LATEST ADDITIONS

Let’s get one thing straight here first. No reissue label and mean none goes to the trouble Classic does to get the packaging right. Get your hands on this Tommy reissue and compare it to the original UK Track edition and you will see that Classic has gone the extra 3000 miles to give you as close a facsimile of the original British pressing as is humanely possible.

As with back jacket credits of UK-based Pure Pleasure’s 180g vinyl release ofMississippi John Hurt Today! (http://www.musicangle.com/album.php?id=461), this Vanguard reissue erroneously claims to have been sourced from a CD. If you’re going to do that, why bother having Kevin Gray cut lacquers at AcousTech when you can have it done much closer to home and probably at lower cost?

A friend told me that Blonde Redhead purists simply hate this album, or at least they’re disappointed by the New York based group’s 7th. Disappointed by what they claim is overproduction, over-thinking and artifice in place of substance.

Smartly arranged and orchestrated, nicely recorded and beautifully packaged, Bright Eyes’s latest double LP set is a wistful set that begins oddly but effectively with a denouement of a song about the encroaching pincer forces of corporate, military and religious aggressors (“If you think that God is keeping score, hooray!”)