There were lots of different ways to buy music in the 90s. Some albums I would still buy on vinyl (usually because of the promise of an extra track or a free 7") - most LPs I would buy on CD as thats where I did most of my listening, and even though I had the facility to record either CD or vinyl to tape, I'd sometimes buy an LP on cassette.
I'd bought all of the earlier LPs by The Wedding Present on vinyl (and there were 4 of them by 1991) and I still bought all of the singles on vinyl. So goodness knows why I didn't buy a vinyl version of Seamonsters, yet I did buy it on cassette (I probably had it on CD as well)
What I do know is that its an LP that lends itself enormously well to tape, and to that claustrophobic listening experience you get with a set of headphones. This was the first LP where the band worked with Steve Albini, and there's a raw guttural sound that sets it apart from (I think) all of their other albums and almost makes it an outlier in their catalogue.
By this time, they were on RCA, and the inlay here is rather perfunctory with thin shiny paper that folds out nicely but that is only printed on one side. Still - it's all about the music and 31 years later, songs like Corduroy and Dalliance still thrill.
I finally got your blog added to my blogroll. I had to redo the entire blogroll, because the old one wasn't letting me add or remove blogs anymore. Still. Now you can write more posts for me to read.