various artists - Monitor This! Oct/Nov 2010

I like to play this little game when I come across this, a sampler that came from the missus' collection. It's "which record did she buy to get this free with purchase?"

Was it Superchunk, whose "Majesty Shredding" was a heavy spin for the two of us in our first year dating each other? She's always been a big Ben Folds fan, with loads of CD-R filled with live sets. I bought her a copy of his 2010 collaboration with author Nick Hornby, "Lonely Avenue", during a record-buying binge before she went home for Christmas that year. It seems unlikely it would have been the recent releases by Robert Plant (not a Zep fan, as far as I know) or Jerry Lee Lewis (she's a Sun Records purist). Maybe it was KT Tunstall; she's the right age to have blasted "Suddenly I See" while bombing down I-97 to her job in Annapolis. Or perhaps Anberlin, as she listened to a fair amount of emo-adjacent alt rock for years before meeting me. A Stone Sour purchase would confuse me. A late-catalog Ice Cube CD would be very out of character for her. And Maroon 5? Well, in this house, that's grounds for a serious conversation.

With any luck, it was a Mark Ronson record that I've yet to turn up in our shared collection. Or maybe somebody just tossed it in her bag to be nice, one fall day in 2010.

Discogs

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various artists - Monitor This! April / May 09

This comes to us courtesy of the Missus' record collection. She brought some truly exceptional recordings to our now-shared collection. And some pieces like this, a freebie that came with purchase of an associated title. I would hope that she purchased Doves' "Kingdom Of Rust"; I fear it was instead Rocco DeLuca & The Burden's "Mercy".

So why share something I mostly don't care about? Well, in the course of researching this series, I uncovered that this was the audio giveaway from the Record Exchange, a branch of which was the first record store I ever spent my hard earned dollars. I bought my first Fugazi record from the Record Exchange in Roanoke, along with demo tapes for a bunch of mostly-forgotten alternative and punk bands from south-western Virginia. "Music Monitor" was just as important a source of information as "Rolling Stone", "HeartattaCk", and "Maximum Rock & Roll". So this sampler, headlined (for me, at least) by Doves, Diana Krall, and Lady Sovereign, brought back a few fond memories of well-spent youth, digging in the crates and discovering a world I knew little about.

Discogs

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