VMP Magazine

VMP Rising is our series where we celebrate up-and-coming bands and put their music on vinyl, often for the first time ever. Our newest VMP Rising ...

Originally published in 2017, we remember Christina Aguilera’s Stripped, which turns 20 this week.

Have you ever spent a wallet’s worth of cash at the pet store, carefully hand-curating a batch of toys that you think your cat will love, only to have her reject them for the crinkled receipt? Of course you have! Despite having a beautiful scratching post all to herself, the cat is always going to ravage the corner of the couch when she’s compelled to unsheathe her claws. Or the coffee table. Or the mattress. You’re just the helpless human witnessing the path of her kitty destruction.

Until she goes after the record collection.

Today Liza Anne is feeling three main emotions: “overproductive” (because she’s been helping clean out an old estate), “grateful” (because she’s with family), and “expansive” (because she feels her mind is quite literally expanding).

Fiona Apple's landmark sophomore album, When the Pawn... turns 20 this weekend. To celebrate, we're running this essay, which looks back at the album.

While I rode the bus to school in 2006, destruction ensued far, far away from my little rural town in upstate New York. America shipped out its troops to Iraq in droves. Thousands of Iraqis were killed. Saddam Hussein was about to meet his fate, and the search for Osama Bin Laden continued. Every night on the news, I saw how adults were messing up the world, and I couldn’t have felt more disconnected. I was 16. I couldn’t even vote yet.

I was on that bus when I first heard John Mayer’s “Waiting on the World to Change” over the radio in 2006. Admittedly, Mayer was my first celebrity crush. Ever since I saw him grace the TRL studio — baggy cargo pants, baby-faced, full of wit and charm — I doodled gel-penned declarations of my love for him in my journal. Despite being a complete dreamboat, I related to him. I felt seen when he recounted his awkward relationships and insecurities on Room For Squares (2001) and Heavier Things (2003).

photo by Galin Foley

Esther Rose’s last album ends with a moonlit declaration of love at 2 a.m. But as life would have it, 2021 has her in a completely different state.

Life out on the lonely road… It’s a tale that many rockstars sing about, longing for a day they can actually come home from traipsing around the world, meeting faceless fans and playing show after show. It can get lonesome on tour, and yet, somehow, they can’t shed their vagabond ways.

Marissa Nadler cares for all of her hundreds of songs, no matter how twisted, sad or deep. She gives them space to live as they weave in and out of her fans' fostership. Out of 14 albums— seven commercial and seven self-released—she has her favorite tracks, sure, but there’s a standout in the litter, and, for a while, she had to figure out why it was so different.

Listening to Bedouine is like walking into a rustically decorated Airbnb—you feel oddly cozy, like you’re at home, yet you feel the thrill of staying in a place that’s not your own. Bedouine’s self-titled debut (out now on Spacebomb Records) is sleepy and smart, smothered in ’60s folk and ’70s country, with lush orchestral arrangements that take you to another place. So much of it looks and sounds familiar, but it’s brand new and exhilarating, daring you to step inside and spend some time. When you listen, you wrap yourself in the wool blanket of her vocals, while letting the strings rustle around you like a strange shiver.

There’s a little something irritating, like lemon in a split cuticle, when you listen to Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain”—the clawing frustration of an unsolved mystery from when all the clues are right there in front of you. Yet, the answer remains in its annoying cove in Simon’s brain, snickering at us as we try to figure out...“Who’s so vain?”

We’ve been spoiled with other artists, who’ve satiated our hunger for gossip and given away the subjects of their songs. It’s clear that when we listen to Justin Timberlake’s “Cry Me A River,” Taylor Swift’s “Dear John” and pretty much the entirety of Beyonce’s Lemonade that we’re getting songs about Britney Spears, John Mayer and Jay Z.

We talk to Noga Erez about her debut LP, Off The Radar, which we have in our store now on an exclusive blue vinyl.

It’s hard to describe what the inside of Alexandra Savior’s brain looks like, but she supposes there’s a lot of velvet. Listening to her debut album, Belladonna of Sadness, you can imagine there might be a few dimly lit hallways, scarlet-hued walls, a creepy parlor filled with omniscient stone-faced characters... and a gun positioned perilously on a side table.

Methyl Ethel’s album was not made for you. Let’s get that straight right now. The second LP from the Perth art-rock outfit dropped out of the mind of Jake Webb—song by song, like Tetris blocks morphing shape until they locked into place. When the level cleared, he’s on to the next puzzle. While Everything Is Forgotten was just released March 3 on 4AD, Webb’s consumed by another project, tinkering away at an album that we won’t hear for “a long time.” At least that’s what Webb says to me on the phone, calling from some Australian bathroom where he went to find some tranquility.

Just when you think your vinyl collection is complete, you discover something even crazier—a rarer find, a more exclusive release, a sold-out collector’s item, etc. So goes the never-ending hunt of the crate digger. Perhaps you’ve stocked up on boxed sets and you’ve even got wacky colored vinyl. But what about picture discs? What about shaped vinyl? What about that record that got printed on chocolate?? Do you have that?

Quick history lesson: Picture discs were created as a gimmick in the 1920s, but rose to popularity again the 1970s (one quick Google, and you’ll discover that about half of them feature a cut-out of Gary Numan’s head). Combine picture discs with a funky shape, a practice used by record labels to sell music in the 1980s, and you’ve got one flashy single release. And even though a lot of these bad boys originated in the ‘80s, many Record Store Day releases today have used the format as well, so you might see a few modern-day shaped singles floating around, too.

Here’s a few weirdly shaped records, both new and old, that you might want for your collection: