Record Store Day: Stolen Recordings Compilation featuring The European

So it’s Record Store Day this Saturday – you know, support your local independent record shop – and there will be all kinds of treats available: one-off records, gigs, and more. Stolen Recordings’ RSD-special compilation 6 includes two tracks from six of the label’s artists, one new one and one ‘classic’. The album features The European, who isn’t as well known as Bo Ningen and Pete and the Pirates but should be.

In A Very Real Sense Now, The European’s first album, was one of my highlights of last year: nine smart, slightly odd pop songs. ‘I’m Compromising’, the ‘classic’ track on this new sampler, is an excellent example of Simon Break’s way with a tune. I suppose it’s a boy-meets-girl song but it’s really about what that means: abandoning self-sufficient complacency and starting to live for someone else. Compromising, in other words. Break’s delivery is pitched somewhere between melancholic and arch; the songs are funny but he’s deadly serious. They sound like deceptively simple electronic pop too, but there’s all kinds of things going on here.

Break promised that the next album will be a meditation on Dungeons and Dragons and the Enlightenment, and his second contribution to the Stolen sampler, ‘Universal Values’, is a demo of this album’s title track. Another strange and tongue-in-cheek tale, it made me laugh even before I heard the very long ‘guitar solo’ – which sounds like Break bothered a guitar with a hairbrush.

The Stolen compilation will be available from all good shops, including Manchester’s Piccadilly Records, who are also putting on all sorts of good stuff including a great free gig. Details here. You should also track down In A Very Real Sense Now – buy it from Stolen.

I can’t really put either of these tracks up – not the spirit of RSD at all, eh? – but here’s the other standout track from that first album; I’ve posted the video as well but most people find it a rather overwhelming experience (have a look at the hilarious youtube comments) and it’s safer to start here:

THE EUROPEAN – ‘The Settler’ – In A Very Real Sense Now

More on Record Store Day here and on 6 here.

JKneale