The Cut-Out Bin #2

Every year thousands of albums are released. A handful of these are strongly promoted and widely reviewed, and lodge in our collective memory as the significant records of an era. The rest slowly drift into those used CD racks at the back of record stores or the ad hoc shelves of close-out discounters and thrift stores to be largely forgotten, if they were even noticed in the first place. There, they join the music industry’s miscalculations, those huge-run sure-fire hits that missed, as well as the consumer cast-offs and albums sold back in a fit of post-fad buyer’s remorse, after fashions shift and the hype evaporates. In the old days of LPs, this trough of music-business effluvia was sometimes called the Cut-Out Bin after the albums that were notched and marked down for resale after they’d been returned to the manufacturer. If you were tuned out of musical trends, and had adventuresome tastes and could suspend judgment—or if you were just cheap and constrained to bargain shopping—you could dredge up some surprising finds from the mishmash, gems that could be treasured all the more for the improbability of your ever having stumbled upon them or for the courage it took to embrace them even though they had been publicly reviled. Here, PopMatters writers share some of their finds, the worthy-but-neglected albums rescued from the Cut-Out Bin of culture, and make the case for their continued relevance. May it inspire some slag-pile searches of your own.

— Rob Horning