I read their TPRG entry and was mildly intrigued, but didn't rush out to find anything. Several years later I came across Staying Loose: A Compilation in the bins at... Generation, maybe? I picked it up and found that it was about half good, with maybe three or four real stand-out cuts. In other words, par for the course for a band of Zinker's also-ran status. Why buy more?
Bands like Zinker present a strange sort of quandry for my collecting habit. They're not very good, but have a good sound and just enough good songs to make me think the next record I buy just might be that overlooked masterpiece that they may or may not have in them. So I keep buying their records (I'm up to five as of the pair I just had shipped to me from Italy last week), and none of them is a complete disaster, but I really don't need more than like, one. Maybe two.
Bands like that are murder on a compulsive collector because they wind up nudging potentially better as-yet-unheard bands out of the budget. Granted, the "unheard" aspect is no longer a factor in the age of digital music, but there are certainly plenty of classics I ought to have in the collection and don't. Like, I still don't have any Big Star records, but I have at least half a dozen by Steely Dan. And I mean don't get me wrong, the Dan's pretty good, but Aja and the first one are perfectly sufficient; do I really need Katy Lied? Becker and Fagen don't even like that one.
So anyway, I got on kind of a Zinker kick lately during which I decided that I don't have one of their very best songs on vinyl, and I ought to, and it was a single so I don't have to buy a whole album, all of which led to me mail-ordering a copy of said single from some record store in Italy for only about five bucks, although the shipping pushed it over ten. Stupid? Yes. But it's an awesome song. Check it out.
Buy it... on vinyl.
From my deck to you: HP Zinker - "Sunshine"
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