Various
Cooking Vinyl Sampler Volume 5

Listening notes

Cooking Vinyl Sampler Volume 5 is a compilation CD released by Cooking Vinyl in 1996, carrying the catalog number GRILL CD 009. The release is the fifth entry in the label's ongoing sampler series and spans seventeen tracks drawn from artists on the Cooking Vinyl roster.

The compilation is catalogued under the genres of Folk, World, and Country alongside Rock, a pairing that reflects the breadth of Cooking Vinyl's signing policy during the mid-1990s. The tracklist moves through a range of titles — from "Go, Man Go" and "Rum Thunderbird" near the opening to "Swedish Polka," "Caligari's Mirror," and "Pillory Scene – June 1637" in the latter half — suggesting that the label was not working within a narrow stylistic remit. Titles such as "Witch Of Fauldshape" and "My Friend Is A Stooge For The Media Priests" sit alongside more straightforwardly titled pieces like "Venus," "Hold Me," and "Not A Pretty Girl," indicating a varied roster of contributors, though individual artist attributions per track are not available in the verified data.

Label samplers of this type served a practical promotional function, offering listeners a broad introduction to what a label had available at a given moment. As the fifth volume in this particular series, the release implies that Cooking Vinyl had found consistent enough use for the format to return to it multiple times by 1996.

Track durations are not documented in the available data, so the total runtime of the disc cannot be confirmed. No pressing or format variants are noted beyond the standard CD issue catalogued here.