These two albums have always been a pair in my mind but I’ve never listened to them both in the same sitting.

I discovered Sunny Day Real Estate with this record, and thought I had discovered the band I would follow for years. I was disappointed and then stunned to find out that not only had they since broken up, two members had gone on to participate in another album I’d recently discovered, The Colour and The Shape.

In some ways, the Pink Album had to be the messy and half-hearted process it was for us to have the Foo Fighters album we have, even if only a few of Goldsmith’s drum parts remain.

This is certainly my favorite SDRE album mostly for emotional reasons but it also gave us emo anthems “8” (the song that originally blew my young mind wide open when I stumbled onto it on the Batman Forever sound track of all places.), as well as the onomatopoeically titled “J’nuh”, with the riff that launched a thousand emo bands.

The Colour and The Shape had 3 huge singles that almost everyone knows but New Way Home is the track I had in mind when I thought about getting this on vinyl. Simply put though, every track is great and the production is bristling with energy.