Discovery by randomly pulling it from a local record store in Portland
Three years ago, I visited Portland OR to see the musician King Krule live. It was an okay experience, but really it was an excuse to have a friendcation. One of the places we stopped by was a record store. It was a pretty expensive one, with me purchasing two records for a whopping $30 each.
One of them was Revolver by The Beatles, and the other was me randomly selecting one completely blind, which so happened to be The Book of Ramifications by Zealot.
I thought the cover was cool, the vibrant colors for each of the animals and the environment built a pretty unique feel. It felt kind of special to have a record in my hands that had some mystery within the ridges of the vinyl. Before getting in the van to go back to my friends’ apartment, I looked up Zealot on Spotify to see how popular they were; they had under 100 monthly listeners. This was exciting. To my surprise, it came with a lyric sheet and a gray tint vinyl splash for the record, most records I own from big musicians don’t even go that far with their releases. cough King Krule cough.
I don’t know what I was expecting from the album, but the story of a man coming to terms with his lycanthropy in music form wasn’t it.
“This record was written from the perspective of a werewolf dealing with their newly discovered lycanthropy, and the subsequent existential crisis that would naturally follow.”
~From The Book of Ramifications’ lyric sheet
Obviously, I didn’t infer this from my first listen in my friends’ apartment, but I was surprised this wasn’t a haphazard attempt at making music like many other bargain-bin albums that waste away in the record store. So many boring and uninteresting albums infest local stores, due to nobody wanting to own them. Compilation albums of Beatles clones, albums made for a cheap buck by celebrities that only your great grandma might know, and records that can’t even be played on modern vinyl players.
The first few cords of the song The Somnambulist were enough to confirm to me that this was an actual musical project with effort put in.
The album itself wasn’t incredible or anything, I found it to be pretty good and unique, a high 6/10. However, after getting home and looking up Zealot on the website Rate Your Music to give it a rating, they didn’t appear. This was shocking to me at the time since I assumed Rate Your Music has a ton of music artists from the deepest trenches of music streaming, but I was mistaken.
This is where I decided to bite the bullet, and made it myself. I rarely ever get involved with the background of a social website, but if no one has done it, I took it upon myself to help out this band. Zealot is a band that I did not expect to get this interested or involved with. I haven’t been to Colorado in more than a decade, I’ve never seen them live, and possibly never will. It’s really strange how me just selecting this from a random box gave me so many unique perspectives within music forum management and the internet. Heck, maybe that’s why I’ve taken up these classes in the first place. Getting into the nitty gritty of making pages on the internet. Many thoughts still roam within me in regards to this vinyl, “who was the original person that owned this vinyl? Were they from Denver, or were they from Portland and were deeply into the underground music scene? How many of these were printed? There’s still a quantity left on their Bandcamp… How low were the chances of me even finding and owning this piece of media? Does the person who originally owned this know that they’ve indirectly inspired me to get a career due to me finding this?” Guess I’ll never know the answers.
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