…features 25 bonus tracks — nine studio rarities and 16 live recordings captured by bootlegger Mike Millard at Pink Floyd’s Los Angeles Sports Arena concert on April 26 1975, now receiving its first official release. The live audio has been restored and remastered by Steven Wilson.
…It’s a considerable trove of audiovisual material chronicling the British band’s Herculean task of following up the commercial success of 1973’s The Dark Side of the Moon, which was in the early stages of a staggering multi-year run on the Billboard charts. After mooting a conceptual piece involving “household objects” (heard on the bonus track “Wine Glasses”), Wish You Were Here largely deals with the numbness of absence. “Welcome to the Machine” and “Have a Cigar”…
Category: deluxe edition
…two audio CDs of “This Is What You Wanted” Live In Mexico City & bonus track edition of the studio album “Never Let Me Go” with “Shout”.
An intimate exploration of Placebo’s evolution, charting their journey through lyrics and songs that delve into the human experience.
Placebo’s second feature-length documentary called This Search for Meaning. This intimate and enlightening film explores the ideas that inhabit the lyrics and subject matter of Placebo’s songs, whilst charting their evolution as a group and as human beings. It is a fearless, truthful and forthright exploration of the creative process and the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle, along with its inevitable consequences.
Since emerging from obscurity in the 1990s with provocative songs such as “Nancy Boy” and “Bruise Pristine”, Placebo forged a decidedly unfashionable path through the brazenly macho ‘Britpop’ scene to explore subjects such as the body politic and the continued erosion of our human rights…
Ultravox’s 1984 best-of compilation The Collection sold over 2 million copies worldwide after its release and went triple platinum in the UK. It includes the band’s first 14 singles released between 1980 and 1984. The best-known tracks include the cult song “Vienna”, the anti-nuclear war anthem “Dancing With Tears In My Eyes”, the new wave classic “All Stood Still” as well as “Hymn”, “The Voice” and “Reap The Wild Wind”.
Now “The Collection” is being re-released remastered in various formats with different bonus material. This newly remastered compilation has been expanded into a 4CD/2Blu-ray Deluxe Edition. The set includes a second volume of “The Collection” with a further 14 singles from 1986 to 2024, alternative and unreleased versions.
The ship of Theseus is a classic paradox of thought that asks whether an object is truly the same after all its component pieces have been replaced. That’s not exactly the case for Sting’s musical The Last Ship, but he is once again revisiting the song score he’s tinkered with several times over the last decade in a new expanded edition.
Coming to 2CD, 2LP and digital on December 5 ahead of a new series of worldwide performances, this new edition of the singer/songwriter’s 2013 concept album take on The Last Ship offers 20 tracks from the original album release and cast recording, plus five new recordings, all resequenced to better reflect the current narrative of the tale. Those new tracks are a re-recording of the song “Shipyard” (with new vocals by…
…features the remastered original stereo mix, along with an extended introduction version of ‘Rubycon’ mixed by Steven Wilson. The set also features the complete concert recorded at The Rainbow in London in October 1974 over 2 CDs and the complete concert at The Royal Albert Hall in April 1975 (which featured Michael Hoening replacing Peter Baumann) also over 2CDs.
The members of Tangerine Dream continued to hone their craft as pioneers of the early days of electronica, and the mid-’70s proved to be a time of prosperity and musical growth for the trio of Chris Franke, early member Peter Baumann, and permanent frontman Edgar Froese. The three of them had been delivering mysterious space records on a regular basis, and their…
Formed in 1987 by Fruitbat and Jim Bob, Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine burst onto the scene with their signature style of punk-pop infused with samples, drum machines, and social commentary.
Released in 1995, Worry Bomb was Carter USM’s fifth album and their fourth in a row to break into the top ten of the UK album charts. It would also be the first to feature their new drummer, Wez, marking a shift away from the famous drum machine sound.
The album mixed things up musically, balancing mellow acoustic tracks like ‘My Defeatist Attitude’ with Carter’s signature high-energy indie rock, including ‘Let’s Get Tattoos’ and ‘The Young Offenders Mum’ which both hit the UK top 40.
To mark the 30th\u202Fanniversary…
An expanded deluxe edition of A Tab in the Ocean by Nektar. First issued in November 1972, the album was the second release by Nektar and was a milestone for the band as it set the template that that would bring them success in both Germany and the USA.
Originally featuring just four pieces, the albums first side would be dominated by the extensive title track which was a progressive rock tour de force. The remaining tracks, ‘Desolation Valley / Waves’, ‘Crying in the Dark’ and ‘King of Twilight’ would also become Nektar classics.
