…remixed from the original tapes in Nashville, TN by Brad Jones and Robyn Hitchcock at Alex the Great Studios in June 2025.
Robyn Hitchcock is one of England’s most enduring and prolific singer/songwriters, visual artists, guitarists, live performers, and genuine eccentrics. He started his recording career with the Soft Boys, a punk-era band specializing in melodic pop merged with offbeat lyrics. In 1988, he landed his first major U.S. label contract with A&M Records and followed the signing by releasing the ambitious Globe of Frogs (1988)
…Hitchcock’s first foray into U.S. major-label territory disappointed some critics but helped expand his audience beyond the realm of college radio, thanks to the radio-friendly…
Category: remastered
There’s a reason that To Live and Shave in L.A. (TLASILA)’s The Wigmaker in Eighteenth-Century Williamsburg opens up with samples of free jazz. Shave mastermind Tom Smith is explicitly trying to connect his work with the music he loves — the record’s liner notes contain a Nurse With Wound-like list of those influences. That list is multidisciplinary, covering his love of usual suspects like “Poe, Baudelaire, Joyce, Man Ray,” but also “Theremin and all Russian avant-gardists,” “Lee Marvin,” “all atomic test footage,” “global student revolt and the inevitable erotic aftermath,” “Fluxus (in doses),” not to mention digressions on Funkadelic, Hendrix, the “titanic Electric Eels,” and provocative music-nerd statements like “Stooges purists prefer Asheton, but…
Gravity is a pivotal album from Monolake’s nearly 30-year career. It’s the first to feature Robert Henke more or less on his own, following the departure of Gerhard Behles.
It also finds Henke transitioning into the sound and style that makes Monolake one of the most legendary techno artists of the 21st Century. Now, thanks to this essential vinyl reissue from Field Records, you finally have a chance to hear it in deep, rich, sparkling high fidelity.
Henke’s third LP as Monolake is an anomaly. A good chunk of the underground electronic music from this time focuses on the conceptual and cerebral, with genres like microhouse and glitch filling raves and art galleries alike. Even more belongs to the burgeoning minimal…
…remastered by Rashad Becker with previously unheard bonus track exclusive to this edition.
In 2010, Matthew Barnes emerged from The Wirral with an almost album-length EP, Dagger Paths. It immediately caught the attention of the music press with its strange, blurry mixture of psychedelic pop and languid dubstep. Engravings follows the same vein, but with Dagger Paths‘ rougher edges honed into a series of enigmatic spectral half-songs that swirl and bite in successive layers of oblique, occasionally abstract, textures.
To record Engravings, Barnes made the audacious choice of mixing his tracks outdoors, immersing himself in the supposedly spiritually-charged environment of the Wirral peninsula. As such, even if his music descends from…
More than 25 years after Bruce Haack became a cult favorite, there were still corners of his discography waiting for proper reissues. Plenty of attention has been given to works like Electric Lucifer, Electric Lucifer: Book 2, and the wildly eccentric Haackula, but aside from early collections like Listen Compute Rock Home and Hush Little Robot, his music for children has often been overlooked. Shimmy Disc rectifies this matter with their reissue of 1975’s This Old Man, which was remastered by Kramer and released on vinyl for the first time in 50 years. This Old Man is something of a mirror twin to its predecessor, 1974’s Captain Entropy. Falling somewhere between the activity songs of the Dance, Sing, and Listen series and the lysergic visions of Electric Lucifer, both…
Released in 1989, Def, Dumb & Blonde is Debbie Harry’s third, solo, studio album.
Although Debbie Harry‘s popularity had decreased by the late ’80s, 1989 wasn’t a bad year for her at all. That year, Blondie’s former lead vocalist successfully portrayed a struggling singer on the brilliant but underrated CBS crime drama Wiseguy, and demonstrated that she could still have considerable fun in the studio.
Under the direction of hit producer Mike Chapman – who had worked with Blondie, as well as with everyone from Sweet to Scandal – Harry delivers an eclectic CD that isn’t in a class with a Blondie treasure like Parallel Lines but nonetheless has a lot going for it. Much of this new wave-ish pop/rock and European-flavored dance music…
Mastered at MoFi’s California studio, Mobile Fidelity’s hybrid SACD puts the record’s artistic significance in proper perspective. It invites you to hear with stellar clarity the diverse architecture, passionate playing, and fervent emotions that help make ‘Dreamboat Annie’ an all-time classic. This 50th anniversary edition also marks the first time Heart’s opening salvo has been available in audiophile quality on disc in more than a decade.
