Darkroom – San Paku (1983)

Goth-tinged new wave from my home town of Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.

Great album, far exceeding the typical talent and production quality of the average local yokel rock bands that came out of Alberta in the 80s, as you’ll see as time goes on and I post more Alberta albums. Frontman Jim Gray has a fantastic voice and the band seems to have been quite a good marketable package deal. They seem to still be touring off and have an internet presence. I’ve got their follow-up LP as well, which will be coming along eventually (if you have any preferences about what I upload and want me to hurry up with anything in particular, don’t be shy, drop me a line!) As far as I understand, the master tapes are deposited at the Alberta Provincial Archives, but I’m assuming the label owns the copyright and legal snags have been preventing any official remastered release even though the band is still alive and kicking.

Technical Notes: I spent more time than I usually do on cleanup for this one, although I still capped it at a few hours of work and left the less-egregious noise intact. If this was a needle drop for an official release of course there would be a lot more TLC given to it. The pressing is quite decent and low-noise, and after a clean the record was close to near-mint condition. Oddly, though, the track volume seems to decrease as the album goes on, with each track on average being quieter than the previous one. I chose to leave these dynamics as-is in order to avoid distracting increases in surface noise between tracks.

With the master tapes still apparently in existence, it seems stupid to try to create a definitive version from a modest vinyl rip – although it still certainly sounds better to my ears than the band’s semi-official YouTube posts of the same tracks.