A certifiable slew of excellent reissues hit stores in 2024, so many in fact, that we’ve thematically doubled up them up to provide maximum exposure.
20. Afterimage – Faces to Hide (Independent Project Records) + Torn Boys – 1983 (Independent Project Records) Formed at the dawn of the 1980s, Los Angelinos Afterimage could lead a listener to think they were from merry ol’ England, or not so merry ol’ England to be accurate, as the sound was clearly impacted by the post punk happenings of the time. But there was nothing contrived about Afterimage and their sound was tough and raw, befitting their Cali punk roots. Anybody into cold wave, dark wave, minimal wave (all the waves, basically) should check out this lavishly produced set.
Per the title of their retrospective collection, Stockton, CA’s Torn Boys didn’t stick around long, but while extant they did lay down enough high quality material that IPR made the wise decision to drop it onto LP. The sound is art-punk with vocal harmonies and drum machine rhythms, an attack that hovers in the California hills somewhere between Keats Rides a Harley and The Enigma Variations.
19. Cold Sun – Dark Shadows (Guerssen) + The Artwoods – Art Gallery & I Take It All (Singles Collection) (Guerssen) Based in Catalonia, Spain, the Guerssen label is indefatigable in maintaining a frequent release schedule that ranges from psychedelia to folk-rock to proto metal to prog with visitations to the private press fringes. Every year is a pretty good one for Guerssen and its many subsidiaries, but in 2024 they hit a higher note than usual, in part due to a fine reissue of the sole release by the Austin, TX dark psych outfit Cold Sun. Lots of obscure reissues get puffed up with hype only to deflate like a goddamned souffle once the needle is dropped. Not Dark Shadows.
Those perpetually hungry for UK Beat-Mod stuff have likely already devoured Art Gallery and I Take It All. The frontman was Ronnie Wood’s younger bro Art Wood, so they did the sensible thing and named themselves the Artwoods. But Jon Lord and Keef Hartley were also members, so the band was brimming with talent if lacking in original material. But it’s no matter really, as both of these albums are about that UK Beat-Mod sound.
18. John Wright Trio – South Side Soul (Craft Recordings / Original Jazz Classics) + Prince Lasha & Sonny Simmons – The Cry! (Craft Recordings / Acoustic Sounds) In terms of pure quality, these aren’t the best records Craft Recordings reissued in their Original Jazz Classics or Contemporary Records lines, but they are exactly the type of records the label should continue to make available. South Side Soul was Wright’s debut album, a trio date from the noteworthy if underrated pianist that’s infused with Windy City flavor; if Prestige hadn’t put it out, it would’ve worked nicely as one of the Delmark label’s jazz releases.
The Cry! is important for a variety of reasons, foremost for its documentation of two figures associated with the jazz avant-garde who are too often overlooked, and at an early juncture, when they were both collaborating with Eric Dolphy. By extension, this album reinforces how the New Thing was an impulse that spread out beyond the marquee names associated with the movement. Mostly though, The Cry! just sounds fantastic.
17. Ernest Tubb & His Texas Troubadours – The World Broadcast Recordings 1944–1945 (ORG Music) + The Blasters – Over There: Live at the Venue, London – The Complete Concert (Liberation Hall) A whole lot of mid-20th Century country music gets overlooked, mainly because most of it isn’t very good. Ernest Tubb is a big exception, but he still gets talked about more than listened to partly because his best stuff predates the LP era and many of the anthologies devoted to his work leave a lot to be desired. Focusing on songs cut for radio inside a tight timeframe, The World Broadcast Recordings 1944–1945 steps right in to fill a need and communicates Tubb’s talents very clearly.
Tubb played a major role in what The Blasters described simply as American Music, a collection of sometimes blended styles that included jazz, blues, country & western, rockabilly and more. The Blasters’ existence was inextricably linked to the rich vast pool of American Music, and the expansion of the band’s live EP to a full length set illuminates the band’s great achievement, which wasn’t about vaunting the past but rather extracting the good stuff from the Bad Ol’ Days and carrying it forth for a better future.
16. Woo – Xylophonics + Robot X (Independent Project Records) + Cocteau Twins & Harold Budd – The Moon and the Melodies (4AD) Woo is the brother duo of Mark and Clive Ives, UK residents active since the 1970s who debuted on record in 1982. Their collaboration with Bruce Licher’s IPR began in 1988 and recommenced this year with this reissue, which combines two digital releases from 2016–’17. Woo has been described as New Age in orientation, which is fair for certain Woo releases (they have quite a few) but not really for these two. The thrust here is art rock that’s occasionally kissed by Minimalism and given a cinematically conceptual spin.
Contrasting, the ethereal post punk-proto shoegaze of The Moon and the Melodies has become canon. They share with cult band Woo an adjacency to New Age that’s most openly articulated through this collaboration with Harold Budd, whose music, like Eno’s, was often filed in the New Age section around the time of The Moon and the Melodies’ release, though the proper term (related to Eno’s work of the period) was ambient. What the Cocteau Twins and Budd share with Eno (and Woo) is that their ‘80s stuff has aged like wine instead of souring into spacy spiritualist vinegar.
15. cLOUDDEAD – S/T (Superior Viaduct) + MF Doom – Mm…Food (20th Anniversary Edition) (Rhymesayers) There’s more than one way to undercut encroaching stylistic normalcy. When the masses start loitering on the doorstep, make it weirder. cLOUDDEAD burst out the door, launched off the porch steps, and sprinted down the street to meet up with folks into Cocteau Twins and Flying Saucer Attack who also dug slamming beats and elevated syntax. Not as rampantly syllabic as some of their contemporaries, cLOUDDEAD made up for it with fascinatingly hazy ambience.
