The Sampler: Best Reissues of 2021

Tony Stamp looks back at some of his favourite reissued albums and archival compilations of 2021, including Japanese ambient, West African funk, grunge icons and more.

Edo Funk Explosion Vol. 1

In the late seventies in the Nigerian state of Edo, a type of new music merged the sounds of regional culture with what was coming out of West African nightclubs at the time. Synths, electric guitars and effects racks joined the mix, and Edo Funk was born.

Analog Africa do brilliant work researching and curating their collections -  Edo Funk Explosion is a wonderful hour or so of music, but it’s well worth sinking into the liner notes, which make it an educational experience as well as a sort of time-shifted musical tourism.

Hello, Are You There? By Voom

One of those acts whose legacy looms larger than their output, Auckland band Voom’s catalogue consists of just two albums. The second, Hello, Are You There? became available on vinyl for the first time in 2021, and revisiting it I was surprised to hear the way it spirals into a dreamy existential crisis in its second half, after delivering power pop classics like ‘King Kong’ in its first.

On some of these songs Moller seems preoccupied with things like the nature of reality, and those ones tend to sound created on a whim. They’re balanced with more thought-through numbers like the lovely, delicately plucked ‘Beautiful Day’, and precise fuzz chords of 'B Your Boy'.

Tago Mago by Can

Seminal Krautrock band Can were in need of a new singer when they stumbled across Damo Suzuki busking in Munich. Tago Mago is the band’s first album to feature the Japanese vocalist, the result of three months recording long improvised jams, which were then edited into finished tracks. It's wildly influential to this day.

What’s Going On by Marvin Gaye

The soul classic received a fresh burst of attention in 2020 when it scored number one on Rolling Stone’s Greatest Albums of All Time. It's an album that says everything in its exasperated title as Gaye’s narrator returns home from the Vietnam War and surveys the state of his country.

The original single mix of the song ‘What’s Going On’ first surfaced on the 40th Anniversary reissue, and it’s here too on the 50th. Gaye aspired to be more than a singer in the Motown factory model, and the demo was his pitch. Motown boss, and Gaye’s brother-in-law Berry Gordy reportedly called it ‘the worst thing he’d ever heard in his life’. Time has obviously proved Marvin Gaye right, and the original version, with its extra focus on drums, is as undeniable as the finished product.

The Low End Theory by A Tribe Called Quest

In 1990, still creatively buzzing after their first album, alternative hip hop pioneers A Tribe Called Quest went straight into making their second, The Low End Theory, which celebrated its 30th in 2021. Producer and rapper Q Tip leaned into jazz influences, he and co-producer Ali Shaheed Muhammad were innovative in the way they flipped multiple samples on each track, and Phife Dawg came into his own, spitting effervescent bars with ease.

The whole album still perfectly evokes a certain time and place. It pioneered the fusion of jazz and rap, paired it with playfully profound wordplay, and remains effortlessly cool.

Loveless by My Bloody Valentine

The same year A Tribe Called Quest innovated hip hop on The Low End Theory, an Irish-English shoegaze band reinvented the guitar. Led by Kevin Shields, the recording process for My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless took place over two years and in nineteen studios, allegedly causing Creation second-in-command Dick Green to have a nervous breakdown.

Rhythm tracks were assembled from samples of the band’s drummer Colm Ó Cíosóig, guitar feedback was also sampled, and Shields used distortion and his instrument’s tone arm to create what sounded like an army of guitars. He claims it's just a few.

There were a lot of notable guitar albums released in 1991, including Smashing Pumpkins debut Gish, Use Your Illusion 1 by Guns and Roses, and of course Nirvana’s Nevermind, but none of them sounded as futuristic as My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless, or as British, obviously.

Trying to achieve a vocal track that was more of a sound than a voice, Kevin Shields merged his own singing with Bilinda Butcher’s, and pushed the result low in the mix. But it’s the fuzzy euphoria of those enormous guitars that lingered, influencing players to this day.

No Code by Pearl Jam

Fifteen years later when Pearl Jam released their fourth album No Code they were a band starting to fracture. There were internal conflicts, and they were attempting to make an album and tour simultaneously. Maybe this is why it's such an inconsistent album sonically. The garage rock sound of previous album Vitalogy got even spikier, and the quiet songs even quieter, but the most interesting addition was the busy drumming of new member Jack Irons, which gave certain songs a somewhat non-Western flavour.

‘In My Tree’ finds Eddie Vedder singing about ‘trading stories with the leaves’, and his lyrics on some songs do smack of a certain new age spirituality. My favourite is the relatively old fashioned ‘Red Mosquito’, a cautionary tale with a guitar sound that resembles the titular insect.

Gold Lame by Alec Bathgate

Alec Bathgate was one half of Tall Dwarves with Chris Knox, and has released three solo albums. The first of those, Gold Lame, came out in 1996, and featured the same lineage of pop-rock in its songwriting as the Dwarves, and the same mix of angst and fun in Bathgate’s voice.

I’m a sucker for noisy, lo-fi pop tunes, and he's a master of the form. These songs are as gleeful and slightly unhinged as the best Tall Dwarves material, and as comforting in their blurry homemade sound.

Heisei No Oto: Japanese Leftfield Pop From The CD Age, 1986-1996

This descriptively-titled album was compiled in Osaka by two record store owners, and released by Amsterdam label Music From Memory.

Eji Taniguchi (Revelation Time), and Norio Sato (Rare Groove), avoided J-Pop and favoured jazz, ambient and exploratory music they felt deserved wider recognition. Much of it sounds ahead of its time, but I mostly enjoyed how relaxing it all is.

'Heisei No Oto' refers to the sound of the Heisei era, when Japan shifted to primarily using compact discs. The songs on this compilation evoke the specific mood of that period; it’s an immersive and transportive pocket of musical history.

KID A MNESIA by Radiohead

There was an idea as we approached the start of the third millennium that the global system of computing our species had built was about to collapse. The Y2K bug was a real concern, and it took a lot of people working furiously to keep us online. When the year ticked over to 2000 and everything was fine, people assumed they’d been worried about nothing.

The following year Radiohead released Kid A, a record positively bathing in post-millennium dread. They didn’t just start exploring technology, they broke their sound and songs down to the atoms and reassembled each one over multiple sessions in multiple countries. The result was deafeningly acclaimed, and doesn’t really have any stand-out singles. The tracks that loom largest are the ones that seemed furthest from their previous guitar anthems, like opener ‘Everything In Its Right Place’.

The following year in 2001, a follow up called Amnesiac was released, which seemed to be the inverse to Kid A - a selection of songs that didn’t necessarily feel like an album. These were tracks from the same exhaustive sessions, playing in the same digital sandbox, led by the grim ‘Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box’.

The two albums were reissued this year as KID A MNESIA, with a third disc of offcuts - different mixes of album tracks, different versions of b-side, even 2 songs mashed together to become one. For Radiohead fans it’s thoroughly rewarding, and the nicest surprise was a studio version of ‘Follow Me Around’, which was known from a scene in their documentary Meeting People is Easy over twenty years ago. Aside from a subtle vocoder under Thom Yorke’s voice, it’s a pretty straightforward acoustic guitar track, almost the opposite of the digital post-millennium sound they spent so long trying to achieve.