A Testing Romance

Earlier this month I wrote album the debut LP from The Catharsis entitled Romance. If you read it you'll know I've been pretty impressed by the band after recently stumbling upon them, so much so that one copy of the album was never going to be enough. A few days after writing about the record Rich of Speedowax Records who released the album tweeted that he was selling a few of the test presses of the record to help pay for future releases if anyone wanted one...boy did I.

I was pretty excited when this came through and here is my test press of Romance. This has the normal record sleeve with a sticker indicating that this is test number 8 of what I imagine is 10 test presses total? *correction 8 of 8 - thanks Jamie.

 

 

This record is great and I'm super pleased to have grabbed something like this early on. So I now have the green version and the test press, just the clear version of the record of 300 to go right? Well actually no, because Rich threw in a copy of that too.

 

 

I really wasn't expecting that and had actually already planned on having to pick up this version of the record from Rich at a later date so it's immensely appreciated. Here's a group shot of the complete set. Boom!

 

 

Now just to make me look like even more of a The Catharsis fan boy it doesn't stop there. See Rich was also selling a few test copies of the Worn Out / The Catharsis split that I also featured in my last post. And here it is:

 

 

I love that this has a different cover to the normal release this has a cover that is actually redder than it looks in these photos as opposed to the normal white cover.

 

As part of  my conversations with Rich about buying these two tests I asked him if I picked up both if he'd mind throwing in a copy of each of the bands previous releases too. You might remember I said in that last post about the Worn Out split that The Catharsis weren't even mentioned on the record sleeve and I knew that had since been changed or corrected or whatever so I wanted a copy with an updated sleeve

 As you can see the back of the record now features that familiar T/C text and song titles from the other band on the split. It was nice that the version Rich sent through seems to be a slight variant too as the inner bag was marked as 'Speckled' and on closer inspection the blue vinyl does indeed have some distinct black speckling on it.

So I'd now like to think I have a normal blue vinyl version and also a speckled blue vinyl version of this record. Here's a group shot of the three together. The new updated version of the split with the white cover you might also be able to see is clearer than the previous version too with a finer print that before.

To finish things off the haul here is my copy of the O'Recluse split with No Control

 

Black vinyl version of the record of 100 with 97 having this red text on the No Control side of the cover. 3 have a messed up splatter across the picture apparently. I love Rich's attention to pressing detail. NERD!!

 

 

Again the centre label of this is the same T/C as on the other releases. Some might think this a bit dull but I actually quite like the uniform approach to the discs.

 

 

Typically and like any good record collector I actually feel a little incomplete now and think I should try and pick up the green version of this split and a test if possible just to own everything the band have released.

 

Rich also chucked in some other releases by Speedowax with a note saying how much he liked reading the blog which always gives me a boost especially when it's from a someone actually putting quality records out rather than just collecting and writing about them. Such a good dude. I'm gonna write about those records in a future post as they are all excellent and I deserve their own write up time.