I’m not going to waste too much time here, it’s been a while. Life got a little low for a minute, I lost some family members and keeping up with this kind of stuff took a bit of a back seat. However I have been diving back into some old entries of blogs I read when I was first discovering a love for record collecting and thought it was about time. I hope you’re all well, sincerely.
There’s a new Praise record in the world, and after their 2022 LP ‘All In A Dream’ I have been eagerly awaiting some new material and these songs absolutely rip. I dig the hype sticker on the sleeve, detailing that this is the Record Store Exclusive (Clear With Green Smoke/ 300). There was also a Rev webstore exclusive colour /200 and a black /500 for this pressing. I believe the Rev exclusive is long gone and I assume this variant won’t be too far behind it.
Clear W/ Green Smoke works great alongside the artwork here, and fits right into that Revolution Summer revival kind of thing this band are pretty damn perfect at.
These new songs are incredible, introspective and thought provoking. I don’t tend to buy too many 7”s nowadays but this arrived today and as I’m typing this I am putting this on my turntable for the third time. Good Grief has some real Embrace energy to it to my ears.
Lyrics and thanks. I want to say All In A Dream was also recorded at The Magpie Cage but I’m not 100% off the top of my head. I know that Matt who engineered this 7” also worked on AIAD so it all makes sense, it sounds like a perfect sonic continuation.
The back of the insert lists 7 members of Praise, which leads me to guess that there is a little bit of a revolving door nature to the lineup - which would make perfect sense with Dan Fang from Turnstile being in the band. Blake Hall played drums on this 7” but Dan is still listed as playing additional percussion. I saw Praise live in Boston last year supporting Fiddlehead and Dan was on tour with Turnstile then; so it kind of tracks that to keep this band active there would have to be a wider net of members to keep things constantly open.
Here’s a photo from that show. I took this on my trusty Ricoh 35mm camera. This photo could be straight out of 1994 really; between the vintage Insted shirt and the X’d up hands it really feels like a moment in time. Fun fact; I X’d up for this show for maybe the first time in a decade - despite being Straight Edge for nearly 20 years at this point.
I hope this has been an interesting read. I don’t plan on leaving is so long until I post again. Please check out this record if you haven’t and stay safe 🖤