Same week, more records, with all of the wonderful not-new.
Hello, Friends.
As we said yesterday, this week's set of releases are vast and plentiful, so to help you navigate them all we broke the reissues and compilations into their own edition. So this is Drift's Not-New Records of the Week™.
Released in October 2000 (and winning the Mercury Music Prize in 2001), Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea is the fifth studio LP from PJ Harvey... and it's one of the best albums of all time, fact!
Produced by PJ Harvey with Rob Ellis and Mick Harvey, it found her ever maturing as a writer but still so in-touch with the fire of her amazing work to date. As with the other reissues in this series, there is a separate collection of unreleased demos of every track written. It's amazing to hear that part of the process and how they evolved.
Electrically Possessed is the fourth volume of Stereolab's Switched On series, compiling non-album tracks and sought-after deep cuts by the group. The long-awaited fourth instalment spans 1999-2008 in the Stereolab story and collates 3 LPs worth of material, all remastered from the original tapes and overseen by the band.
I guess the question here; did Stereolab ever do anything that wasn't utterly lush? What a band, folks.
Way Down In The Rust Bucket is the legendary recording of Neil Young & Crazy Horse in full flight. Recorded on November 13th 1990 in Santa Cruz, CA, where the band were rehearsing for their upcoming Weld tour, Neil Young and Crazy Horse played a club show at The Catalyst which is now released for the first time. So many magic moments, but Cinnamon Girl rips so hard!!!
+ Available on double CD, a four LP set and as a deluxe box that includes all four LPs, both CDS plus a DVD and all in a foil numbered box.
Fugazi is the self-titled and utterly uncompromising debut EP from the soon-to-be-pretty-legendary post-hardcore band. This 12" EP (on limited edition red vinyl) was re-cut from the Silver Sonya masters in 2008 at Chicago Mastering Service and comes with a free MP3 download of the album.
Three belters back in print from the early vaults of The National, with Cherry Tree EP, Sad Songs For Dirty Lovers and their self-titled debut in the racks. All three have been remastered at Abbey Road Studios and sound absolutely mint.
Charles Mingus's amazing The Black Saint and The Sinner Lady gets a much deserved reissue. Originally released on Impulse! in 1963, the album broke new ground in both genre-defying composition and innovative recording techniques.
"the experience of the first few listenings to a record so total, so mind-twisting, that you authentically can say you’ll never be quite the same again. Black Saint and The Sinner Lady did that, and a very few others. They’re events you remember all your life, like your first real orgasm." - Lester Bangs.
Staying with Jazz for a minute, we have the third volume of BBE's J Jazz - Deep Modern Jazz From Japan series. These gifts just keep giving. Mastered at the Grammy-nominated Carvery studio in London, many of the tracks featured are reissued for the first time, including mega-rare private press cuts from the Yasuhiro Kohno Trio, Masaru Imada Trio, and Hideyasu Terakawa Quartet.
Going back to the start of the DOOM story, we have a deluxe CD edition of KMD's BL_CK B_ST_RDS on Metal Face Records. Got a feeling that this one is going to be more celebrated with each passing year as both a hugely important cultural document and a badass album.
Deftones White Pony album celebrates its 20th anniversary with a handsome suite of box-set editions.
The Black Crowes' debut album - Shake Your Money Maker - gets a reissue with lots of formats and interesting Paraphernalia. It has also been newly remastered from the original tapes and sounds pretty tight.
A real nice 2021 edition of Aretha Franklin's Young, Gifted and Black. A beautiful album that perfectly mixes both sides of Aretha — the earlier hard-hitting soulster, and the developing vocalist with a rich talent for more sophisticated material.
+ Limited 'Burnt Orange' vinyl pressing.
Also getting a handsome-sounding new edition is Ray Charles' The Atlantic Years compilation. Full of bangers from start to end, it's all the good.
+ Limited Blue vinyl pressing.
We have a clear vinyl repress of Vashti Bunyan's legendary debut album, Just Another Diamond Day.
The astutely titled "Greatest Hits" is the first-ever official anthology of recordings from Jack and Meg White's iconic The White Stripes vaults. Twenty-six tracks, all killer.
Just Arrived > Landing with us now and also on the new racks this week; Horse Meat Disco, Blanck Mass, Cabaret Voltaire, Nightshift, Pauline Anna Strom and Vapour Theories.
And soundtracking the weekend? Easy money, that'll be Cumbia Cumbia 1 & 2 on the World Circuit label. Meticulously selected from thousands of singles, this collection brings together the greatest recordings from Colombia's legendary record label, Discos Fuentes, between 1950 and 1988. Some joy herewith.
Okay, okay, we'll leave you be... For a while!
- Drift