New vinyl reissues: August 7, 2026
We’ve got another metric ton of new vinyl reissues to sift through today—but first I wanted to mention the recent layoffs at the four music-news outlets owned by a company called Veeps. This happened earlier this week, as reported by Pitchfork; the sites/publications are BrooklynVegan, Goldmine, Alternative Press, and Revolver, and reportedly almost all of their staff were virtually laid off overnight, completely gutting the outlets from stem to stern. Veeps is a company owned by the two brothers from Good Charlotte, Joel and Benji Madden, who took over these news outlets some years back but, crucially, had recently sold a 51 percent share to Live Nation, a terrible company that hates music and really hates music fans.
BrooklynVegan is a longtime stalwart of indie-rock news, having been around since the blogosphere days of the ’00s and covering a near-comprehensive spread of music, with acts both large and small filling their pixels. Oftentimes, a notice in BrooklynVegan would elevate a nascent band’s profile to previously unseen levels, and as these types of publications have dwindled, it remained one of the only places for a tiny band to break through to a national audience.
Goldmine, too, was at one point the record collector’s bible. It developed the record grading system that is in common usage today—mint, VG+, good, poor, and so on—and was also an excellent place to find classified ads touting rare and collectible records in the days before eBay and Discogs. Alternative Press and Revolver, too, were vital sources of music coverage, with the former focusing on punk and (naturally) alternative and the latter geared toward fans of metal and other heavy music.
This is a dreadful development, and I will allow Live Nation and the Good Charlotte guys to share the blame here. Music publications have been experiencing a death spiral since the demise of print media and the metastasis of social media and all of its attendant algorithms as they infect and kill off online news outlets. (AI search aggregation isn’t helping, either.) I don’t know what the future of any of these publications is, but the general feeling seems to be that they are finished. While I hope that’s not the case, with the complete demolition of their entire talent pools, the outlook is not very good.
Support independent media. Boycott Live Nation. And don’t listen to Good Charlotte.
With that out of the way, I wanted to mention a couple of new announcements on the reissue calendar, starting with the Go-Betweens, who are getting three of their ’80s studio albums reissued by Beggars Banquet. The Australian band is beloved by fans of smartly crafted pop, with their cherished albums often difficult to find on vinyl. Coming September 25 are new pressings of 1986’s Liberty Belle and the Black Diamond Express, 1987’s Tallulah, and 1988’s 16 Lovers Lane, considered by some to be their finest LP, although the competition is stiff; these three albums comprise their so-called “London” period, when the band was working and living in the UK. There’s also a repressing of the 2020 live set Fountains of Youth: Live at the Town and Country Club, which was recorded in 1987 and remains the best representation of the Go-Betweens’ live show. Preorders are here.
We’re also getting a new AAA pressing of Elvis Costello’s 1977 debut My Aim Is True, with “Watching the Detectives” included, as per the US configuration. Details are scant, but it is being touted as “an all-analog production,” so hopefully the pedigree—mastering engineer, etc.—will become apparent in the coming weeks. It’s coming in tandem with a larger 5-CD box set celebrating My Aim Is True’s 49th anniversary, because Costello thought a 50th-anniversary set would be too precious. Due out October 6, the vinyl can be preordered here.
Here’s the week’s playlist, exclusively for our paid-tier subscribers (and invisible to everyone else, through the magic of the internet). If you’d like to become a paid subscriber—and see and hear all—you can upgrade by clicking the button below. In addition to these excellent weekly playlists, which are fast becoming the talk of the town, you also get access to the complete site archives, plus commenting privileges and eligibility in our monthly vinyl giveaways. But best of all, you support a tiny independent music outlet that will never, ever be majority-owned by Live Nation and will never force you to read a Good Charlotte review.
Mazarin: We’re Already There & Guppyboy: Jeffersonville [Dust and Memory]
Spanish label Dust and Memory is making their name in the vinyl reissue scene with absolutely diamond-sharp curatorial tastes, delving into the American indie rock scenes of the ’90s, ’00s, and ’10s and coming out with unexpected and wonderful reissues. This week they’ve got We’re Already There, the third album from Philadelphia band Mazarin, who wove psych, chamber pop, and indie rock into a gorgeous sonic tapestry; the 2005 album wasn’t released on vinyl until 2020 in very limited quantities, making Dust and Memory’s reissue much needed. And they’ve also got Guppyboy’s 1997 album Jeffersonville. The Burlington, Vermont, band trucked in an occasionally twangy, moody variety of downtrodden indie rock; the album’s been expanded to two LPs with extra material from the era. Both albums were remastered by Álvaro Lissón and pressed at the Spanish plant Press Play Vinyl. I’ll have longer reviews for both in the coming days.