The album was recorded and mixed at Dierks Studios, Stommeln, Germany in October 1972, produced by Peter Hauke and Nektar and engineered by Dieter Dierks.
Coming off the less-than-classic Shake It Up, the Cars decided again to change things up, this time moving from their home studio in Boston to London to record with Mutt Lange. The producer was coming off a string of sleek modern hits, most recently Def Leppard’s Pyromania, and the Cars put themselves in Lange’s capable and demanding hands. They spent six months in the studio painstakingly putting the album together, sometimes spending days getting the right bass sound or vocal take. The bandmembers were rarely in the room at the same time and instead of using live drums on the record, Lange and David Robinson put together drum tracks using samples of Robinson’s playing. This sounds a bit like the recipe for a airless, stale album,…
…featuring the original album, B-sides, remixes, singles and never-before-released live at NEC, Birmingham, which has been newly mixed by Dan Hawkins.
From the moment the pan flute fanfare on “One Way Ticket” kicks off One Way Ticket to Hell…and Back, it’s clear that the Darkness still believes that more is more. If anything, the band believes that even more is even better: with the help of producer Roy Thomas Baker, they make their second album incredibly glossy and expensive-sounding, with layers of sitars, marching drums, bagpipes, and tubular bells on top of their already-powerful guitars, drums, and keyboards (and, of course, Justin Hawkins’ formidable falsetto). But while the band’s excess succeeded on…
Toyah’s 1994 studio album was recorded with Salisbury band Friday Forever and includes eight re-recordings of classic Toyah material and six original compositions. CD1 adds four tracks of which three are previously unreleased. This includes demos of album tracks Invisible Love and Lu$t For Love, first recorded in 1992 with Kiss Of Reality.
CD2 contains 16 rarities with seven of these previously unreleased. CD2 features the long-awaited release of original material Toyah wrote with members of Girlschool for their ‘supergroup’ project Strange Girls, who played live UK gigs and supported The Beach Boys in Germany. Long desired by fans who saw the Strange Girls live gigs; these three studio demos were recorded in 1991 but have remained unheard until their…
Toyah’s 1991 solo album Ophelia’s Shadow is released as an expanded Deluxe 2CD Edition for the first time ever. Packaged in deluxe 7”-sized gatefold packaging, it continue the series of expanded solo Toyah albums released by Edsel.
Alongside the studio album that features Robert Fripp playing guitar on two tracks, CD1 adds six tracks Toyah recorded in 1993 with Kiss Of Reality, previously available on a very rare CD released only in Germany.
CD2 adds a full 1992 concert recording of Toyah and Kiss Of Reality in Warsaw, Poland. All 10 live tracks are previously unreleased with highlights being the otherwise unrecorded vocals for Amazon, Daydreaming and Shirt Of The Muse plus a rendition of Toyah’s 1987 album track…
Despite all your rage, you are still just a reader on a post about a new expansion of one of The Smashing Pumpkins’ biggest albums. The iconoclastic band will reissue Mellon Collie and The Infinite Sadness this fall for its 30th anniversary, pairing the original, sprawling album with a new double album of unreleased live performances on the band’s ensuing tour in support of the record.
Conceived from the outset as a double album – frontman Billy Corgan described the 2CD set as “The Wall for Generation X” – Mellon Collie represents part of the band’s most prolific era and commercial apex. Working with the best-known line-up of the group (guitarist James Iha, bassist D’arcy Wretzky and drummer Jimmy Chamberlain) plus producers Flood and Alan Moulder…
…includes the original album, a collection of B-sides, new and classic remixes, and previously unreleased live radio sessions.
It’s something of a mystery why Mute Records waited until early 2006 to release Goldfrapp’s third album, Supernature, in the U.S. After all, when it came out in the U.K. the previous summer, it made the duo into a bona fide chart success, to the point where the album’s terrific lead single, “Ooh La La” — on which Allison Goldfrapp channels Marc Bolan’s dippy-cool vocals and lyrics over a shuffling, glam-tastic beat — drew comparisons to former S Club 7 star Rachel Stevens’ similarly glam-inspired hit “Some Girls.” While Goldfrapp might balk at being called (or compared to) a pop act, it’s undeniable that the duo has…
…Available on four CDs, Alive! features the original double album along with two more complete shows (plus some relevant rehearsal audio and an excerpt of a third) that were, with a few post-production tweaks, used to create the landmark Alive! These overdub-free recordings have been newly mixed by the album’s original engineer, Eddie Kramer, who’s also done mixes of the original album in Dolby Atmos and 5.1 surround on the accompanying Blu-ray.
