Gone and done it again and all it took was some orange vinyl. Admittedly, I had heard of the Love Me Nots before but that’s hardly the point. I was trying to get the old vinyl addiction under control but their LP – “The Demon and The Devotee” – was on limited edition orange vinyl. Damn the electricity bill, I had to have it!
Fortunately, there were musically valid reasons for getting twelve inches of vinyl shipped in from the other side of America especially if you have retro tastes – for a start, how often do you hear a Farfisa organ these days? Lyrically, these foot stompers tread familiar ground even if they are a bit bleaker than you would expect from what would otherwise be a Friday night party band. Taking “She’s Nothing Like Me” as an example, being the bottom vertice in a love triangle gets the slap of brutal realism (“…she won’t get dirty, won’t get on her knees, she’s nothing like me”) and said theme getting revisited from the reverse angle in “Cheap Knockoff”.
However, it is a fact that it is the more pumped up songs that stick in the mind here. Much as I might admire “Trouble” as a downbeat lullaby of the broken hearted, it was the raucous protestations in “Stay” and the stalking cat sensibilities of “The End of the Line” that sold this album to me as they took the band on a trip away from Phoenix Arizona and dumped them in pre punk New York. Nicole Laurenne’s voice took on that I’m gonna let you buy me drinks and them I’m gonna steal your wallet anyway quality that I so admire ( I buy a lot of wallets…). Is it wrong to sweat, I hear you say? Not if you are listening to the Love Me Nots it isn’t!
As I would appear to have mentioned previously, this LP come on orange vinyl (I’ll pay the electricity bill next week, honest…) with the pressing being the work of Pirates Pressing. The insert that comes with the LP suggests that mastering was done at SAE Mastering in Arizona although there is nothing in the runout groove to confirm that. Sound quality, however, is rather fine so no complaints in that department and I did like the suitably retro cover art too.