reissue

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the vinyl reissue of the Labyrinth soundtrack by David Bowie and Trevor Jones. While his career was characterized by no small number of unusual events, arguably the greatest concentration of weirdness about David Bowie’s career can be found in the 1980s. Within those ten fateful years, Bowie released albums which have come to be regarded as some of his finest (Let’s Dance was the album which broke the singer into the Top...

Judas Priest Turbo 30 (Legacy/Columbia/Sony Music) Skim through the catalogues of any number of rock bands who have enjoyed a lot of popularity and, invariably, it’s easy to find the fly in the creative ointment that fans abhor; that album was Into The Unknown for Bad Religion, it was Unmasked for KISS and Metallica has yet to live down Load. Maybe it just wasn’t the right time for those albums or maybe they were just weak and generally ill-advised...

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the 2LP reissue of Dig Your Own Hole by The Chemical Brothers. …And then, with the release of Dig Your Own Hole, The Chemical Brothers became a pop culture phenomenon. Now, it could be contended that the arrival and immediate public embrace of Dig Your Own Hole was the result of several different factors intersecting (after grunge, Brit-Pop overtook both the charts and popular imagination thanks to bands including Blur, Oasis and...

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the new Exit Planet Dust reissue from The Chemical Brothers. From the outside, The Chemical Brothers have never really appeared to be an act that anyone associates with the concept of “evolutionary development,” but that is really the fault of shortsighted critics who simply assume that the group’s influence and growth is limited because the music first gained life on a series of dance floors. Such rigid thinking is foolish, really; in...

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the vinyl reissue of Clumsy by Our Lady Peace. With the knowledge of what Clumsy would ultimately become in the context of Our Lady Peace’s catalogue already a matter of public record (it was a runaway success, being certified Diamond in Canada and Platinum in the US – each denoting at least 1 million records sold), the possibility that the making of the album was laborious may come as a surprise. Not...

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the vinyl reissue of Naveed by Our Lad Peace. Now with the benefit of hindsight, it is genuinely incredible when one considers how many classic bands just seemed to materialize from nowhere on the streets of Toronto in the first half of the 1990s. That might sound like an overstatement to those who came along later, but it’s true; bands like The Tragically Hip, the Headstones, Gorp, 13 Engines, The Morganfields, Thrush...

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the Exit Stencil reissue of the Sings Blues and Hymns LP by Cat-Iron. In my life, I have had three perception-altering experiences with the blues. The first was when I heard Howlin’ Wolf; when I first heard the moans and growls which came off songs like “Smokestack Lightning,” it rattled me to the core and hooked me with the inherent danger of it. The second time the blues changed my life was...

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the 2016 reissue of the BLACKsummers’night LP by Maxwell. On a superficial level, leaping around an artist’s catalogue can be confusing in a variety of ways; there can be a disconnect in the continuity of the artist’s development and that may mess with the perceptions of their catalogue as a whole. Such a phenomenon is absolutely true of Maxwell’s songbook – when the singer’s started with Urban Hang Suite in 1996, his...

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the deluxe 2LP reissue of Maxwell’s Urban Hang Suite by Maxwell. It’s incredible how wide the stream of creativity was in the mainstream music scene of 1996. While rock had finally started to get itself worked out following the death of Kurt Cobain (there were a few good rock records that year – Ministry released Filth Pig, Lou Reed put out Set The Twilight Reeling, The Wallflowers released Bringing Down The Horse...

Artist: Mike Doughty Album: Haughty Melodic (CD reissue) Label:ATO Records I must preface this review by saying that I have been a Mike Doughty fan for an incredibly long time. I first became a fan when I discovered Soul Coughing; at that time, I had grown tired of grunge’s (by then) floundering, poor self-image (the genre as a whole really had difficulty regaining its strength and composure after the death of Kurt Cobain) and was looking for something which was...