Vinyl Distractions

Let The Festivities Begin~ front cover. Featuring four women, the gand members of Los Bitchos, seated in front of white balloons and behind a table set with a cake and party drinks, they are raising glasses and wearing party hats, illustrating the title of "let the festivities begin!"

'20s / Catchup / Colored Vinyl / Intrumental / World

March 30, 2025

Los Bitchos – Let The Festivities Begin!

Well, I’m surprised to find that somehow I haven’t yet written about Los Bitchos! I mentioned them in the last entry on Los Wembler’s de Iquitos and then found that I’ve never written them...

Los Wembler's de Iquitos front cover – a rather psychedelic design of various colors, geographic shapes, eyes, leaves, fish and other elements.

'20s / Catchup / World

March 25, 2025

Los Wembler’s de Iquitos – Vision del Ayahuasca

This is one of my weirder recent acquisitions, in terms of being outside my normal tastes. I knew exactly zero about cumbia music before discovering Los Bitchos, whose infectious cumbia-based instrumentals delight me –...

Claudine Longet We've Only Just Begun front cover – The title and song titles are in type on the left. The photograph shows the head and shoulders of Claudine Longet, with her shoulder-length straight brown hair appearing rather mussy and windswept, her large eyes looking straight ahead, little evident makeup other than mascara. Her expression is pleasant but blank, not smiling.

Catchup / Pop

March 24, 2025

Claudine Longet – We’ve Only Just Begun

Okay, not every purchase is a good purchase, even if it’s from the dollar bin, even if it’s likely my dealer just tossed it in with whatever else I was buying that day. I...

'70s / '80s / Blues / Catchup

March 16, 2025

Living Chicago Blues – Vols. 1-6

Sometime in the around 1991, I picked up a CD on Alligator, “Living Chicago Blues, Vol. 4.” Most likely I got it at the old Records ‘n’ Such in Stuyvesant Plaza, which had a...

Lightnin' Strikes front cover – featuring the title stacked to the left, and then Lightnin' Hopkins stacked to the right. Below that is a picture of Hopkins, a middle-aged Black man, wearing a cocked hat, sunglasses, and smoking a cigarette, looking straight at the viewer.

'60s / Blues / Catchup

March 10, 2025

Lightnin’ Hopkins – Lightnin’ Strikes

Here’s another really heavyweight reissue by Lightnin’ Hopkins – I mean, the cardboard has a weight not seen since the early ’60s. Very sturdy gatefold. Verve was always oriented toward quality production, and seems...

Mojo Hand front cover – with the title in very large, black letters outlined in white, with white chalk highlights. a photograph of a hand breakds through the red background of the album cover, appearing to have torn through the board. Below, the artist's name, Lightnin' Hopkins, is set in Mistral.

'60s / Blues / Catchup / Colored Vinyl

March 7, 2025

Lightnin’ Hopkins – Mojo Hand (Japanese Mono)

Did I end up buying a second copy of “Mojo Hand“? Yes, yes I did. Did I know that it was virtually identical to another recently acquired copy of “Mojo Hand” when I bought...

Light in the Attic and Friends front cover – a very folk art style illustration. The entire image is bordered by dots and four-pointed stars. within, there is a house with a face, birds and flowers, plants growing into the ground with snails and mushrooms.

'10s / '20s / Alternative / Catchup / Colored Vinyl / Compilation / Pop / RecordStoreDay

March 6, 2025

Light In The Attic and Friends

Light In The Attic is a label that I was really only familiar with because of their really excellent reissues of Betty Davis’s groundbreaking funk albums, which showed a real dedication to the music...

'20s / Alternative / Catchup / Colored Vinyl / Pop

March 3, 2025

Jenny Lewis – Joy’All

I guess one good Jenny Lewis deserves another, so here’s another – 2023’s “Joy’All.” I was uncharacteristically aware that this was coming out. Sometimes the algorithm gets it right. It may also have been...

Jenny Lewis Voyager front cover, showing just a woman's torso in a colorful blazer, perhaps painted. It is light colored at the top, blue shifting to darker green moving down the jacket, then turning to white with a line of ocean waves and clouds. There are stars across both lapels. Her brown hair hangs down on her right side, lightly wavy. Her bare skin shows between the lapels, with a necklace that is cut-out letters reading "Jenny" above and "The Voyager," the album title, below.

'10s / Alternative / Catchup

March 2, 2025

Jenny Lewis – Voyager

As much as I’ve imposed my musical tastes on my kids through the years (what choice did they have?), sometimes it does come back in the other direction. One of their friends turned our...

Vinyl Distractions