OK, I know this one isn't an album, it's an EP. But still, it's my blog so I can bend the rules if I want to! :P
Either way, I had to include this.
It was sometime in the summer of 1996, I'd dropped out of uni and was living in the town where I'd originally gone to study. By this point, I was hanging around with a local crowd which included one other guy who'd done the same thing as me a year earlier, and it was this guy who introduced me to this EP.
The two of us were sitting in his flat getting stoned and listening to music. I was still, to all intents and purposes a metalhead at this point, but that was slowly changing as I began to tire of listening to one genre of music all the time. And throughout the course of this languid sunny mid-week afternoon, this guy played music that brought me back to my indie/alt-rock years.
"Did you used to listen to Archers of Loaf before?" he asked, referring to my pre-Metal days.
"No, never heard of them," I said.
Then he put on this EP and it blew me away.
Melodic but noisy, aggressive yet measured, it was exactly what I needed to hear to reawaken my former self. To this day, when I hear this EP, I think of sunlight bleeding into the living room that afternoon, fusing into my mental associations with the music itself. I think of the energy of opener 'Audiowhore', the goosebumps from the bass chords of its pre-chorus and the sulky 'Freezing Point' that seemed like a musical representation of everything I felt then, but couldn't put into words. Later that afternoon as I walked home in a buzzed haze, the outro to 'All Hail the Black Market' morphed with the honey hues of the late afternoon, melting away the concrete blandness that framed the cityscape.
So yes, this little EP had quite an effect on me, being just what I needed at just the right time, earning itself a well deserved place here.
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