The timing of Alive! could not have been more fortuitous. KISS was desperate to break through, and their label Casablanca Records desperately needed a hit after sinking a major investment in an underselling record of clips from The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.
…include a new remastered version of the original album, a disc of rarities and a CD featuring a live show from that year.
One in the winter of 1983, Paul Westerberg – singer, guitarist and songwriting leader of Minneapolis trouble boys The Replacements – phoned manager Peter Jesperson with hot news: “I just wrote the best song I’ve ever written, and we need to record it right away.” Jesperson said there was no rush; the band’s second album, Hootenanny, had just gone to the pressing plant.
Jesperson soon heard why Westerberg was so excited. During a gig at a local club, the singer, drummer Chris Mars, lead guitarist Bob Stinson and Bob’s teenage brother, bassist Tommy Stinson, lit into “a bouncy tune I didn’t…
…feature 13 non-LP remixes and B-sides. Original mastering engineer Bernie Grundman has overseen the remastering along with engineer Chris James.
…An eternally hard-to-pin-down artist, Prince was already at work on the album when Purple Rain hit theaters and record store shelves, and the LP arrived less than a month after he’d finished touring that record. “I didn’t wait to see what would happen with Purple Rain,” he told Rolling Stone. “That’s why the albums sound so different.” (He’d call it “the smartest thing” he did in that same interview.) Influenced by the psychedelia of the West Coast-based Paisley Underground movement (but not, he was clear in one of his only period interviews, The Beatles), Around the World mixes Middle Eastern orchestration…
…Originally released on 11th September 2000, Leila’s acclaimed second album Courtesy of Choice followed the success of her Rephlex Records debut Like Weather and felt like a broadcast from a futuristic radio station no one else could tune into. Twenty-five years on, alongside collaborations with the likes of Bjork, Aphex Twin and Terry Hall and iconic performances at the likes of the V&A and Venice Biennale, more and more listeners have found the frequency.
This new version, Courtesy of Choice… asides and besides, re-presents the original 14 track album — including the previously vinyl-only “Relax the Pleasuredome” — alongside a wealth of unreleased material. Leila chose to re-edit rather than remake the album (she has all the original data…
Yves Jarvis’s Polaris Prize-winning record, All Cylinders, is expanded upon with 5 extra tracks.
“Polymath” is one of the misused words of music journalism, cousin to the even more hyperbolic “genius”. In pop coverage it usually gets applied to musicians who play more than one instrument and do not fit neatly into a genre bracket — impressive, perhaps, but hardly the same as translating Sumerian while extracting DNA from an apple.
A recipient of this overblown term is Canadian singer-songwriter Yves Jarvis. Born in Montreal as Jean-Sébastien Yves Audet, he plays all the instruments on his new album All Cylinders, which he has also produced. Its songs are filled with switches in direction and doublings back. “If this trail bifurcates, then I just have to choose,”…
If The Hurting was mental anguish, Songs from the Big Chair marks the progression towards emotional healing, a particularly bold sort of catharsis culled from Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith’s shared attraction to primal scream therapy. The album also heralded a dramatic maturation in the band’s music, away from the synth pop brand with which it was (unjustly) seared following the debut, and towards a complex, enveloping pop sophistication. The songwriting of Orzabal, Smith, and keyboardist Ian Stanley took a huge leap forward, drawing on reserves of palpable emotion and lovely, protracted melodies that draw just as much on soul and R&B music as they do on immediate pop hooks. The album could almost be called pseudo-conceptual, as each song holds its place and each…
Bête Noire was the follow up to 1985’s Boys and Girls and was co-produced with Patrick Leonard (who had worked with Madonna on her True Blue album and would later co-produce 1989’s Like A Prayer). Johnny Marr was amongst the contributors to Bête Noire, whose singles were ‘The Right Stuff’, ‘Kiss and Tell’ and ‘Limbo’. Only ‘The Right Stuff’ troubled the UK top 40, peaking at No 37.
For the 2025 reissue Bête Noire is released as a 2CD deluxe edition and on purple vinyl. The second disc of the 2CD set offers remixes and edits from the original singles. This appears to be mostly comprehensive, with the exception of a small number of ‘Limbo’ versions, and extra points go to BMG for putting together a ‘listenable’ running order (not grouping remixes of the same…