Dass kleine Firmen sicherlich Terminprobleme haben ist wohl allen klar und wird ja auch akzeptiert. Ein paar Tage länger als üblich hat es bei Wytch Hazel (Bad Omen), White Magician (Cruz del Sur) und Possessed Steel (Temple o´f Mystery - okay die ist momentan noch irgendwo auf dem Postweg zu mir) ja glaube ich auch gedauert. Aber das passt schon und dafür habe ich auch absolutes Verständnis. Im Gegenteil, ich war sogar überrascht, dass alles so gut geklappt hat.
Bei Night dagegen...puh...schwer, schwer. Ist nicht die Schuld der Band sondern geht auf die Kappe des Labels.
Vom Label habe ich da am 12.12.20 nachfolgende Infomail bekommen:
Hi everyone!
We are glad that this shitty year is finally approaching an end! We wanna update you on the status on several things before the holiday season starts. Both with regular information, and a lot of informations about delayed products.
So first of all. We will send out all orders that arrives until the 20th December 2020. We will not ship any new orders made between the 20th of December until the 10th of Januari 2021. Perhaps we will be active and send out stuff between these dates. But we will not make any promises. If any delayed products arrives from the pressing plant these albums will be sent out asap no mater when the records arrive.
During this time we will also make inventory of all the products in our warehouse. Hopefully we might find a few sold out gems, we usually do when we are cleaning the warehouse. If anything is found it will end up on the Freight Train site. We have managed to clear out a lot of space in the warehouse since our blowout sales. That means that it is easier for us to keep track of everything and your orders will be able to be sent out faster.
We have had a shitload of problems with delayed products during this autumn. We can not blame everything on covid-19. A few stuff have to do with human errors from our side. But the delays would never been this late if it was not for the epidemic. In some cases we have also changed pressing plant during the period to try to get albums to arrive earlier. But in these cases new problems have arrived instead. The workload at the pressing plants and their sub contractors have gone up during the epidemic. This means that some productions that normally takes 4-8 weeks are now 18-22 weeks at some plants. We are trying to figure out new ways to handle this in the future. But where we are now we are quite stuck with this.
At the moment we hope that the Night - High Tides Distant Skies vinyl and Second Sun - Kampen Går Vidare vinyl will arrive within 10 days. They where schedule to arrive earlier this week. But quality issues postponed that date. We and the plant are working overtime to make sure we will be able to send out all orders in the next 10-14 days. We hope it will happen even faster, but with the situation and the bad luck we have had during the last months we do not wanna do any promise about a really quick delivery. At the same time as these albums arrive, we should receive represses of Vånna Inget - Utopi, Second Sun - Hopp / Förtvivlan, Second Sun - Eländes Elände and De Lyckliga Kompisarna - Pengar Har Inga Ögon vinyl.
In early January the heavily delayed pressings of Hast, Bandet Ellington and Saturdays Heroes vinyl should arrive. We have still not got a finalized date. At the same time as these albums arrive also the second pressing of Night - High Tides Distant Skies will arrive. We are hopping to also have the Volcanova - Radical Waves CD and Hawkins - Silence is a Bomb CD early next year.
Except for this we are now awaiting represses of Henning - Nätter utan dagar, The Hawkins - Silence is a Bomb and Svartanatt - S/T on vinyl. We are also expect to have a few new album productions ready in January. But since the mess with all these delayed products, we will await to send out new information before them arrives.
We are sorry about this mess with delayed products, we although hope everything should have arrived in the next couple of weeks. Sometimes even the second pressing of some products should arrive only days after the first press. So we are glad that you have keep ordering albums from us. We really hope for a better 2021. Both in delivering in time, and with a vaccine for the pandemic.
We are hopeful for the new year! And we are making sure to tie up all the loose ends before the end of the year. We hope you have a bit more patient with us. We have a great year to look forward to in 2021. We have a few really cool stuff to look forward to, new albums, live albums, a project containing a great anniversary box, and well... you will find out soon. We can promise you that the production of most release that will happened in 2021 is already in motion to make sure delays will not be a problem! We wish you all a happy holiday!
A last reminder is that we never took away the 19% Covid discount that we offered a about two months back. It will still be active until we reopen in January. So head over to the Freighttrain.se the next shipment of records are going out in the beginning of next week.
Freight Train Crew
