“I turn 29 in a week, I’m five years older than the rest of the guys in the band and I’m guessing that I’m the only one who still remembers vinyl as a main musical format before CDs were introduced… only just, mind you.”
“Having said that, I don’t exactly have the those warm fuzzy memories that people talk about (usually in the lead up to Record Store Day) of being a young kid digging through their parents’ record collection and the excitement of hearing the crackle when the needle hits the vinyl. If I’m being honest, my first experience with vinyl was a yellow 7” of ‘The March of the Bunnykins’ by the Royal Doulton band and the Thunderbirds theme tune on flexi-disc cut off the back of a Frosties cereal box.
Music wasn’t such a big deal in my house when I was younger—my old man definitely got me into Pink Floyd, but that wasn’t until he bought his first CD player and his first order was Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here—2 records that definitely drove me to pick up a guitar in the first place. The only vinyl record I remember playing a lot of was Michael Jackson’s Thriller, which would have been played so often that I probably wore the grooves out.
Despite not having the best start, I do love vinyl. I still believe it to be the highest quality format to play music on today. I’m listening to Deafheaven’s Sunbather on a ‘piss yellow’ coloured LP right now and it sounds glorious. It’s been great to see its resurgence in the last few years, especially in a time when clueless record exec dinosaurs have completely lost their grasp on their own industry. It’s a good thing I don’t smoke, do drugs, or drink heavily because any of these combined with my current vinyl buying habit would no doubt bankrupt me.
My girlfriend bought me my first turntable as a Christmas present 6 years ago and of all the nice gifts she’s given me over the years I still maintain that it’s my favourite. That’s when the obsession started, it was love at second sight, or second sound, I guess. The clarity and depth of the sound off a real record really is absolutely untouchable. I still maintain that MP3 is a great format for on the go or in the car, but put an MP3 through a good pair of speakers in your home and it just doesn’t compare. If you are passionate about music, then this is something you care about.
I actually work in the audio industry and one thing I hear a lot is that listeners want to feel as though they are in the room with the musician, they want to feel like Miles Davis is standing 6 feet in front of them—they want to be immersed—and you can’t get this from an MP3.
You don’t need to be a musician to care about that sort of thing either, but being in a band has made me appreciate high fidelity even more than before. Once you create something, in this case a piece of music, you don’t want to hear it in a diminished format. And I have to admit I’m a sucker for the artwork too. Gatefold sleeves and inserts, all of it, I can’t get enough and I don’t want to be leafing through something that’s 5″ square or a PDF on my computer screen. I want it big and bold, and colourful, something to truly admire.
We are just about to release our debut album Building Homes from Broken Bones and we had intended to release it as a 12″ LP, but it’s broken my heart a little to realise that we can’t afford to do it, at least not for the initial release and I would love nothing more than for it to do well enough that it gives us enough money to get it pressed to vinyl.
We’ve put so much time and effort into it now that I feel it deserves nothing less.”
—Fraser Sanaghan
Penguins Kill Polar Bears’ debut album Building Homes From Broken Bones lands on store shelves 7th April 2014.
