fri 11/07/2025

Reissue CDs

Reissue CDs Weekly: The Shaggs

“The Shaggs are real, pure, unaffected by outside influences. Their music is different, it is theirs alone.” So began the liner notes to Philosophy of the World, The Shaggs' sole album. Not many people read the words or heard the music when it was...

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Reissue CDs Weekly: Les Panties

What should a band called Les Panties sound like? Melodic, Ramones-like pop-punk? Dirty garage rock a la early White Stripes? From the name, either surmise seems reasonable. In the event, what reverberates through this incongruously named Brussels...

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Reissue CDs Weekly: John Foxx

In 1985, John Foxx released In Mysterious Ways: his fourth solo album since leaving Ultravox in 1979. In 1980, he had charted with “Underpass”, his first solo single. Subsequently, he charted a path where frosty, anomie-filled electropop gave way to...

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Reissue CDs Weekly: Chess Records Soul, Little Richard

Chicago’s Chess Records first made waves in the Fifties with a raft of records which included future classics integral to defining the urban slant on blues music. Early in the decade, the label issued singles by John Lee Hooker, Memphis Slim, Muddy...

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Reissue CDs Weekly: Tamam Shud

In 1969, the Australian band Tamam Shud improvised as a film  was projected onto the wall of a recording studio. The results were heard on the Evolution album. Playing original music live to accompany a film screening isn’t commonplace these...

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Reissue CDs Weekly: The Beach Boys

The Beach Boys signed with Capitol Records on 24 May 1962. Early the next month, their first single for the label became “409”/”Surfin’ Safari”. It was not their debut release. The “Surfin'”/ “Luau” single had been issued in November 1961 by Candix....

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Reissue CDs Weekly: Judy Henske & Jerry Yester

In 1969, a tranche of American musicians looked back to the country’s past for inspiration. Bob Dylan followed John Wesley Harding with Nashville Skyline. The Band’s eponymous second album hit the shops. The Flying Burrito Brothers debuted with The...

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Reissue CDs Weekly: Betty Davis, Jeanette Jones

Despite their different paths in the Seventies, the final years of the Sixties saw parallels between Betty Davis and Jeanette Jones. Both soul singers had significant backing from music business insiders. Late in the decade, each had a discography...

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Reissue CDs Weekly: Heartworn Highways

Although Heartworn Highways was a unique document of a collection of country singer-songwriters who had rejected the Nashville establishment in favour of following their own paths, hardly anyone saw the film after its completion. Initially titled...

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Reissue CDs Weekly: Jerry Ross

A two-bar flurry of guitar lays the table for a skip-along beat, handclaps, and an arrangement and melody akin to Martha and the Vandellas’ March 1964 single “In my Lonely Room”. This though was not a Motown production and did not tell the story of...

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Reissue CDs Weekly: Simple Minds

As the album featuring Simple Minds’ first Top Twenty single, “Promised You a Miracle”, 1982’s New Gold Dream (81-82-83-84) was aptly titled. After the success of the next single “Glittering Prize”, it hit number three in the album charts. Five...

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Reissue CDs Weekly: Bitori, Space Echo

Since achieving international success in the final years of the 1980s, the late Cesária Évora has dominated much of globe’s perception of music from the Cape Verde (officially Cabo Verde). This fascinating pair of releases reveal other aspects which...

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