Score!
My friend Caleb lives near the big Everyday Music on Sandy, which is a used music store. It’s to used music what Powell’s City of Books is to, well, books. I went there last night with my friend.
One of my favorite bands is Radiohead, and I own all of their major releases. A while ago I found an EP of theirs at the Everyday Music on Burnside, so I tend to check the Radiohead bin even though the odds of finding anything I don’t already have is pretty slim.
But the odds were on my side last night. When I checked the bin, there was an EP I’d never seen before: “My Iron Lung”, apparently released around 1994, with eight tracks, six of which I’d never heard of, and one a version I’d never heard!
- my iron lung
- the trickster
- lewis (mistreated)
- punchdrunk lovesick singalong
- permanent daylight
- lozenge of love
- you never wash up after yourself
- creep (acoustic)
That’s a lot of new Radiohead songs! So this morning I’m doing some research on it. I figure it’s an import or something. Well, Follow Me Around (a fansite) shows this EP, with this track listing, as an Australian import. Cool! But then At Ease shows it as a Dutch import… interesting. The CD I have shows that it’s printed in Holland, so I guess I have the Dutch import. The label is Parlophone, which comes up in Google as a UK label, part of EMI. Then I checked All Music Guide and saw that they described this EP:
…as close to a forgotten, long-lost Radiohead album as you can get. Although marketed and priced as an EP, it contains eight tracks, seven of which are unavailable anywhere else, and is half an hour long (which more than meets the criteria for a full-length). But besides its length, what makes My Iron Lung such a find is the quality of the tracks, all of them being great outtakes from the sessions for their classic 1995 full-length release The Bends.
Joy! After I’ve listened to it a million times I’ll post my own review, but I can tell you that a) I’m already a fan of Radiohead and predisposed to like their sound, and b) Since these are outtakes from “The Bends” and that was my first favorite Radiohead CD I’m even more predisposed to like these (yes, I’ve learned to like “Kid A” and “Amnesiac” and the others, too, but “The Bends” was my first favorite). What? Why haven’t I listened to it yet already? Because I’m moving my MP3 collection to a server and therefore iTunes is busy, so I haven’t ripped it to my iPod yet. And my actual CD player, out in the living room, isn’t hooked up (a product of my recent move).