Television: Marquee Moon [Mobile Fidelity]
Mobile Fidelity’s upcoming release roster is throwing more curveballs than usual, including some very cool pressings of Rodriguez’s Cold Fact and Devo’s Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! alongside more expected fare, such as the Rush catalog or their ongoing Doobie Brothers reissues. Their handling of Television’s 1977 debut full-length, Marquee Moon, is perhaps the best example of how they’re defying expectations, expanding the notion of what an audiophile record can be. The album offers a jagged sound that occasionally belies the virtuosic playing, with the dueling guitars of Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd circling like jabbing prizefighters. Rhino High Fidelity’s recent remaster of Marquee Moon famously manipulated its characteristic sound, expanding and cleansing it somewhat—to great controversy—so it will be interesting to hear what approach Mobile Fidelity has taken, although you’ll need to have deep pockets to do so. The album is pressed as an UltraDisc one-step, cut at 45 RPM on two LPs using the analog master transferred to DSD, per MoFi’s standard operating procedure.
Real Gone Music
The monthly drops from Real Gone Music are always packed with fascinating albums that span virtually every genre, and this month is no exception. The one I’m most excited about is their reissue of Take It to the Streets, the second album from New York psych-rock-soul-funk outfit Elephant’s Memory, whose claims to fame are the two tracks they got on the Midnight Cowboy soundtrack in 1969 and their stint backing John Lennon and Yoko Ono during their New York era in 1972. Take It to the Streets features Elephant’s Memory’s finest moment, a grimy funk-rock jam called “Mongoose” that disturbed the nether reaches of the singles chart in 1970 and still absolutely slaps today. The album around it is a versatile, heavy, and at-times loony record that contains evidence of why they were in some ways the East Coast counterpart to the Mothers of Invention, although without a visionary like Zappa at the helm. The Real Gone reissue is the first time it’s ever been reissued on vinyl, with a remaster by Mike Milchner at Sonic Vision, a lacquer cut by Harrison Hunt of Well Made Music, and the pressing done on black-and-clear vinyl at Gotta Groove. I’ll have a full review for this one in the coming days.
That’s not all Real Gone has in store. They’ve also got a sort of late-model lounge-pop-exotica record from Egyptian-born, Europe-based singer Bob Azzam that seems to have been first released in Sweden in 1968 as New Sounds, featuring bizarro, psych-scented covers of the Rolling Stones’ “The Last Time” and Allen Toussaint’s “Rain, Rain Go Away,” among others. This configuration, slimming the tracks down from 12 to 10, was released in the States in 1969 on the Audio Fidelity label as Bob Azzam & The Great Expectation. Real Gone also has two heavy metal slabs on tap, Machine Head’s 1994 debut Burn My Eyes (which already appears to be sold out on their site) and Tampa death-metal band Obituary’s second album Cause of Death. Plus they’ve got a wide release of the third En Vogue album, 1997’s EV3, which was first released in limited quantities on Record Store Day, and they’ve also re-pressed of two titles from their excellent Black Jazz series: Doug Carn’s Infant Eyes and Walter Bishop’s Coral Keys, both from 1971.
Lisa Loeb & Nine Stories: Tails [Geffen]
Anyone who had a pulse and ears in 1994 can probably recall every last second of Lisa Loeb’s “Stay (I Missed You),” the ubiquitous, forlorn single that made Loeb the first unsigned act to reach number one on the Billboard chart. The song itself was released via RCA on the Reality Bites soundtrack, and Loeb didn’t stay unsigned for long—her debut album, 1995’s Tails, came out on Geffen and included “Stay” tucked away as the final track. It augured a sort of coffeehouse-folk movement that quietly flourished in the late ’90s and early ’00s, although Loeb seemed destined to become a trivia factoid rather than an artist with ongoing relevancy. Nevertheless, everything from the ’90s is desirable again, and this is one of the thousands of ’90s records that never had much of a vinyl presence to speak of, making this reissue of interest for a certain nostalgic strain of fan who probably owned it on CD but got rid of all of their physical media during the iPod era and now sorely regrets it. Interestingly, Tails was reissued earlier this year as a 2-LP limited edition as part of the Interscope Vinyl Collective subscription series. This version keeps the album confined to a single LP mastered by Levi Seitz of Black Belt Mastering, but I wonder if this is a signal that other Interscope Vinyl Collective pressings may eventually become more widely available.
