Spin Doctors – Homebelly Groove Audio Cassette

Grunge could have been a disaster for the Spin Doctors. The band shared a number of traits with full-on grunge artists, but were initially considered by their record label, Epic, to be too dilute. Indeed, Epic told the band that their first studio album – A Pocket Full of Kyptonite – would not sell because of its musical diversity, and they blew the promo budget on Pearl Jam instead.

Early 1970s Scotch Dynarange C-120 Audio Tape

I was quite flippant about the performance when I posted a photo of a Scotch Dynarange C-90 in 2012, but it’s often very hard with old tapes to evaluate them properly, since so little is known about the recording conditions, and there’s little or no space to record new sequences for test purposes.

Gladly, however, I’ve now unearthed an early ‘70s Scotch Dynarange C-120 with plenty of blank space on Side B, so I set about establishing what these 40+ year-old stalwarts are like when it comes to preserving a known quality of signal.

Sonic Youth – Sister Audio Cassette (UK (1987)

You get a perfect sense of what sort of album this is going to be from the fact that the labels are stuck on the wrong sides of the tape. Side 2’s label is on Side 1, and vice versa. I’ve often wondered whether this was deliberate, given Sonic Youth’s approach, but even if not, it’s entirely in keeping with with the chaotic and contradictory attitude of the music.