THE ACADEMY OF SUN - It Is Finished When It's Destroyed / Ghost Foxes

I guess there are some powers in this the world, which will always try to find ways to diminish every little one of our joys.

Yes, of course I'm talking about Brexit. And I'm not even British.

But come on: There's a special limited item from a band you like. It's not a huge investment, so you buy it without even having to check it out beforehand, and then you wait for it to show up one day and put a smile on your face. Sounds like a solid plan, right?

But now we have re-installed the lottery of customs, that relict from the past noone missed. Well, except Pro-Brexit voters appearantly. On top of that the German postal service has new regulations, which doesn't allow postmen to collect import charges from third parties if the recipient isn't present.

So one day you receive a package with four used records from England, which had been held at the Frankfurt airport for over a week, but ultimately arrives without any problems or payments.

And the other day you only receive a card saying that your package, which contains only one single 7" single, has to be picked up and paid for at the next post office outlet. Which is not only annoying, but full-on ridiculous, given that it means to drive twelve kilometers for a whopping 1,11 Euro of taxes. Plus fucking 6,00 Euro expanses flat-rate on top! If that's not robber baronry, then what is?

THE ACADEMY OF SUN - It Is Finished When It's Destroyed / Ghost Foxes (7") (2021)

Well at least I am a hundred percent confident that the members of The Academy Of Sun - self-description "queer, gnostic, orchestral post-punk" - don't fit into the demographic of closet bullshit voters, who made this happen.
Thankfully, since boy, that would seriously piss me off, given that "The Quiet Earth" is still one of my favorite albums of 2020 and I'm also a fan of singer / main songwriter Nick Hudson's solo material.

Between his new album (which I only haven's immersed myself in as much as it deserves yet, because I'm - as so often - still waiting and "saving myself" for my vinyl copy) and The Academy's masterpiece from last year, a seven inch with six minutes of music naturally can't seriously compare. 

It's good though, and especially the A side introduces a different tone to the band, since the guitars and keyboards on this piece from a parallel universe's 1980s sound more inspired by Hudson's musical soulmate Toby Driver than ever.

However the main takeaway of this release is that The Academy Of Sun is a a group for bigger pictures. This single passes by too fast and leaves the impression of randomly peaking into the middle pages of a story.
It is finished when it's destroyed, but it can never be destroyed, because it remains unfinished.

So while I enjoy the glimpse of greatness provided by the music, it's 1. the remarkably thick item itself, which is graced by 2. a cover painting by Hudson himself, 3. the elitist exclusivity of the limited hand-numbered run and 4. the fact that this made me look up and remember again, what a lathe cut actually is, which all adds up to the complete experience here.

Ultimately I definitely had a thousandfold worse unexpected extra expenses this month. Too bad those 7,11 Euro of bullshit money don't go to the artists though.