A Head Full of Wishes newsletter #43

2026-02-27
Categories: substack

Substack
A Head Full of Wishes newsletter #43

My record collection: [329] Magic Hour - No Excess is Absurd (CD box)

This is the fourth and last copy of Magic Hour’s first album No Excess is Absurd, and is also the tenth and last appearance by Magic Hour in this series.

This is the Twisted Village limited edition box, limited to 1000 copies (which seems quite a lot) each numbered - mine is #0448. The package is a lovely silver-coloured card box about 1.5cm deep. Inside the box is the CD in a transparent paper sleeve and a small 12 page booklet… and three fat pieces of cardboard to fill the empty space in the box. It is lovely but it would have been nice if that empty space had been filled with something beautiful because the disc and booklet could have easily fitted into a card sleeve meaning there was no real reason to put it in a box.

The box is however a sweet thing, and vastly superior to a jewel case. The CD has a vintage image of some beautiful astrological mumbo-jumbo on it (the Ché CD had a very dull design) and the booklet also has more lovely vintage nonsense - here’s what Google Lens tells me:

The left hand of french empress Josephine (1814 engraving)

The Pentagram of Albumaz (from a book published in 1822)

An image from Integrum Morborum Mysterium (1631)

The sixth pentacle of Mars from The Key of Solomon

The package was designed by Naomi and is of course lovely (if lovely nonsense) and is reminiscent of her Galaxie 500 box set from a couple of years later.

Catalogue Number: AHFOW 10/086
Artist: Magic Hour
Title: No Excess is Absurd
Notes: Limited edition #0448 of 1000
Packaging: Card box
Format: CD
Bought from Discogs seller for £14.00 in 2012
Buy ‘No Excess is Absurd’ on Bandcamp

Previously in my record collection:

My recprd collection: [330] Galaxie 500 - Fourth of July

If I’d have been smarter I’d have posted about Galaxie 500’s Fourth of July single on the Fourth of July but no… here we are at the end of Feb celebrating #Galaxie500Day.

Some plays of Fourth of July over the years

Because Galaxie 500 have a song called Fourth of July, and because every year has a Fourth of July I have written so many posts about this song/single over the years, although most have just been collections of links/mp3s/videos and I suspect that there’s no reason that this one won’t turn out like that too.

This is another record that I know when and (sort of) where I bought it, and indeed how much I paid for it. That’s because I never removed the price sticker from the front of it. I sort of wish I’d done that with more of my records (particularly the ones where the sticker damaged the sleeve) - obviously the curse of shrink-wrap has pretty much done for stickers being stuck to the actual record sleeve.

So… I bought this in HMV for £3.49, I don’t of course know which HMV but it was likely either the one in Ealing, or one of the two big stores they had on Oxford Street back then.

I do sort of love that Galaxie 500 were so prudent in their releases, three albums, one single from each album. That’s the way it should be.

OK… links/mp3s/videos as promised. First up, of course, is Sergio Huidor’s official video:

Galaxie 500 - Fourth of July (Sergio Huidor, 1991) (play on YouTube)

… and, obviously, what the kids made of that:

Galaxie 500 - Fourth of July - kids korner (play on YouTube)

“creeeeeepy” and “discombobulated” and “I got a little tired”.

The b-side is their cover of The Velvet Underground’s Here She Comes Now… I remember thinking at the time that this felt like they were asking for trouble given that lazy reviewers would always throw in a VU comparison (I was never convinced that it was warranted), but I sort of get the feeling that Galaxie 500 (in particular Dean) never really had much time for journalists and so probably didn’t care.

Here are Galaxie 500 playing Here She Comes Now for UK TV in 1990:

Galaxie 500 - Here She Comes Now (play on YouTube)

In 2013 Esopus magazine had a lovely “Special Collections” edition which included a booklet with scans from Dean’s “early drafts” including a proto-Fourth of July (that has crashed into Luna’s Crazy People):