Listen: A Phone Call From Oliver Reed (A Real Gone Sampler 2023)

The year end “sampler” has long been one of our year end traditions at Real Gone. Although in recent years, the sampler has taken the form of an online stream as opposed to a traditional download, we’ve continued to receive good feedback about the annual project, and still managed to introduce people to things they missed throughout the previous twelve months.

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GUIDED BY VOICES – Nowhere To Go But Up

In February 2020, Guided By Voices released their thirtieth full length album, ‘Surrender Your Poppy Field’. At the point where it appeared on record shop shelves, it was seen as just another album from the ever prolific Robert Pollard. At the time, nobody really knew it would be vastly overlooked due to the world grinding to a halt a few weeks later. As it turned out, though, the disc was far from the band’s best. It boasted a grand opening track, and shared a couple of other fine tunes within its thirty nine minutes, but in terms of exciting GBV fare, it seemed rather lacklustre compared to 2018’s ‘Space Gun’ and 2019’s ‘Warp & Woof’ and ‘Sweating The Plague’.

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Rubies & Rudders: The Real Gone Sampler 2020

It’s that time of year again when Real Gone takes stock of all of the great music that’s been sent our way over the last twelve months.  Changes in how people consume their music has meant shifting from providing a free download to offering an album length stream, but the variety and quality of the new music remains very high.

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GUIDED BY VOICES – Surrender Your Poppy Field

After Guided By Voices reunited in 2012, the band went into recording overdrive. Robert Pollard’s abilities to be prolific were always known – at any one time, he could be working on a variety of projects – but few would have suspected the band would release three albums of brand new material in a little over ten months. Their comeback disc ‘Let’s Go Eat The Factory’ was a return to many of the ramshackle lo-fi experiments that filled the much-loved ‘Alien Lanes’ and while it sounded great upon release, time has allowed a little rust to set in. Some of the moments that sounded like welcome imperfections now sound like generic GBV filler rather than lo-fi quirks. Thanks to a few amazing tunes – and a really catchy single in ‘Doughnut For A Snowman’ – it’s worth a spin once in a while, but looking at the much bigger picture, it ranks somewhere in the mid table of the band’s vast output.

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Real Gone’s picks for Record Store Day 2020

Love it or hate it, Record Store Day has become an important fixture on the music-related calendar. From humble beginnings with a few bits and bobs to entice people into independent record shops, it’s now become a huge business tool, giving major labels an excuse to reissue all kinds of stuff. While it now seems more about a money making venture than to highlight small business, there’s still some cool stuff to be found. Never more so than for the 2020 event, where there are a truckload of artificially created rarities that look like lovely items for the keener fan.

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