FROM THE 80S POP OF JAPAN AND A-HA TO THE UNLIKELY COLLABORATIONS OF GARY NUMAN AND RADIO HEART, PLUS TREVOR HORN’S HOOK-UP WITH YES, WE RUN OUR CRITICAL EYE OVER THE LATEST HOT VINYL RELEASES…

REISSUES AND BEYOND

IAN GITTINS

THE JESUS AND MARY CHAIN – 21 SINGLES

The sales bullet points were always noise, feedback, attitude and what Creation Records co-founder Alan McGee termed “art as terrorism”, but the Jesus And Mary Chain were always best with a sweetly ingenuous tune lurking beneath their barbed surfaces. Feral flails like Upside Down were all very well but it was 1987’s April Skies, with its honeyed Motown melody, that went Top 10. Simultaneously thrilling and samey, this 2LP set is a vinyl reissue of the 2002 21 Singles CD boxset, but completists may rue the failure to add the most recent singles, Amputation and Always Sad, from the 2017 comeback album Damage And Joy.

JAPAN – GENTLEMEN TAKE POLAROIDS/TIN DRUM

Always the most beautiful and precocious of the early 80s electropop art-rock experimentalists, Japan give us the chance to buy their final two albums (not counting 1991’s slight return as Rain Tree Crow), Gentlemen Take Polaroids and Tin Drum, on half-speed mastered double-vinyl albums that play at 45rpm. We should take it: there is some truly exquisite music here, with Night Porter heavy with existential ennui, The Art of Parties sepulchral and sultry, and the gossamer Ghosts hovering on the edge of silence. The genius is in the understatement. Both are also newly available as single-vinyl editions that are not half-speed mastered and play at 33rpm.