Description
Ukrainian pressed music cassette. Clear Western Thunder cassette with white text.
Poland is probably the country that had the most record labels in the world that only released cassettes. But even though there were lots of labels the market was still small as they only printed these for their own market inside of Poland. And a label in one town maybe lacked the distribution for another town and so on. A Warzaw or Krakow label might print more copies of a tape then labels from a smaller town. So even if there are thousands of releases you will notice how rare some are if you start to try to list the catalogue number of one particular label. Some cassettes just rarely shows up. When the Polish Parliament passed on a new copyright law in May of 1994 most Polish cassette labels disappeared but several new labels started to produced tapes in Ukraine instead where the cassette market reached it peak between 1994 and 2000. WT / Western Thunder (Zakhidnyy Hrim) was one of those Ukrainian labels that started in 1994 and managed to produced somewhere between a thousand and fifteen hundred cassettes up to 2000. They were based on the Malinovsky Blvd 28-B in Kiew.
Before Radiohead became the biggest critics darling since Pavement or Dr. Dre, they were just another pre-Oasis British band with some loose indie ties, trying to gain some cred. Loopy enough to name this moody, often battering debut album for a Jerky Boys routine, they were also a lot more interesting when they hadn’t yet learned the word soundscape. Creep, the miserably majestic single they now claim nearly ruined them, may not even be the best thing here; try Anyone Can Play Guitar, an epitaph for River Phoenix before the fact. Today the album is often dismissed by critics as something that lacks the quality compared to later Radiohead albums. (It’s a viewpoint also often directed towards Blur and their debut Leisure, also a great record.) I think so much of that posturing is just a result of not giving the record a chance on its own terms. The album as a whole really does not suffer from a feeling of datedness (like much of the other alt-rock of the 1993-4 era.)
Track list:
1. You
2. Creep
3. How Do You?
4. Anyone Can Play Guitar
5. Vegetable
6. Blow Out
7. Stop Whispering
8. Thinking About You
9. Ripcord
10. Prove Yourself
11. I Can’t
12. Lurgee