In the 1980s and ’90s, numerous women recorded blistering rock, but things were quite different in 1976 — when female singers tended to be pigeonholed as soft rockers and singer/songwriters and were encouraged to take after Carly Simon, Melissa Manchester, or Joni Mitchell rather than Led Zeppelin or Black Sabbath.
Back in 2018, Omnivore Recordings collected The Complete Warner Bros.-Seven Arts Recordings of jazz pianist-composer-Peanuts legend Vince Guaraldi. Now, the label is breaking out one of the albums contained in that set for CD and vinyl reissue. 1968’s Oh, Good Grief! was built around his familiar compositions for Charles M. Schulz’s legendary characters, but those tunes were subtly updated as Guaraldi added electric guitar and electric harpsichord to his trio (piano/bass/drums) format. Kevin Gray has remastered these vibrant new editions.
In his first album for Warner Bros., Vince Guaraldi serves up another delightful, though pitifully short (28 minutes) helping of his themes for the Peanuts TV specials. By this time, like…
The Kentucky Headhunters have reissued Big Boss Man, a one-of-a-kind project originally recorded in partnership with Sony/ATV Music Publishing two decades ago.
Long considered a hidden gem within the band’s catalog, Big Boss Man returns as a newly remastered, fully restored project, released on the band’s own Practice House Records label. The origins of the project go back to 2005, when then Sony/ATV President Donna Hilley, compilation supervisor Jack Jackson and creative director of new music Tom Long, approached The Headhunters with an idea to take 12 classics from the Sony/ATV catalog and “Headhunterize” them, infusing each song with the group’s signature energy. The purpose behind the project was to breathe…
…Remastered by Helge Sten.
Back in 2008, Motorpsycho MK3 was beginning to gel and settle. Kenneth Kapstad’s entry into the band a year earlier had not only started to inspire a new and different writing, as shown in their first album, Little Lucid Moments, but also given the musicianship a solid kick up the behind. By summer 2008 the engine room was back to firing on all cylinders, ushering in a new era of intense and ambitious work for the band.
In hindsight it’s hard to quite remember the sequence of events, but some time early in 2008, an invitation to play the Terrastock Festival in Louisville dovetailed with an opportunity to fulfill the long held ambition to record at Electrical Audio with Steve Albini.
2025 mix by Jon Altschiller.
As we enter 2026, who could have imagined the Bruce Springsteen Live Archive series would be entering its twelfth year? The first show in the series, Apollo Theater, March 9, 2012, was released in November 2014; remarkably, 100 more have followed, expanding Springsteen’s live recording canon into territory once exclusive to the Grateful Dead.
Tours from 1975 on are represented in that 100, with many covered in depth. Frustratingly to all, a few gaps remain, limited by technical challenges (#freetherisingtour) and tape availability. But the Archive series is open-ended: new sources and playback breakthroughs remain ever possible.
For this year’s holiday release, we revisit…
…remastered & with 5 bonus tracks.
“Even a stopped clock gives the right time twice a day”, maintains Paul McGann’s character near the start of Withnail and I. He plays Marwood – the ‘I’ of the title – in a drunken and druggy but decidedly unpsychedelic cinematic glimpse into the late 1960s. The film initially flopped in cinemas at the height of 1980s yuppiedom, only to find cult adoration (and over quotation) via subsequent release on video. Everything has its right time in the end. And so it is with Henry Badowski’s one and only album Life Is a Grand, which is finally getting the reissue it justly deserves after all but disappearing, along with its creator, to near complete indifference following its release in 1981. Indeed Badowski himself seems more…
…La-La Land Records give the expanded treatment to Hans Zimmer’s score to the 1991 hit Thelma & Louise. Directed by Ridley Scott from a screenplay by writer-director Callie Khouri (her first credit!), Thelma & Louise starred Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis as two midwestern friends whose road trip escape from their humdrum lives takes unexpected turns. The film, screened out of competition at the Cannes Film Festival, earned Oscar nods for its two leads and Scott’s direction, even winning one for the script; it also featured an early supporting role for Brad Pitt, whose smoldering turn led to his rise to the top of the Hollywood A-list.
Zimmer’s score reflected the southwestern Americana locations seen onscreen, with…
…With expanded or remastered presentations of Goldfinger, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Live and Let Die, The Man with the Golden Gun, Moonraker, Octopussy, Licence to Kill, Tomorrow Never Dies, The World is Not Enough and Die Another Day already certifying La-La Land Records as the home of definitive presentations of Bond soundtracks, there’s another one striking hard: 1965’s Thunderball, the fourth film in the series featuring a returning Sean Connery as Ian Fleming’s thrill-a-minute secret agent. Here, Bond squares off against another agent of the terrorist organization SPECTRE – the eyepatch-sporting Emilio Largo – attempting to stop SPECTRE’s plot to set off a pair of atomic bombs they stole.