Rampantly syllabic? MF Doom was that and then some. The music of MF Doom (the alter ego of Daniel Dumile, who hit the scene in the late ’80s with KMD as Zev Love X) is also quite funny in a naturally flowing way, and yes, appealingly weird. I don’t know if he’s ever sounded better than on Mm…Food, which gets some solid anniversary remixes and corrals some entertaining interview segments. Furthermore, I don’t know if Mm…Food has ever sounded better than it does right now.
14. The dB’s – Stands for Decibels & Repercussion (Propeller Sound Recordings) + The Ladybug Transistor – The Albemarle Sound Expanded (HHBTM) These entries hit at the opposite ends of a spectrum. When The dB’s first two classic albums were released, the “punk era” was effectively over. Released in the UK by the Albion label and shipped back into the USA as imports, Stands for Decibels and Repercussion made an impact as part of what came to be known as College Rock, and then Alternative rock before the ’90s went kerblooey all over fucking everything and Indie Rock caught fire; it was all ultimately part of a long continuum.
The dB’s with both Chris Stamey and Peter Holsapple in the band positively brimmed with smarts, but the sound was still essentially guitar-pop. Contrasting, The Albemarle Sound is lush and ornate, the kind of record that can only come near the end of a cycle, in this case Indie rock on the far end of that long continuum. To those with an undying allegiance to loud raw guitars, The Albemarle Sound likely registered as decadent. But it’s decadent like a big slice of rich chocolate cake with raspberry drizzle eaten slowly at a café at an outdoor table on a sunny breezy day while reading a book of poems by Elizabeth Bishop.
13. Terry Riley – Descending Moonshine Dervishes (Beacon Sound) + Mother Mallard’s Portable Masterpiece Company – Make Way For Mother Mallard: 50 Years of Music (Cuneiform) Descending Moonshine Dervishes was reissued by Beacon Sound in 2016, arguably making this a repress, but that’s debatable, for as we all know, 2016 was a long time ago. But as this recording is a bit underrated in Riley’s discography, giving it some fresh exposure makes sense, especially as we’re doubling up for 2024. And if hipping some ears to Riley’s expansive avant-gardism can raise some consciousnesses in a time that sorely needs it, we’re doing our part in building a better planet.
Cuneiform Records has been celebrating 40 years of activity throughout 2024. Steve Feigenbaum got the label’s ball rolling when I was 13 years old (heavy into Zep, Sabbath, and Jethro Tull at the time). Primarily focused on prog-rock, art-rock, and jazz, Cuneiform’s boundaries were/are not rigid, as evidenced by this Moog-tastic 2CD set of electronic experimentation. Disc one dates from 1970–’75, with the 32-minute “CAGE I” a wonder to hear. Disc two’s eight part suite dates from 2019 and finds David Borden’s project, like Cuneiform itself, holding up exceptionally well.
12. Bad Brains – I Against I (ORG Music) + The Dicks – Kill From the Heart (Superior Viaduct) That the Bad Brains’ catalog has found a solid home is cause for good cheer. That I Against I is the band’s greatest studio album is arguable, but it’s certainly their most consistent up to this point in their discography, unless of course one swoons over the sound of fair-to-middlin’ reggae. On I Against I, reggae is still clearly an influence, but no longer an overt style, and that’s where the consistency comes in. I Against I is just a heavy good time, pioneering a punk-funk merger one needn’t be embarrassed about liking 30 years later.
Contemporaries of Bad Brains, The Dicks are less high of profile but still justifiably legendary, standing tall amongst the most beautifully twisted (as in, not straight) bands of the whole US wave. Now, there were plenty of fucked up punk bands on the early ’80s scene, but a big reason The Dicks stood apart was how politically angry they were at a point when political punk was growing increasingly generic. Kill From the Heart isn’t stale rebellion but a legit wail of defiance from a belly fold of the American beast where being different could have (often did have) catastrophic results. We need this record in our lives more now than ever before.
11. Sahib Shihab – Sahib’s Jazz Party & After Hours (ORG Music) + McCoy Tyner & Joe Henderson – Forces of Nature: Live at Slugs’ (Blue Note) Befitting it’s title, Sahib’s Jazz Party is just a good time at the turntable (After Hours is a second disc holding the bonus tracks from the CD edition). It’s notable for documenting Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen at 17 years of age, but this is really a showcase for Shihab as multi-instrumentalist, and based on his spoken intros, nobody seems to be having more fun on this night than him. Shihab also gets huge points for namedropping Stanley Donen in the intro to “Charade.” An auteurist in France!
Taped by Orville O’Brien in 1966 with bassist Henry Grimes and drummer Jack DeJohnette rounding out the band, Forces of Nature is something of a revelation. Perhaps unsurprising as this set derives from Slugs’ Saloon, a hotspot of the 1960’s jazz avant-garde, but Henderson is on fire in a unique way, reminiscent of Coltrane but mainly sounding like a seriously pumped up Joe Henderson. Tyner’s playing is also a treat, really pushing forth with intensity rather than providing the modal block chord anchor, as was so often Tyner’s way. Grimes’ tone is huge and DeJohnette is simply thunderous. It’s downright gobsmacking that DeJohnette sat on these tapes for nearly 60 years.