Charanjit Singh: Synthesizing: Ten Ragas to a Disco Beat [Light in the Attic]
The 1982 studio full-length debut of Charanjit Singh, Synthesizing: Ten Ragas to a Disco Beat, is exactly what it sounds like—a marriage of Indian classical music with electronic disco, played by Singh on a Roland Jupiter-8 synthesizer, a Roland TB-303 bass synth, and a Roland TR-808 drum machine. Rather than sounding like Switched-On Bach, the album plays like the soundtrack to a techno-thriller from another dimension, with the bulbous, glowing tones of the Jupiter-8 turning the humanistic, heart-rending raga melodies into somewhat ominous sounding transmissions from robotic entities. The album is a bit samey-sounding all the way through, as you might expect, but it remains a distinct and fascinating relic that blends wildly disparate elements into something unexpected. Light in the Attic is reissuing it on two LPs, mastered by Johanz Westerman at Amsterdam’s Ballyhoo Studio and pressed at Optimal in Germany.
Cluster: Zuckerzeit [Bureau B]
Cluster’s 1974 album Zuckerzeit seems to have predicted the next 50-plus years of electronic music, and not with an entirely sunny outlook, either. The album, whose title means “sugar time,” dabbles in the sicklier ends of its sugary pop sound, with its glowing synths and programmed rhythms often taking on the properties of sticky, half-sucked hard candy and artificial flavors filled with unpronounceable chemicals. It’s an arresting thing to hear more than half a century later, as it still sounds so prescient and otherworldly, but it must have been an outright shock in 1974, coming on the heels of Cluster’s more avant-garde and pastoral work. The duo of Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Moebius were working independently in the studio, with each track crafted entirely by one or the other, and that fusing of two different sensibilities is part of what makes Zuckerzeit so disorienting and brilliant. This new edition is essentially a repress of the 50th-anniversary pressing from 2024 (which was limited to 1000 copies), featuring mastering by Marko Kluge at Optimal Media, where it was also pressed.
Jazz Alley
Two new Blue Note Tone Poets and two titles from a brand-new series are sharing the alleyway this week. First, Blue Note is reissuing Jackie McLean’s Vertigo, an album recorded in 1963 but not released until 1980, perhaps because of the more adventurous stuff McLean was also recording around that time, like One Step Beyond and Destination… Out! However, Vertigo features Herbie Hancock, Donald Byrd, Tony Williams, and Butch Warren, making it an essential session in its own right. The other Blue Note this week is Ike Quebec’s final album Bossa Nova Soul Samba, released in 1962 shortly before his death from lung cancer in January 1963. It’s an unassuming, laidback listen that draws heavily from the bossa nova trend that swept up the early ’60s jazz and pop scenes. These Tone Poets feature mastering from tape by Kevin Gray and pressings done at RTI.
Meanwhile, Habibi Funk is launching a sister label called Audible Beauty with two exciting pieces of global jazz that have likely eluded most longtime jazz heads. They come from the Malaysian jazz scene of the 1970s, a much-overlooked wellspring that didn’t receive much exposure outside of its home country and little in the way of vinyl release outside of a few limited radio-station pressings. The first is Tiga Trombone, a collection of the work of Malaysian pianist and composer Alfonso Soliano, who incorporated jazz, Latin, and Southeast Asian elements into his work. And the other is Jazz Dari Angkasapuri, compiling the work of trumpeter/composer Johari Salleh, who used modal grooves to explore spiritual ideas and Malaysian folklore in his music. These look to be real finds for jazz explorers.
