Monday, February 1, 2010
Crickets / Music For Whom the Bell Tolls
Posted by Miles Raymer on 02.01.10 at 01:48 PM
The Great Record Store Extinction is claiming another victim. Metal Haven, one of my all-time favorite record stores (the blurb from our Lincoln Square/North Center neighborhood guide is here), has announced on its MySpace blog that it's closing its doors imminently. The upside is that the store is throwing an "Armageddon Sale," which will offer progressively steeper discounts on everything in stock (with the exception of items bearing a red tag) until Metal Haven's final day of business. The sale started last week with a 15 percent discount, and the rate will soon jump to 20 percent if it hasn't already. The downside, and it's a huge one, is that Chicago and the world are losing one of those rare record stores geared to the hard-core superfans of a particular musical style, a temple of obsessive genre devotion for a customer base among whom the possession of arcane knowledge and the expenditure of untold hours crate digging is the rule rather than the exception.
Metal Haven is closed Mondays, but I'll have more info tomorrow.
Comments (3)
Showing 1-3 of 3
heard the news over the weekend and stopped in yesterday for the first of many visits in the next month or two. i've been a regular customer over the last few years, but it's still pretty amazing how much STUFF they have. just an insane amount of stock. and it was good to see that their short-haired counterman was as surly and useless as ever.
like
dislike
I used to go to Metal Haven at least 3 or 4 times per month when they were in Boystown. However I didn't go there as often as I would when they moved to Ravenswood because of the longer trip to get up to the Montrose brown line. This is a huge bummer. I'm gonna have to stop by there in the next few weeks and try to snap up whatever good records they have left.
longtime reckless employee here. i was a metal kid in high school but got out of it for awhile in my 20's because i thought i was above it or something. anyway, about 10 years ago metal haven helped me become a full-fledged born again hesher. i used to go there on my break when they were still on belmont and i think mark got sick of me asking for darkthrone records that were out of print but he was always helpful. to be honest, i didn't get to the new location very often but it was a place i always took my out of town metal friends along with kuma's. anyway, we at reckless hate to hear about any record store closing in chicago, especially such an important institution as metal haven. sad times for chicago metalheads.
Related Stories
-
Start Mourning Metal Haven
The Ravenswood record store--a destination for serious metal fans in and out of town--is winding down.
- Feb 11, 2010
