Vinyl Vednesday 12/9

[Vinyl Vednesday is a weekly feature about three favorite vinyl finds. It’s not meant to be a dick-measuring contest, but it kinda is. This week’s entry is on New Found Glory, in honor of their sold out 12/12 acoustic show at the Trocadero with Dashboard Confessional. E-mail pelonej1@gmail.com with your own big finds!]

Records: New Found Glory’s New Found Glory (2000) on picture disc, “Listen to My Friends” single (2009) on clear white, and Not Without a Fight (2009) on tan camo marble something or other.

Place of Purchase: The self-titled album came from eBay. “Listen to My Friends” was an impulse buy from Hot Topic, while Not Without a Fight was an intended HT purchase from the start.

Thoughts: Oh Lordy, how I wish I owned Nothing Gold Can Stay on vinyl, but that ish is too expensive for a humble service worker like me. Of course, now that I say that, I know I’m going to try to buy it again sometime soon. For the time being, though, my best NFG find is their self-titled second record. There are a number of different picture discs floating out there; mine has a skateboard on one side and a joystick on the other. Gold will always be my favorite NFG record, but the s/t is mighty fine as well – big hooks, big breakdowns, even the occasional bass-boom abound on this hardcore-indebted pop-punk ode to girls and their mysterious ways. Side note: The guy I bought this from packaged my copy with Sticks and Stones sleeves, which gave me quite a start when I opened the box. I saved them because… well… maybe I’ll need them for packing material as well?

Less significant to me (now) is the band’s “Listen to Your Friends” single. The B-side is a karaoke (re: instrumental) version of the song, which I don’t have any reason to listen to ever, although it did come with a limited edition poster priced at a whopping $2. This seven-inch was valuable to me at one point, though. After Coming Home, I’d pretty much given up on NFG. But when I saw this single while shopping at Hot Topic, I felt this nagging, Irish Catholic guilt-derived need to give the band one more chance (perhaps the pretty great EP The Tip of the Iceberg contributed to this feeling). Thank goodness for my deeply rooted neuroses, because “Listen to Your Friends” is a classic NFG romper-stomper, which inspired me to pick up…

Not Without a Fight is a nifty return to form. The band’s output got spotty after New Found Glory – I hated Sticks and Stones (although I’m apparently in the minority), loved Catalyst, and just did not dig Coming Home and From the Screen to Your Stereo Part II – but their work since then has been great. Their topics have slightly broadened, in that a lot of these love songs could just as easily be about the band, but it’s still the NFG I fell in love with in high school. They’re pop-punk lifers, and apparently so am I.