Seeing as day twelve was a bank holiday and all the shops were closed, me, Caby, and Cramble were eager to go right back out the next day and hit up the shops we weren't able to. For me, this meant the two record stores in town, Kellys and Spillers, and for Cramble, that meant visiting CEX for the first time! (Love how this trip has been something new for everyone involved, even the people who live there.) I actually did a whole blog post about the record stores over a month and a half ago on Letters From Somnolescent entitled "A Tale of Two Welsh Record Stores", so go read that for all the details. I'll summarize here.
We started with Cardiff Market, a funky big ol' place that smells like fish and where vendors sell absolutely everything, from weird clothes to food to, apparently, music! Kellys takes up two spaces on the second level, and I spent an hour in one of them picking through their fantastic CD selection and marveling at the £2-4 prices on damn near everything I wanted. I wound up grabbing ten CDs in total for £30:
- Ash's 1977
- The Black Keys' The Big Come Up
- We Are Scientists' Brain Thrust Mastery
- The Raconteurs' Broken Boy Soldiers
- R.E.M.'s Out of Time
- The Sonics' Psycho-Sonic (the most expensive CD in the lot, at £7)
- Counting Crows' Recovering the Satellites
- PJ Harvey's Rid of Me
- Wilco's Summerteeth
- The Who's Who's Next
So yeah, a really nice mixture of old Cammy favorites I didn't own and found through torrenting, records from bands I like that I was really curious to try out, and a few total shots in the dark to spice things up. As I told in the blog post, I hadn't intended to grab Rid of Me, but a guy also picking through the indie section said it was a damn good album and I threw it in on his recommendation. (I will listen to it, I swear. I have listened to about half of these, so I'm doing better than I used to.)
After a small pit stop at a bubble tea place because Caby and I are white girls, since Cramble was getting kinda irritated and stir-crazy in the hot, cramped, noisy conditions of Kellys, we headed off to CEX to make it up to him. I didn't buy anything this time, but he picked out a few 360 titles (Borderlands 2 GOTY Edition and Far Cry 2), because there's something for everyone at CEX. We then revisited Spillers on the way home, I got my music taste roasted by some random teenager (The Dandy Warhols rule, okay, meet me in the Wawa parking lot), and I procured three more albums at higher expense:
- Shellac's Dude Incredible
- Adwaith's Melyn, my "blind" pick for this trip, and the only Welsh-language music I bought this time
- Dinosaur Jr's You're Living All Over Me
Once again, a bit of old Cammy favorites, and a bit of completely new to me. I think this was around £24, so definitely a bit pricier, but given the history and prestige of Spillers, I was happy to spend a little more. Maybe next time I'll get a shirt to go along with the music, I read in an article that's a big way they keep the lights on.
Satisfied with our big adventure, and a little tired after two days out in Cardiff, we retired home for chippy (which was absolutely delicious, though probably pretty damn bad for you) and Top Gear. Caby and Cramble ate too much and left to lie down not long after dinner, though I stayed downstairs with her parents, and we wound up watching a bunch more episodes as her dad and I discussed magic systems in fantasy stories. (I believe that started as a conversation on Harry Potter being wasteful and discombobulated with its types of magic, I don't recall—turns out, like their daughter, both of Caby's parents can sustain an hour long plus conversation if they're into the topic.)