My blog break has been a little longer than expected. I’ve had some issues.. like visiting a neurologist a few days ago. That’s pretty scary stuff, but thankfully anything serious seems extremely unlikely. Even so, this will still bother me on some level until I get rid of the headaches and numbness on my limbs. It just appears to be that it’s the tension neck that causes all these issues that trouble me. Anyway, I guess I should at least try to forget that stuff and finally move the blog to 2015. A lot of great new releases are already on the horizon like Vähäsarja, Viljami Kukkonen, Elephant Micah, Small Houses, American Aquarium, Justin Townes Earle, Andrew Combs. However, before getting into that new stuff, here is a really small and quickly made list of my favourite reissues of 2014. A rather pointless list, because I didn’t have much money to spend on these last year. There was so much good new music last year, that I had to leave most reissues to the shelf of the record store. Therefore I didn’t even make a top 10, because I’m not sure do I even own that many.
Top 3 Reissues of the Year 2014:
3. Richard Buckner – Bloomed
Merge Records celebrated their 25th Anniversary last year and reissued a lot of fabulous records from their back catalogue. I already owned most of them, so I only picked this Richard Buckner album Bloomed that I never bought back when it first came out. Excellent album and pretty much on the same level as my earlier Buckner favorites Devotion + Doubt and Dents and Shells.
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2. Sister Flo – Tragician’s Hat (10th Anniversary Edition)
Sister Flo’s Tragician’s Hat is one of my all-time favourite Finnish albums. Actually you could even remove that word Finnish from that sentence. Soliti celebrated the 10th anniversary of Tragician’s Hat by reissuing it. This masterpiece definitely deserved that treatment.
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1. Bob Carpenter – Silent Passage
Sister Flo will probably always remain far more important to me personally, but the reissue of the year is going to be Bob Carpenter’s Silent Passage. Mostly because I have been listening to Sister Flo for ten years, but last year was the first time I actually heard this classic by Bob Carpenter for the first time. I had been aware of Silent Passage for many years and when No Quarter reissued it in 2014, I knew I needed to pick up a copy so that I’m finally able to hear this album. Buying a copy was definitely a great decision, because Silent Passage definitely lived up to it’s status as one of the great lost country-folk treasures.
