Reissue CDs Weekly: 2014 Revisited

With just over two weeks to Christmas, thoughts might be turning to which of the deluge of 2014’s reissues might be suitable as a gift, worth putting on your own wish-list for Santa or even merit buying for yourself. So if help is needed, theartsdesk is happy to provide a one-stop guide to the essential reissues covered so far this year.

Normal service will resume next week with a look at John Grant’s old band The Czars. The week after we will consider Millions Like Us, a box set dedicated to, as it is helpfully subtitled, “the Mod Revival 1977–89”. Following that will be a collection dedicated to Sly Stone’s intriguing label Stone Flower, which briefly bloomed over 1969 and 1970.

The new year will bring more delights, but this week looks back over 2014 and reveals Lewis’s stunning L’Amour as the best of the year. Back in July we noted: “To say that L’Amour, the only album by Lewis, is arresting underplays it. This is one of the most direct and affecting series of songs ever captured in a studio.” It’s a view that's unchanged.

Lewis returns below, but if money is no object two extravagant box sets stood head and shoulders above all the others. Here Comes the Nice - The Immediate Years was a smartly packaged definitive statement on the Small Faces’ tenure with Andrew Loog Oldham’s Immediate label. As the mod quartet has been endlessly compiled since the late Sixties, producing such a set and cramming it with otherwise unheard gems was no mean feat. Assembled with care and a rare thoughtfulness, the set included previously unheard studio sessions showing the evolution of classic songs in the studio and a blistering live set heard in decent fidelity for the first time.

Calypso Craze was an equally pricey and just-as splendid box set. Six CDs, a DVD and an album-size, full-colour, 175-page hardback book told the story of the music which almost eclipsed rock ’n’ roll over 1956 and 1957. This was the reissue as a socio-historical artefact.

The cheaper three-CD box Love, Poetry and Revolution told an alternate history of “the British Psychedelic and Underground Scenes” which was, as we declared, “stuffed with amazing and idiosyncratic music begging to be heard.” Equally freaked-out was the fantastic Live Evolution Lost, a triple-album vinyl box set catching Texas’s 13th Floor Elevators live in 1967 as they were bending time while filled with LSD. Probably not quite the soundtrack for a post-Christmas lunch siesta, but over-consumption can be akin to psychedelic euphoria.

Less fragmented, but as revealing of a band’s essence in front of an audience, was the gratifyingly warts-and-all CSNY 1974, a doorstop dedicated to the 1974 Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young tour. The superstar quartet's milieu came through strongly on the excellent four-volume set Troubadours - Folk and the Roots of American Music, an overarching overview of the evolution of the American singer-songwriter and the world which birthed Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. Ruthann Friedman is a lesser-known late Sixties American singer-songwriter whose lovely 1969 album Constant Companion was core to the fine The Complete Constant Companion Sessions, issued in July.

Jazz oddity and specialist in the out-there Sun Ra was plugging away during the same period, and September’s In the Orbit of Ra was a fine introduction to his oeuvre, despite it shying away from his most challenging material. Just as stimulating was Fourth World Vol 1 - Possible Musics, the joint Jon Hassell and Brian Eno album which actually did change the course of music. The story behind it was also thought-provoking.

For those heading towards the dance floor, the budget CD set Philadelphia International Records – The Collection was packed with great albums by The Jacksons, Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes, The O’Jays and more. It was essential, though it still seems a shame that an extremely keen price undermined the value of the music itself. Holland-Dozier-Holland - The Complete 45s Collection, Invictus, Hot Wax, Music Merchant was an also-must-have covering the post-Motown adventures of the former producers of and songwriters for The Four Tops, Marvin Gaye, The Supremes and scads of other Motown acts. A rethink of what the dance floor is for came with the compelling and hugely entertaining Too Slow to Disco, a sparkling collection of the Californian Yacht Rock sound – the aural pastures where many singer-songwriters headed after their noses had frozen over.

By a long stretch though, 2014’s reissue of the year was L'Amour by the mysterious Lewis. Enveloped with ethereality, this was an utterly arresting album. On its original issue in 1983, L'Amour was barely heard. Lewis was a pseudonym of the enigmatic Randall Wulff. As we put it in July: “as fascinating as the story is, the music would still cast its spell with no information, no knowledge. The otherworldly, transcendent L’Amour really is a lost classic. It has to be heard.” Since the summer a second Lewis album, 1985’s less-impactful Romantic Times, was discovered and swiftly reissued but L'Amour remains untouchable.

Wulff himself was found in August and the contact with the still-inscrutable sonic voyager led to a subsequent decision not to re-press both L'Amour and Romantic Times – once existing copies are gone, that is it, no more. Some are still out there to buy, but it’s a fair bet stocks will dry up soon.

Lewis’ emotional bulletin from the soul is 2014’s essential reissue and must be sought out. Not just for Christmas, L'Amour is for life.

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