If you encounter these issues with our vinyl, we will send replacements when appropriate and if copies of the records are still available. I feel kind of bad, because every time people ask me what it tastes like, I say it’s disgusting,” she says. These cosmetic issues include: seam splits on either the jackets or inner sleeves, dinged or bent corners, and other slight imperfections on the packaging and colored vinyl. Pharmacist,’ the first track on the album, is an exciting jumping off point for what is sure to be one of the albums of the year.

Alvvays’ self-titled debut will turn 10 years old next summer, but Rankin says celebration plans are still up in the air. Lyrics like ‘those days, I’d never let you fall apart but things fade like the scent of a brand new car’ from After The Earthquake hint at the growth and changes of relationships; a tale of once having had the power and emotional adversity to get their partner through anything but now it’s beginning to fade.Named for the sugary alcoholic beverage Rankin and MacLellan used to drink as teens on rural Cape Breton, Blue Rev looks both back at that country past and forward at an uncertain world, reckoning with what we lose whenever we make a choice about what we want to become. It is a cultural hallmark of my youth, so whether it’s gross or not, it remains vivid and a cornerstone. Released on October 7, Blue Rev is Alvvays‘ third studio album and the first recorded with new members, Sheridan Riley (drums) and Abbey Blackwell (bass). Much like the sound, the sentiment is so layered and dreamy that the real pain underneath is obscured, almost invisible.

Check with your local post office and see if they can provide more information on where your package is and when it is scheduled to be delivered. You’re almost unable to pinpoint what era this track is from; its big 80s keys with layered harmonies cradle the MBV-like guitars for the big Belinda Belt that Rankin gives at the end of the last verse (what a vocal register this gal has).

In fact, the band began writing and cutting its first bits soon after releasing 2017’s Antisocialites, that stunning sophomore record that confirmed the Toronto quintet’s status atop a new generation of winning and whip-smart indie rock. There are newly aggressive moments here—the gleeful and snarling guitar solo at the heart of opener “Pharmacist,” or the explosive cacophony near the middle of “Many Mirrors.

I was scoping our whole discography, and my phone was just going crazy and I didn’t want to be rude, so I wasn’t looking at anything,” she says. But in October 2021, when they arrived at a Los Angeles studio with fellow Canadian Shawn Everett, he urged them to forget the careful planning they’d done and just play the stuff, straight to tape.Aside from those mix discrepancies this is super enjoyable, details otherwise missing or extremely drowned due to compression in the digital version shine through here, feels like a completely different mix! It’s the realisation that a person who you believed to be a central figure in your life is no longer that version. The luminous poser kiss-off of “Velveteen,” the lovelorn confusion of “Tile by Tile,” the panicked but somehow reassuring rush of “After the Earthquake”. These issues include: excessively warped vinyl, significantly scratched or scuffed records, excessive noise and pops during playback, and locked grooves. Last month, the band earned their first-ever Grammy nomination for the Blue Rev favorite “Belinda Says,” which is up for Best Alternative Music Performance.

despite being great new music, this particular pressing is nonetheless "exhausting and unnecessarily loud" (tons of vocal sibilance) as well as "very distorted" and "muffed, [with] vocals [that] are barely audible. Alvvays released Blue Rev in October 2022, landing at Number 12 on Rolling Stone‘s year-end albums list later that year.It does play into the essence of our band, because we release albums with so much time in between and we [have] a ‘less is more’ kind of ideology,” she says. Both Polyvinyl titles have garnered praise across the music world, earning spots on year-end best-of lists by The Guardian, Pitchfork and The Ringer, among many others. On the second day, they ripped through Blue Rev front-to-back twice, pausing only 15 seconds between songs and only 30 minutes between full album takes.