If Goldfinger further codified the formula of…
After a yearlong hiatus, Light in the Attic’s Nancy Sinatra Archival Series is continuing with an expanded and remastered reissue of 1969’s Nancy on both CD and LP. Her 6th and final studio album for the label, the Billy Strange-helmed LP offered a cross-section of rock, pop, soul, and country tunes as only Sinatra could have delivered them.
Nancy arrived in the wake of producer-songwriter Lee Hazlewood’s unexpected move to Sweden. Hazlewood had produced all of Nancy’s Reprise albums to that point (including the soundtrack to her television special Movin’ with Nancy, not yet a part of the Archival Series) but with his departure, arranger-guitarist Strange would move up into the producer’s chair. Billy also appeared on Nancy as co-writer of “Memories.”
…This 15th anniversary remaster of ‘Gateway’ includes a bonus disc with eight additional unreleased tracks mostly from the 2010 era.
On Gateway, Erik Wøllo presents the kind of travelog predicted by Joe Meek with I Hear a New World, a soundtrack of a visit to an alien world. The roots of the release are more readily placed in late-’70s space rock and ’80s new age, though, and while Gateway is an enjoyable listen, it’s not very inspiring in feeling like a new launching point for both sound and style. The elegant blend of dreamy synth loops, deep bass tones, soft electric guitar parts, and more simply doesn’t break through into a new, striking synthesis. There’s no question that Gateway is both well-performed and arranged; it’s a lovely sounding effort…
Undergoing an experience not unlike how Brian Eno came to his own experiments with ambient music, finding himself deaf in one ear and now hearing sound differently before, not to mention suffering auditory hallucinations, Jon DeRosa experimented with making music in an attempt to make sense of these disconcerting experiences. In that creative and therapeutic place No Solace in Sleep was born. Twenty-five years on from this extraordinary, in the very real sense of the word, debut album, it has been remastered by ambient/electronic pioneer Taylor Deupree a process which has unlocked an even brighter, deeper, broader, and stunning sonic experience.
As the name he chose for the project suggests, this this is an album that creates a tonal…
…featuring the 2024 remix by Mike Kennerty as well as the original mix (remastered).
My Brain Hurts is the third studio album by the Chicago-based punk rock band Screeching Weasel originally released in September 1991 through Lookout Records. It was the group’s first album on Lookout as well as the only release with bassist Dave Naked and the first with drummer Dan Panic, the latter of which would go on to appear on several of the band’s albums.
The album marked a very distinct stylistic shift for the group, fully moving toward a Ramones-inspired sound and completely abandoning their previous hardcore punk influences as a condition made by vocalist Ben Weasel when reforming the band after a brief break-up.
For the very first time, the complete studio recordings made by the iconic conductor Carlo Maria Giulini for Columbia and HMV (plus the two for Pathé and Electrola) have been remastered in high definition from original tapes and put together in a 60-CD box. Some recordings never published before are also included in the box: a Freischütz Overture from 1969, the stereo version of ‘Spring’ and ‘Summer’ Concertos from the 4 Seasons, plus a rehearsal of ‘Winter’ (1955), and excerpts from Tchaikovsky’s 5th Symphony (1962).
This wide-ranging collection provides a comprehensive testimony of Carlo Maria Giulini’s collaborations with London’s most distinguished orchestras, his beloved Philharmonia Orchestra, and the London Philharmonic, later recordings…
‘Cerulean R’ is the expanded 15th anniversary reissue of first Baths record, ‘Cerulean’.
The “R” in the title refers to the tagline “Reissue, Remix, Resurface, Remaster”. The Release itself is split into 3 constituent parts: “Reissue” LP1 is a reissue of the original record. “Remix” LP2 contains 8 unheard remixes created in 2010-2011, around the original release.“Re surface” LP3 contains 8 unsung Baths songs.
It’s fitting that Baths’ debut album Cerulean is on Anticon, as Will Wiesenfeld’s music blends glitchy, hip-hop-tinged beats with delicate atmospheres. Cerulean sounds like the missing link between Bibio, Flying Lotus, Toro y Moi, and Dilla, to name a few, but Wiesenfeld has his own sound within that realm. He keeps his intricate…