Each Sunday, The Hard Times travels back and reviews a notable album from the past. This week we take a trip to beautiful Berkeley, California and look back on Crimpshrine’s 1988 LP “Duct Tape Soup.”
Back when I was young and hopeful for the future I spent a good amount of my time looking to the written and audial wisdom provided by one Aaron Cometbus. His zine, Cometbus, taught me seeking, finding, and enjoying love is not shameful or embarrassing, seeing new places and meeting new people will make life fuller, and the private language we create with ourselves in small moments of solitude is sometimes already spoken and understood by other people we don’t know and likely will never meet. And that all feels good.
One thing Cometbus did not teach me is the difference between an EP and an LP, and as someone who’s made a living being a very interesting and successful and, incidentally, physically beautiful music writer, you can probably imagine how embarrassing this is for me. Because I’m really down to the wire here in reviewing Crimpshrine’s “Duct Tape Soup,” I have no choice but to take my best guesses as to what they might mean.
So, right off the bat, I know an El P is the guy from Run the Jewels, but actually, now that I think about it, I’m not sure if that means he’s an LP or an EP. And perhaps more importantly, I still don’t know what it means, as he is an individual on his own journey, and is likely a complex and sensitive person with feelings, values, and aspirations too complicated to reduce into one simple definition.
The next and final thing I could think of is that L is a weed term, I think? Like a pound of weed or something? So LP is more weed than the smaller EP. Which you really notice when you play it on a nice piece of equipment.
SCORE: I guess I give this thing 3 EPs or 8.4 LPs, depending on whether you’re doing the British measurements or the American ones.