New vinyl reissues: March 6, 2024
Welcome back to The Vinyl Cut, where the only thing that’s square is the album cover art. Although, actually, we’ve got some praise for a pretty middlebrow Elvis Presley album in today’s newsletter, so I guess that’s kind of square. And hey, now that I think about it, one of the albums in today’s newsletter (Small Faces) has a round cover!
Clearly I’m stalling. No big announcements today, so let’s jump right in to this week’s new releases.
Talking Heads: Tentative Decisions: Demos & Live [Rhino]
This week a 3-CD set of very early Talking Heads material comes from Rhino, collecting most of the extant recordings the band made leading up to their debut album in 1977, including their famed CBS demo tape and live gigs from Max’s Kansas City and the Jabberwocky Club. The first CD of this set made its way to turntables this past Black Friday as a limited edition on clear vinyl, and now the LP (which includes a bonus 7-inch) has returned to stores via a wide release on black vinyl. It contains primitive demos from the trio of David Byrne, Tina Weymouth, and Chris Frantz (Jerry Harrison had not yet been recruited) and early run-throughs of songs like “Psycho Killer,” “Thank You for Sending Me an Angel,” and “Love Goes to a Building on Fire” (plus one live track; hence the title). As such, it’s an intriguing glimpse at the band in their embryonic state, although they wouldn’t start showing signs of their future genius until the CBS demos—which make up Disc 2 of the CD set and are in fact coming on vinyl this Record Store Day in April, on a 2-LP set cut at 45 RPM. (Could a vinyl version of Disc 3, with all of the live stuff, be coming on Black Friday? Almost certainly yes.) We’ll have a bit more to say about this disc with a review in the coming days. NL
Tom Tom Club: Tom Tom Club [Real Gone Music]
Also in the Talking Heads Extended Universe this week: Real Gone has a 45th anniversary pressing of Tom Tom Club’s self-titled 1981 debut on yellow and red vinyl. The project, featuring bassist Tina Weymouth and drummer Chris Frantz of the Heads along with Weymouth’s sisters Lani, Loric, and Laura on vocals, plus Adrian Belew and other guests, married the hip sounds of downtown New York with the tropical feeling of the album recording sessions in the Bahamas. “Genius of Love” and “Wordy Rappington” are touchstones now, funky new-wave songs that carry a premonition tremor of the forthcoming hip-hop tsunami. And the rest of the album is a great dance-pop affair, with the rhythm section of Talking Heads staking out new ground away from the band and Byrne’s songwriting influence. NL
Versus: The Stars Are Insane [Teen-Beat]
Arriving amid the groundswell of grunge and major-label alt rock that was taking up all the attention back in 1994, the debut album by New York combo Versus set itself apart by eschewing the typical quietLOUDquiet aesthetic in favor of creating a heady atmosphere through each melodic rock song. Their secret weapon, though, was the fluid vocal interplay of bassist Fontaine Toups and guitarist Richard Baluyut. The Stars Are Insane has been out of print on vinyl since its second pressing in 1995 but is getting a crucial re-release this week in a very limited run of 1,000 copies. Act fast. RH
Barbara Lewis: The Many Grooves of Barbara Lewis & Ernie Hines: Electrified [Real Gone Music]
Two more fab soul records are back in play courtesy of Real Gone Music, following the excellent analog reissues they gave us in February (read our reviews of those here and here). Barbara Lewis had big hits in the ’60s with “Hello Stranger” and “Baby I’m Yours,” but the first phase of her career came to a close with 1970’s The Many Grooves of Barbara Lewis, recorded for Stax’s Enterprise imprint. One wonders why this alternately gritty and gorgeous soul album didn’t deliver Lewis the audience she deserved, as it includes ingenious takes of “Windmills of Your Mind” and “Slip Away,” plus other lost soul classics like “Break Away” and “Baby That’s a No No.” Ernie Hines’s 1972 album Electrified also came from the Stax stable, originally released on their We Produce sub-label, and it too was overlooked in its day, eventually commanding collector prices after one of Hines’s non-album singles, “Our Generation” was sampled for Pete Rock and C.L. Smooth’s “Straighten It Out.” Now both of these wonderful albums are back on vinyl, in all-analog pressings on colored vinyl or just plain black. Hooray. NL
Luciano Cilio: Dialoghi del Presente [Superior Viaduct]
