Latest Posts

Still Diggin’: I Hate Record Store Day

April 17, 2015 Mike Torsell

In the summer of 2002, I went and bought my first record at Home of the Hits. It was The Shins’ Oh Inverted World, and it cost me about 17 dollars (I really don’t remember the price to be honest). That day, I spent a sleepy afternoon flipping through all of the records, carefully weighing my limited budget against my nearly unlimited options. I took it home and must have listened to it nearly every day that summer. I have collected records and used it as my primary means of purchasing music ever since, and the question I sometimes ask myself, in the face of a wide variety of ways to listen to music from Pandora to Tidal (can anyone say Tidal with a straight fact by the way?), why do I still go with LPs as my preference? Thinking it over, I think my reasoning comes down to a desire to[...]

Still Diggin’: Spiral Scratch Records

April 17, 2015 Tim Fenster

Spiral Scratch Records is the kind of place that’s becoming increasingly hard to find in these times of big-box department stores and strip malls – a shop with character. The Bryant Street record shop is Buffalo’s only independent record store, and definitely one of the quaintest record joints around. Its entire retail space could fit probably fit into your living room, or a single studio apartment, so the place feels crowded with just a half a dozen patrons. But that’s also its charm – the personal, individualized feel of the place, and the chance to interact with hip people who probably share your tastes in music. While the store boasts a good collection of new and used vinyl records – along with various clothes, CDs, books, magazines, stickers and the like – they specialize mainly in punk, indie-rock, and various underground and cult acts. On a typical day you can[...]

Still Diggin’: Always Dancing

April 16, 2015 Alicia Greco

Another year has passed and my musical evolution has continued on. Record Store Day is coming up once again, and I have a story to tell. My grandparents introduced me to vinyl. When I was small, I was fascinated by their turntable. I would push the glass door gently so it would pop open. My grandmother, the matriarch of the Greco family, would come over and help me pick out a record. Their collection was filled with the classics, especially the beloved Frank Sinatra. Probably around three or four years old, I would always pick out Sesame Street Fever which she would then drop the needle on so I could dance around in the living room. The hilarious child-inspired rendition of Saturday Night Fever, SSF is a concept album made by Sesame Street in 1978. The album artwork is ridiculously and hilariously on point. Bert, Ernie and the Cookie Monster pose[...]

Still Diggin’: To Buy or Not To Buy

April 15, 2015 Mac McGuire

I download a lot of music, like a lot, and not in the legal way (shhh). It’s just so easy to go on a torrent page and type in an artist/album, and within seconds, have that music at my finger tips. Last year, after owning one of the crappiest record players known to man (thanks for nothing Urban Outfitters), I finally bought a solid player from U Turn, based on the recommendation from a fellow Rochester music blog. Once I got my player/receiver/speakers finally step up (which was another headache in its own right), I started to put a conscious effort towards building a small record collection. I began with some of my all-time favorites: Broken Social Scene’s You Forgot It In People, Wilco’s Being There, pretty much any Radiohead, but after that, I kind of just stopped. I would spend hours walking up and down aisles in shops like[...]

Still Diggin’: Shopping Local

April 14, 2015 Brendan O'Connor

I remember beginning to buy and collect vinyl about four years ago. Sure, since then, my taste has changed vastly, but the reasoning for buying is still the same. There’s just something weird about owning a record, something that I can’t easily put into words, and it’s something that definitely seems to confuse a lot of people. For me, records have always been sort of a ritual for me in a way. Having to pull one off the shelf, open it up, and read the liner notes after dropping the needle is what draws me in. Simply put, it’s the involvement that listening to vinyl requires that makes it special, the involvement that that other formats lack. That involvement has drawn me in and turned record shopping into a real money sink, but a money sink that I love and has made music a truly special aspect of my life.[...]

Still Diggin’: Record Store Relationships

April 13, 2015 Nick Muldoon

With Record Store Day quickly approaching, I’m reminded how much the record industry has changed. What was one a booming industry has needed the adrenaline shot of Record Store Day to keep many of the institutions we hold dear afloat. And the act of buying records, which was once a rite of passage, has turned into a niche hobby. But for me, record stores played a massive role in my childhood. More than simply a place to pick up that new Wolf Parade 7′ or an Of Montreal shirt, these were places where I could meet people who actually liked the same things I did, these places were special. And no record store was more special to me than Toronto’s Sonic Boom. Before changing owners, locations, and even being immortalized in film over the past five years, Sonic Boom was something magical in its original Bloor street location. My first[...]

Still Diggin’: Narrowing Your World

April 17, 2014 Dan Bauer

Record shops only really made any sense to me because of my experience with another increasingly-obsolete medium: television. Spending a summer alone, abjectly depressed and too hot to move a few years ago, I finally came around on TV. Streaming stuff over the internet had for a month or so been my only friend, and now even that seemed like an overwhelming task. With a multitude of potential entertainment out there, the act of choice seemed impossible. The freedom nauseated me a little, in fact. I craved control. So, faced with passing the rest of the night in total silence, I hooked up the tiny television in the closet and stole my housemate’s cable. Instantly, I had pleasantly narrowed my world. Fifty channels and half of them too fuzzy to come in: it was a blessing. Sacrificing the freedom of having the world at my fingertips meant freeing myself from[...]

Still Diggin’: Still Digging For Classics

April 16, 2014 Cliff Parks

I wasn’t always a vinyl head. Sure I grew up with vinyl, but by the time I was in high school, it was cassettes for my Walkman, and the digitally pristine sound of the CD became the coin of the realm during college and for a decade after. But after reconnecting to vinyl to expand some musical horizons, it became clear that the old vinyl heads weren’t selling soap: music really does sound better on this format, and after buying a turntable, I got down to business, first at Record Theatre and later at the wonderland that is the Record Baron on Delaware in Kenmore. I became a shark, always on the look out. It was at The Record Baron that I picked up the used Pink Floyd and Peter Gabriel Genesis albums that confirmed a suspicion that the CD had done the classics of rock jive, draining albums like[...]

Still Diggin’: Still Searchin’ for the ‘Holy Grail’

April 15, 2014 Justin Amidon

When I broke up with my ex girlfriend, Stephanie, it was a long time coming. We just weren’t connecting. She was going through a transformation of sorts. She was trying to become this feminist stripper in the form of an incarnation of Frida Kahlo. I mean she had the unibrow thing going on, but everything else was a mess. We were sitting at her kitchen table in her cramped one bedroom apartment. You could tell that it was once a boarding house, by the way all of the doorways were too narrow to move anything wider than a drop leaf table through. And how the bathroom was ten yards from the bedroom.She started crying, and asked me to leave. I hesitated. “Just go!” she yelled. Now when a Stephanie is in an emotional state and tells you to leave, you do it, and if you don’t, well thats how you[...]

Still Diggin’: Our Tribute to Record Stores and Record Collecting

April 14, 2014 Mike Torsell

By now, it is almost a cliche to point out that, with the rise of digital media consumption, there has been a parallel rise in older formats rooted in its physical existence. For every E-Book reader, you will find another person loudly decrying the value of books. So it is with music that, with the ubiquity of now streaming music delivery, many still cling to their ever expanding record collections. I don’t want to say one format is better than the other because, in the end, digital would win from a practical standpoint (ubiquity, takes up no space, infinitely portable, etc.), and I personally think that the two can exist together quite peacefully. But, I think it is also very human to want to have something tangible to tie us to the things we love, a way of connecting ourself to the world around us through the medium of records,[...]