OTHER REISSUES OF NOTE:
(*star denotes inclusion in this week’s paid-subscriber playlist)
Jose Afonso: Galinhas do Mato [Mais 5]
Lorez Alexandria: Alexandria the Great [Verve Record Club Subscription Series]
Siavash Amini: Till Human Voices Wake Us [Umor Rex]
Eddy Arnold: The Tennessee Plowboy 1946–1955 [Acrobat]
*The B-52’s: Ancient Culture: Mesopotamia Revisited (1-LP/3-CD) [Warner/Rhino]
Baphomet’s Blood: Second Strike [Dying Victim]
*Jorge Ben: Tabua de Esmeralda [Ipanema Sun]
Tony Bennett: The Classics [Columbia/Sony]
Boogie Down Productions: By All Means Necessary [Sony UK]
Roy Budd: Fear Is the Key [Music on Vinyl]
*Cheech & Chong: Up in Smoke soundtrack [Rhino]
The Clancy Brothers: Rebels, Rovers & Rakes 1959–62 [Acrobat]
The Comes: No Side [La Vida Es Un Mus]
Concepcion Huerta: El Sol de los Muertos [Umor Rex]
The Cramps: Rockinnreelininauklandnewzealandxxx [Big Beat]
*Cymande: Second Time Around [Partisan]
Diles Que No Me Maten: La Vida de Alguien Más; Obrigaggi [Moonlight Activities]
Dismiss: Lost Transmissions 1995–1996 [Radgirlfriend]
Dødheimsgard: Satanic Art [Peaceville]
Dub Organiser: Original & Vintage Dubs from the A-Class Studio [Real Rock]
The Durutti Column: Vini Reilly [London]
*Ian Dury & The Blockheads: Ten More Turnips from the Tip [Demon]
Ian Dury: The Bus Driver’s Prayer and Other Stories [Demon]
The Fabulous Thunderbirds: Girls Go Wild [Last]
FFF: Free for Fever; FFF [Music on Vinyl]
*Steve Forbert: Jackrabbit Slim [Rolling Tide]
Billy Fury: The Hit Parade Hero 1959–62 [Acrobat]
*Jerry Garcia Band: Cats Under the Stars [Round]
Vince Guaraldi: It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown zoetrope [Lee Mendelson]
*The Handsome Family: Singing Bones [Milk & Scissors)
Hirax: Hate, Fear and Power [Back on Black]
Hollywood Undead: Swan Songs [Interscope Vinyl Collective]
Ezekiel Honig: Surfaces of a Broken Marching Band [Keplar]
Hypocrisy: Destroys Wacken; End of Disclosure [Nuclear Blast]
Iron Kobra: Dungeon Masters; Might & Magic [Dying Victim]
Ragnar Johnson & Ralph Harrisson: Ethiopian Musics 1971 [Sub Rosa]
Herbert von Karajan/Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra: Wagner - Die Walküre [DG Original Source]
Katatonia: The Fall of Hearts [Peaceville]
Ben E. King: The Solo Sessions 1960 [Acrobat]
KRS-One: KRS-One; Return of the Boom Bap [Sony UK]
*Large Professor: 1st Class [High Rise]
*Luna: Romantica; Rendezvous [Wax Mage]
Mar-Vista: Visions of Sodal Ye [Born Bad]
*Mclusky: My Pain and Sadness Is More Painful and Sad Than Yours [Too Pure]
Mighty Dillinger: Steppin’ Out of Babylon [Charly]
Kylie Minogue: Light Years; X; Aphrodite; Kiss Me Once [Warner]
Mitchell/Coe Mysteries: Exiled [Morgan Blue Town]
Moniker: Hunt for the Wilderpeople soundtrack [Impressed]
No Use for a Name: ¡Leche Con Carne! [Fat Wreck Chords]
Ohio Players: Live 1977 [Goldenlane]
Oregon: Always, Never, and Forever [Intuition]
Pineapple Thief: Tightly Unwound (2025 Bruce Soord Mix) [Kscope]
Prince Buster: Blue Beat Hits [Blue Beat]
*Marty Robbins: Return of the Gunfighter [Sony]
*Linda Ronstadt: Don’t Cry Now; Prisoner in Disguise; Simple Dreams [Elektra/WEA]
Duncan Sheik & Steven Sater: Spring Awakening original cast recording [Decca]
*Paul Simon: There Goes Rhymin’ Simon [Sony]
Superheaven: Ours Is Chrome [SideOneDummy]
Mark Templeton: Surfaces of a Broken Marching Band [Keplar]
*Tom Tom Club: Let There Be Love box set [Rhino]
Peter Tosh: Live & Dangerous: Boston 1976 [Sony]
Jim Van Bebber: Deadbeat at Dawn soundtrack [Mystic Vault]
Venom: At War with Satan; Eine Kleine Nachtmusik; Possessed [Noise]
The Western Front: Eureka [Music Theories]
Norma Winstone: A Timeless Place [Enodoc]
Norma Winstone: Live at Maida Vale [BBE]
Witching Hour: Past Midnight… [Dying Victim]
Bruce Woolley & The Camera Club: English Garden [Music on Vinyl]
Brett Young: Brett Young (Platinum Edition) [Blue Highway]
*Warren Zevon: Life’ll Kill Ya [Friday]
Various Artists: Flying High: Chopper Productions 1985–1991 [Digikiller]
Various Artists: Fully Nowhere: A World Resources Archive [World of Echo]
Various Artists: Listen Up! Roots Reggae [Kingston Sounds]
Various Artists: Sir Tommy’s Stars 1985–1990 [Digikiller]
