[$6 // Edition of 200 // https://roklokrecords.bandcamp.com/album/days-ive-lost-b-w-clean-hell]
The moment I first found out about this record I thought to myself: this is the first time Shivering Window has been on vinyl, isn't it? I had to confirm this, which I did, but I always find it exciting when someone is on vinyl for the first time and many artists strive to be on vinyl. In a world now where record labels don't always mean as much as they used to (In the sense that you don't want to get signed, become a millionaire and live happily ever after since you can pretty much release your own music now for the world to hear) vinyl seems to be the tipping point for many.
And why wouldn't it be? Anyone can copy over an old Barry Manilow cassette or buy some blanks at Walmart (Actually, releasing a cassette might not *seem* expensive on paper, but it is still rather hard) but to be on vinyl, that takes some real money and that money being invested in you shows that you've got something that not everybody else does. You are worth putting money into the same way that people would once get tens of thousands of dollars thrown their way after making a demo of a few songs and some corporate suit would say "Go make a gold record, kid".
I'm not sure what any of that means, but Shivering Window has always been a band that I've enjoyed hearing the lo-fi songs of on cassette. They sound like they are often times recorded straight onto cassettes and so it is not wrong to relate them with being as such. But there was always something about them that I couldn't describe that just made me feel like they had this sound that sound be on record. Some artists don't make sense to me on vinyl, some artists don't even make sense to me on cassette, but for whatever reasons Shivering Window has just always worked on cassette and when I found out about this record it just seemed perfect.
Two songs- like the old records my dad would buy for a quarter- this is a song called "Days I've Lost" on the front and "Clean Hell" on the back. I really like "Days I've Lost" because if you've ever sat around and thought about how old you are, how many days are in a year and thus how many days you've lived and how much you remember from each of those days... Yeah. There is a quote I have written down somewhere from a book I read once but I'm not going to go find it so I'll just paraphrase. The author said he didn't keep a journal because as great as the great times were he didn't want to remember the downtime, all the days where nothing really happened. I feel like those are the days I've lost. Well, and other days for other reasons as well.
Through dreamy trip bliss and drum machines come something similar to "Pretty in Pink" and is somehow both melodic and whispy. During "Clean Hell" there is the sound of birds chirping which rightfully disturbs Tito, one of my cats but also the one who is usually sleeping next to me the most. I'm not sure whether Shivering Window has any official music videos or not, but these two songs make me feel like if the next step was to make a video for one of these songs it'd definitely involve a fog machine.
While I feel like the reasons to own this outweigh the reasons why you shouldn't, it's really as simple as this: I don't own a lot of vinyl. I own a lot of cassettes. But in those rare instances such as this when one of the artists I love on cassette puts out a record, yeah, I'm going to end up owning a record. Sure, I have more records than I'd like to right now because of that, but I've never really considered that to be a bad thing and neither should you.
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