The sole album released in the short life of self-taught composer and musician Luciano Cilio is a stunningly minimalist affair. Through four discrete sections and a lengthy closing interlude, the Italian artist strips every piece back to its barest essentials, with simple, intertwining melodic lines from woodwinds, strings, guitar, and voice that float together and come apart in gossamer strands like cotton candy. Released on vinyl in Cilio’s native Italy in 1977, Dialoghi del Presente has been in and out of print since a CD edition arrived in 2004. This new pressing from Superior Viaduct, sourced from the original master tapes, is the first time this LP has been officially reissued in North America. RH
Small Faces: Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake mono [Nice]
Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake might be best known to casual American observers as that album with the funny round cover, but it’s one of the seminal works of late-period English psychedelia, marking the transition in English pop to the heavier rock style that would dominate at the end of the 1960s and into the 1970s. And it’s simply a fantastic album to boot, with pips like “Lazy Sunday” and “Afterglow” on Side 1 and the whimsical fairy tale taking up Side 2, featuring the idiosyncratically nonsensical narration from Stan Unwin. The mono mix has been readily available on vinyl in recent years, but now it has been given a half-speed master, which seems to be the preferred “premium” treatment done in UK mastering studios these days. (We Americans tend to favor our high-end reissues to be cut directly from analog tape.) The original fold-out round cover will be reproduced in full, with an additional four-panel insert with liner notes. The capable Henry Rudkins at AIR Studios has done the half-speed master, from a digital file prepared by Nick Robbins in 2018. NL
Bedhead & Macha: Macha Loved Bedhead - Bedhead Loved Macha [Numero Group]
A few years before Ben Gibbard and Jimmy Tamborello traded musical ideas through the mail, Matt and Bubba Kadane of slowcore band Bedhead and the members of post-rock group Macha took a similar tack with their long-distance collaboration. The Kadanes would send works in progress to Georgia, where the men from Macha would add to and manipulate these rough sketches at will. The resulting five-song EP, released in 2000 as Macha Loved Bedhead - Bedhead Loved Macha, is a perfect meshing of their two aesthetics, with the minimalist rhythms and breathy vocals of Bedhead draped over a bed of vintage synths, Eastern percussion, and, on their warped cover of Cher’s “Believe,” the sounds of a touch-tone phone. Remastered from the original analog tapes, this dreamy meeting of creative minds is being pressed to vinyl for the first time this week thanks to Numero Group. RH
Elvis Presley: That’s the Way It Is [Music on Vinyl]
I’m decidedly not an Elvis guy, but even I have an Elvis album that I arbitrarily cherish. That one Elvis album I can’t live without is 1970’s That’s the Way It Is, a combo studio/live album that includes “Mary in the Morning,” “Patch It Up,” and his dubious but nevertheless enjoyable cover of “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” The album is actually the soundtrack to a documentary of the same name, which featured concert footage filmed in Las Vegas in August 1970 as well as rehearsals and other lightly manufactured “behind-the-scenes” content. It’s fitting that Music on Vinyl is repressing their 4-LP extended version of That’s the Way It Is this week (it was first issued in 2014, in conjunction with a massive CD box set), as the concert film EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert is doing healthy business at the multiplex, and much of that newly constructed movie comes from footage originally filmed for That’s the Way It Is. This era was a sweet spot for Elvis, with heaps of Vegas glitz but still a goodly bit of Memphis soul, not to mention a giant dollop of Middle-America sentimentality. The reissue is technically not available in North America, but wait a week or two for the vinyl importers to send it our way. Music on Vinyl is also repressing Elvis 56 and Elvis Now this week, in case either of those is your Elvis album of choice. NL
Little Feat: Sailin’ Shoes; Dixie Chicken [Acoustic Sounds 40 Series]
