Upbeat, downbeat, heavy, mellow, sad and joyous. A full and varied offering of new-not-new.
We start the new week in splendid form with Songs in A&E, freshly reissued as part of Spiritualized’s ongoing Spaceman Reissue Program. It’s an important one in the timeline. In 2005, with the writing and recording well underway, Spaceman was rushed to the Royal London Infirmary with double pneumonia. The sleeve of this reissue is a photograph taken as he lay in what his close friends and family feared at the time was his deathbed.
It’s an album of country hues, swooping orchestrations and rousing whispers. Lamentations on love, death, drugs and in a career of highs (yep…) it’s one of his most beautiful and weirdly uplifting moments. We spent a joyous monday with it and the whole week has a much better complexion. Suggesting you do likewise.
+ Pressed on double vinyl with new sleeve art.
Following last week's announcement that Ambient Works II will finally see a new pressing, we have another Aphex Twin essential back in the building with an expanded edition of his 1992 Digeridoo EP. It is the first time the EP has been reissued with extra material, with Richard James digging through the DAT archives and revisiting the recordings, encoding them through a Nakamichi CR7e cassette deck, using the customised deck with vari-speed to encode at speeds that “felt right at the time”.
“I wanted to have some tracks to play to finish the raves I used to play in Cornwall, to really kill everybody off so they couldn’t dance.” - Richard D James.
+ Available on limited 'Behold The Salt' or Black colour double vinyl.
Matador have pressed up the Queens of the Stone Age’s self-titled debut LP. They explain; having released the original tracklist and artwork version of Queens of the Stone Age self-titled LP in 2022, limited editions on orange and on black vinyl (aka ‘The 1998 Version’), we are now going to be releasing ‘The 2011 Version’ of the album on LP (specifically double-LP) and CD. This is seen as the definite version of the album by the artist, and the version that we will keep in print going forward.
Big Crown Records release Big Crown Vaults Vol. 2, a collection of unreleased tracks and new to vinyl cuts from The Shacks. Lots of sweet swagger. Produced by El Michels Affair and Max Shrager. Available on Clear Orange colour vinyl.
Also this week, we have a 10th anniversary edition of Wolf Alice’s Creature Songs 10” EP. We had the huge pleasure of revisiting Sufjan Stevens’ Seven Swans for its 20th anniversary with a custom Dinked Edition. We held back a few copies in case of damages, so do keep an eye out as we’ll put a couple up for sale in the coming days. On the stereo as we write to you is a 50th anniversary edition of Grateful Dead’s superb seventh studio LP, From the Mars Hotel. It is from the same period that brought Workingman's Dead, American Beauty and Wake of the Flood, so to say they were on fire is something of an all time understatement. We have limited Neon Pink vinyl and also a super-fun Zoetrope picture disc.
Lastly for today we have another superb compilation from the heads at Two-Piers with Night Train: Transcontinental Landscapes 1968 – 2019. “From Dusk, through to Dawn. A collection to accompany the change of the fields, the coastline the colour of the sky outside your window as you take your journey.” A fine set of companions including; J.J. Cale, Linda Perhacs, Tangerine Dream, The Byrds, Leon Russell and more.
+ Pressed on Transparent Petrol / Magenta Sky colour vinyl.
