If you grew up almost anywhere in America in the staggeringly ignorant days of being a teenager before the internet and were at all interested in bands beyond the regular MTV rotation, what you probably used to do was, get out a pen and paper and send away to the indie record labels for catalogues being sure to include a self addressed stamped envelope.
Many, many weeks later the catalogue would arrive. It was never too big, often Xeroxed or a simple single b/w sheet. Maybe there were a handful of bands you already knew and some that seemed larger than life just because you kept seeing them there in these catalogues or mentioned in interviews. In reality maybe a hundred kids cared about most of these but, in those days, there were no ‘friend counts” or page views and they were mysterious, mythological and known only by what you could figure out from reviews and articles in imported mags from England or the one time you saw that video on 120 minutes at 1 a.m. already dreading the Monday morning alarm clock. And so, you’d read and re-read the catalogue studying the blurb and the picture and the song titles and band names and eventually you’d check the boxes to the record you already knew you wanted taking a chance on two or three other singles you knew next to nothing about and then send it back and begin the wait by the postbox for your records to arrive.

It’s so strangely archaic now; it was so insular and personal. There was no immediacy or rush because you were alone in your development and nobody you knew had heard or seen these records and the anticipation was yours and yours alone. From SST I grew old waiting on Screaming Trees, Sub Pop made me grey waiting for Superfuzz and Bigmuff, Drag City made me hold out for months for Pavement’s first 10′, while Merge let me waste away awaiting Superchunk. I’ve long since forgotten the abysmal failures, the waste of wax singles from absolutely terrible bands but the good ones were prized scalps. It was a time when ‘I knew them first’ status was remarkably inclusive, measured in years not weeks. It was brutal and absurd. No doubt the kids are now more than all right being able to glom the entire history of The Fall or some such in a night grabbing the back-catalogue via wikipedia and few clicks. And the price we pay is of course that blog life has made everything passé three weeks from release. But those of us old enough to remember, do have a certain right to bemoan the miles we walked barefoot and the dues the youth of today take for granted if only because it stunk and we earned it.

The relevance of all this is that a few weeks ago I gave up a Sunday trying to track down The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart debut on vinyl. I went to no less than four NY shops looking for it only to find everywhere was sold out. ‘We’ll have more in next week,’ they all said. ‘Ridiculous,’ I thought annoyed at having to wait for it. And thus, impatient and either forgetting exactly how long mail-order used to take or made wonderfully nostalgic by the few TPOPAH mp3’s I already had to go on, I went home and straight to the Slumberland records site to order it. I hadn’t even thought of doing such an absurd thing since high school and I immediately regretted the decision.

 The weeks went by, and I was reminded of the above memories, and then Pitchfork gave the album a huge review and totally like stole any shot I might have at ‘I knew ‘em foist,’ status but now you know what? I totally don’t even care. It arrived today and so, I’m happy to report that indie labels have become far more responsible and prompt in the years since I was made to suffer.  A scant few weeks after I ordered it, we’re listening to it on, what to god I hope is, one of the last truly cold nights of this winter.

This record is so brilliantly Vaselines and Jesus & Mary Chain and Shop Assistants and any number of sounds I would have truly flipped on in junior high and high school that it’s almost as if it’s a long forgotten mail-order only just arrived. Not that it’s dated or purely nostalgic, because there is certainly a something new about it all if for no other reason than it’s re-contextualizing of those sounds. But their name says it all.  The songs are great, classic ‘Left of the Dial’ hits sounding tinged with melancholia and the hope that maybe this week the new girl will show up in your class, be given the seat next to yours. Romantic titles, love obsessed and innocent, single string solos washed in fuzz, it’s maybe the perfect way to wait out these last heartsick, dark days of winter.