The AS40 series continues with two Little Feat reissues, and fortunately, these are the two Little Feat albums that find the shape-shifting Los Angeles band at their funky, soulful best. 1972’s Sailin’ Shoes has several of frontman Lowell George’s best tunes on it, including “Easy to Slip” and a reworking of his immortal “Willin’,” which originally appeared on Little Feat’s debut. But 1973’s Dixie Chicken is unquestionably the band’s masterpiece, featuring the title track, “Fat Man in the Bathtub,” “Two Trains,” and the gorgeously stripped-down “Roll Um Easy.” The band copped a lot of New Orleans sounds—and musicians—for Dixie Chicken, but all that the pilfering made for an effective marriage of music, similar to how those Berkeley boys in Creedence adopted a swampy Southern style and made it work. These reissues are cut from the original analog tape at 45 RPM across two LPs, with Matthew Lutthans of the Mastering Lab doing the lacquer job and Quality Record Pressings stamping the vinyl. They’re part of an ongoing series of Warner Music reissues from Acoustic Sounds to celebrate the Salina, Kansas, corporation’s 40th anniversary. NL
Ohkami No Jikan: Black Tape II [Black Editions/La Musica]
Black Editions continues its excavation of treasures from the Japanese underground this week with the reissue of Black Tape II, a rarity from the discography of Nanjo Asahito, the guitarist best known for his time in the heavy psych group High Rise and for his label La Musica Records. His project Ohkami No Jikan featured an ever-rotating cast of players that, at one point, included Acid Mothers Temple leader Makoto Kawabata and keyboardist Mineko Mido. For the iteration that recorded Black Tape II, Asahito was joined by bassist Asai Fumiyo and drummer Nagao Kouji, and together, the trio created slow-burning epics that explored free jazz and hard psych with equal acuity. With mastering by Timothy Stollenwerk of Stereophonic Mastering and lacquers cut by Philip S. Rodriguez of Elysian Masters, this new edition is the first time this music has been pressed to vinyl after a short-run cassette was released in the late ’90s. RH
David Zé: Mutudi Ua Ufolo/Viuva da Liberdade [Jazzybelle]
French label Jazzybelle has prepared a 50th anniversary reissue of David Zé’s stunningly lovely 1975 album Mutudi Ua Ufolo/Viuva da Liberdade, the only album the Angolan songwriter released in his lifetime, which was tragically cut short by a political assassination in 1977. The album combines familiar African sounds like highlife and mbaqanga with Latin elements like rumba and bolero, brought to Angola during its many years as a Portuguese colony. Zé sang of resistance, anti-colonialism, and Angolan independence, and his music embeds the frustration and fury of an oppressed people within an optimistic hopefulness that—with full knowledge of his biography—is now devastatingly beautiful to hear. His music was banned for many years after his death, but Zé has since begun to get the recognition he deserved, and this reissue of his landmark album will hopefully turn many more Western ears his way. NL
Various Artists: Léve Léve Vol. 2: Sao Tomé & Principe Sounds 70s-80s [Bongo Joe]
Also from the Lusiphone diaspora this week (the Portuguese-speaking sections of the globe) comes this collection of ultra-rare music from the African island nation of São Tomé and Principe, located off the coasts of Gabon and Equatorial Guinea. As one might expect, this music is bright, sunny, danceable, and delectably rhythmic, featuring puxa and socopê rhythms that sound pleasingly familiar while also delivering something that’s entracingly exotic. The 15-song compilation comes from French label Bongo Joe, and the artists include Sum Alvarinho, Sangazuza, Pedro Lima, Conjunto Equador, and others. NL
Darkthrone: The Fist in the Face of God [Peaceville]
Long-standing Norwegian metal duo Darkthrone is celebrating its 40th birthday this year, and in honor of that milestone, Peaceville is issuing a massive 9-LP set this week. The limited collection focuses on the group’s black-metal era with freshly mastered represses (overseen by Patrick Engel at Germany’s Temple of Disharmony Studios) of the nine albums they released from 1992 to 2004, a stretch that included classics like 1992’s A Blaze in the Northern Sky, 1995’s Panzerfaust, and 1999’s Ravishing Grimness. Also included are a DVD featuring a new interview with Darkthrone members Fenriz and Nocturno Culto and live performances, a hefty book with a history of the group and rare photos, and some art prints and posters. RH
Jazz Alley
