Squeeze: UK Squeeze

A first pressing of a record released in 1978 on limited edition red vinyl!?  Must be a collectible worth tons of $ right?  Not so much.  These can be had on Amazon for $6.79.  I hope I can get that deposit back on the lake house...

Judging a book by its cover I forever believed that the music on here would be reminiscent of the Sex Pistols only not as good (I swear my "Never Mind the Bullocks" album is the same color, same style without the guy about to explode).   This is an American release by the band Squeeze.  How can you tell it's American?  They had to put 'U.K" on the cover as there was apparently some legal trouble with releasing an album in the US by a band called "Squeeze" when there was already a band in the U.S. called "Tight Squeeze".  I don't see what the big deal was.  But that's neither here nor there.  I've been dragging this album around for 30 years from school to apartment to house to house.  So today I decided that, after 30 years, I would actually pull this out in order to figure out what was on here.  I was in for a complete surprise.

I'm actually eating Chinese food right now so I'm going to make this quick.  There are some great songs on here.  There is some bluesy stuff with some tasty musicianship.  There's even a pretty cool instrumental on here.  It spans the gamut from new wave and punk to R&B.  Not at ALL what I thought would be on here.  I can't give track names because I wasn't paying attention and just like when I watch movies I'm going to have to give this another listen before I can really remember anything in depth.  I was mostly left with a feeling of "this is cool, I need to hear it again".

As far as the red vinyl though, it sounds like crap.  It's noisy, the mastering is really terrible, squashed and thin.  I have this album also on normal vinyl and swapped it out when I flipped the record over. It was less noisy, not as badly mastered but not great.   When I go to put this on again (most likely next week in order to wash the sound of Shrek the Musical out of my brain) I'll be putting on the black vinyl.  A little research online found quite a following for the Squeeze with many other releases I didn't even know existed.  I'll have to check out a "Best of" to figure out what they really sound like and how they've changed over the years but that's for another day.