrike Records) is a very pretty and dreamy record that does, indeed, promote the joys of sleep, yet nowhere in the music is there a sense of the kind of anxiety one would feel should one try to take a nap on one of nature’s most dangerous creatures. The album is simple and short but very sweet. I think a lion would enjoy it. And, come to think of it, I could imagine trotting around on a lion’s back listening to this, perhaps gently stroking its mane.

The Babies have a great new album out. It is also called The Babies (Shrimper) and the sleeve is a rather chaotic thing: lots of junk displayed on a wall, postcards of the American wilderness, religious iconography, fairy lights and home-made models of pyramids. The Babies is a desperate, lost and tired-sounding record, but in the coolest possible fashion: it’s full of great, lazy-sounding pop songs. It is also the perfect record to run away to, if anyone is considering that.

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Next, a photograph of five serious-looking men sitting outside with a menacing-looking dog, all staring straight at the camera and, consequently, at you, almost daring you to listen to the album. It’s called Mortika – Recordings from a Greek Underworld (Mississippi), a compilation of 21 underground Greek folk songs about drugs, sex, crime, poverty and heartbreak. I don’t speak Greek, which makes it impossible for me to be shocked by the stories told in these songs.

What I am left with is a series of very innocent, lovable and scratchy-sounding archive recordings that could quite easily be about hugging your mum, eating sweets or doing charity work. Song titles such as “Hash Smoking Chicks” are the only indication that this might not be the case. Many of them are very suitable for dancing along to, but my favourites are those that are so worn that, at times, you can barely hear anything. They fade in and out as though the music is being played from another building and snippets of it keep managing to drift in through your open window. Bliss. l

Tom Ravenscroft’s radio show is broadcast on BBC 6 Music every Friday at 9pm

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