The real treat down Jazz Alley this week is a reissue of Noah Howard’s free jazz conflagration The Black Ark, recorded in New York in 1969 and released in Europe three years later. The alto saxophonist is joined on tenor by Arthur Doyle, and they lead a seven-piece charge through deliquescent soundscapes of cacophony and vibration. Last pressed to vinyl in 2007, this new cut comes from the infallible tastes at Superior Viaduct, the sister label to San Francisco’s Stranded Records boutique. This week also sees two new entries in the Blue Note Tone Poet series: Andrew Hill’s 1967 album Compulsion!!!!! skirts the edges of the developing free jazz movement, with Hill’s choppy, percussive attack on the piano propelling an adventurous ensemble that includes Freddie Hubbard on trumpet and Joe Chambers on drums. And the Lawrence Marable Quartet’s Tenorman, originally released in 1956 on the Jazz: West label, is a full-blooded, swinging set of West Coast jazz, with James Clay’s tenor sax taking center stage in front of Marable’s drums, Jimmy Bond’s bass, and Sonny Clarke’s piano. Both Tone Poets are cut from tape (mono, in Tenorman’s case) by Kevin Gray and pressed at RTI with tip-on jackets. Lastly, the monthly offering in Verve Record Club’s subscription series is Sarah Vaughan’s Close to You, a 1960 collection of orchestrally arranged pop standards, cut from tape and pressed at RTI. NL
OTHER REISSUES OF NOTE:
The Animals: Animalisms [Secret Records]
Black Label Society: Stronger Than Death; Shot to Hell; Catacombs of the Black Vatican; Grimmest Hits [MNRK Heavy]
Carter Burwell: The Celluloid Closet soundtrack [Quartet]
Caligula’s Horse: The Tide, the Thief & River’s End [Music on Vinyl]
John Campbell: One Believer [Music on Vinyl]
Chicago: VI [Friday Music]
Coroner: Mental Vortex; Grin [Listenable]
Corpusse: Delusions [Feeding Tube]
The Cure: 36 West 62nd Street: Live at Hurrah’s Nightclub, New York, April 15th 1980 [Dear Boss]
Morgan David and His Winos: Savage Young Winos [Liberation Hall]
Deep Purple: Amsterdamned: Live at the Paradiso, Amsterdam 1969 - FM Broadcast [Dear Boss]
Delain: We Are the Others [Music on Vinyl]
De-Phazz: Death by Chocolate [Phazz-a-Delic]
Fats Domino: Live on Air 1987 [Blue-Line]
The Donnas: Spend the Night [Real Gone]
Candy Dulfer: For the Love of You [Music on Vinyl]
Dwarves: Horror Stories [Hey Suburbia]
Eels: Daisies of the Galaxy 25th anniversary edition [PIAS]
The Equatics: Doin It!!!! [Now-Again] (repress)
Extreme Noise Terror: Burladingen ’88 [Radiation Reissues]
Fabulous Thunderbirds: Tuff Enuff [Last Music]
Connie Francis: Connie Francis Sings Second Hand Love and Other Hits [Sepia]
Mary Gauthier: Mercy Now [Lost Highway]
Ian Gillan Band: Scarabus [Friday Music]
Philip Glass: Glassworks [Music on Vinyl]
Golden Earring: On the Double [Music on Vinyl]
Godsmack: Awake 25th anniversary edition [UMe]
The Gravedigger Five: The Mirror Cracked [Radiation Reissues]
Guitar Gangsters: Prohibition [Radiation Reissues]
Hawkwind: Hawkwind [Atomhenge]
Helloween: Master of the Rings; The Time of the Oath; Better Than Raw [BMG]
Julius Hemphill: Dogon A.D. [Superior Viaduct]
Mississippi John Hurt: Live at Oberlin College 1965 [Southern Echoes]
Linval Johnson: Don’t Cut Off Your Dreadlocks [Charly]
L.A. Guns: Man in the Moon [Friday Music]
Carmen McRae: I’m Coming Home Again [Reel]
The Meteors: Wreckin’ Crew [Radiation Reissues]
Thelonious Monk: Underground [Music on Vinyl]
Naked Lunch: Songs for the Exhausted [Tapete]
Klaus Nomi: Nomi [Omnivore]
Obituary: Slowly We Rot [Real Gone]
A Perfect Circle: Mer de Noms (RSD Essential) [Interscope]
The Pogues: Pissed and Pinned: Live at McGonagle’s, Dublin, Ireland, 1st March 1985 - FM Broadcast [Dear Boss]
Bill Pritchard: Haunted [Tapete]
Ramones: Summer of ’89: Live at Teatro Tendastrisce, Roma, May 9th, 1989 [Dear Boss]
Buddy Reed & Th’ Rip It Ups: Tough Enough [Red Lightnin’]
Return to Forever: Romantic Warrior [Music on Vinyl]
The Tony Rice Unit: Manzanita [Real Gone]
Randy Macho Man Savage: Be a Man [Girder]
Iwamura Ryata: Monday Impression; Raining to Hear [Analog Dept]
Burkhard Schleissman: Fantasies [Divine Art]
Static X: Cannibal [Real Gone]
Isao Suzuki: Cadillac Woman; My Spare Time [Victor]
Tha God Fahim: Tha Dark Shogunn Saga Vol. 3 [Nature Sounds]
Lino Capra Vaccina: Antico Adagio: Complete 1978 Sessions [Ubi Ku]
Void: Live 1982 [Outer Battery]
Whiplash: Thunderstruck 1984–1985 Demos/Live at CBGB’s 1983 [Radiation Reissues]
Johnny Winter: Live Bootleg Series Volume 14 [Friday Music]
The Yardbirds: Over Under Sideways Down/Roger The Engineer 7” box set [Demon]
Young-Holt Unlimited: Born Again [Music on Vinyl]
Original Soundtrack: The Best of Jim Henson’s Fraggle Rock [Enjoy the Ride]
Original Soundtrack: Hannah Montana; Hannah Montana 2 [Walt Disney]
Various Artists: DJ Amir Presents Strata Records: The Sound of Detroit Volume 2 [180 Proof/BBE Music]
