



Our Best Of 2014 extravaganza ain’t quite over yet. Here’s a list of 20 excellent records that were reissued on vinyl this year. (Out of stock? Add the item to your wishlist and we’ll notify you when we have it in.)

Erykah Badu - Mama’s Gun

Erykah Badu’s second album is a neo-soul touchstone that represents her transition from her earlier work to her wilder 2000’s output. Features the hit “Bag Lady.”

The Beatles – The White Album

The mother of all rock bands/albums. The Beatles’ albums (all of which are pretty much essential) were reissued on vinyl this year. You gotta own this one on mono vinyl, the way it’s meant to be heard.

Belle & Sebastian – If You’re Feeling Sinister

I wrote an essay about how important this album was for me; read it here. Also check out the twee band’s reissues of The Boy With the Arab Strap, Push Barman to Open Old Wounds, The Third Eye Centre, Tigermilk, Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like a Peasant, The Life Pursuit, The BBC Sessions, Write About Love and Dear Catastrophe Waitress.

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds – From Her to Eternity

Nick Cave’s first album after splitting from The Birthday Party is his most celebrated, slightly stripping back The Birthday Party’s cacophony while retaining the same demonic delivery and hinting at the atmospheric heights he’d hit with later albums. The Firstborn Is Dead, Kicking Against the Pricks and Your Funeral… My Trial also were reissued this year.

The Clientele – Suburban Light

The best rainy day LP you’ll find. This singles collection is the first (and best) release by the British band and is full of glittering indie pop gems that exude analog warmth.

Cocteau Twins – Heaven or Las Vegas

The Cocteaus' finest work. Elizabeth Fraser's angelic glossolalia conveys more emotion than mere words ever could, even as she approaches more structured wordplay here, while Robin Guthrie and Simon Raymonde's impressionistic dream-pop textures seize on concrete grooves on classics like "Iceblink Luck" and the title track.

Julee Cruise – Floating Into the Night

Cruise owes her initial fame to David Lynch, who included her music in Blue Velvet and “Twin Peaks,” but Cruise’s ethereal voice, Lynch’s lovelorn lyrics and Angelo Badalamenti’s dreamy arrangements have made Floating Into the Night an enduring cult record.

Grace Jones – Nightclubbing

Grace Jones’ gender-bending persona pulls up to a winning set of originals and covers on Jones’ best album, an impossibly sexy collection of silky new-wave groovers that still sounds futuristic to this day.

Led Zeppelin – IV

I wrote an essay about how awesome this album is; read it here. Don’t miss Houses of the Holy, either, which was also reissued this year.

Lewis – L’Amour

This is the stuff of record collector dreams: Collector Jon Murphy finds this unknown ’80s album in an Edmonton flea market, gives it to private press aficionado Aaron Levin, who puts the album online, a delicate and strange collection of stately piano, out-of-time synths, lonely acoustic guitar and Lewis’ muttered romantic croon. Speculation swirls about Lewis, about whom precious little was known, other than he supposedly showed up at Music Lab Studio in 1983 in a white Mercedes convertible, with a beautiful girlfriend and perfect coif, cut this album and then disappeared. Reissue label Light in the Attic put the album out in 2014, along with another Lewis album, Romantic Times, and they don’t sound quite alike anything else. Though Light In The Attic says they found Lewis aka Randall Wulff, half the fun was wondering just who this guy was. Better pick these up fast—Light In The Attic says they won’t keep issuing the albums once their stock runs out.

M83 – Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts

Before “Midnight City” made M83 a household name, Anthony Gonzalez was just one-half of a duo (along with Nicolas Fromageau, who since left the band). Dead Cities’ digital dreamscapes sound like two laptops falling in love.

Modest Mouse – The Lonesome Crowded West

The indie rock greats reissued their first two albums this year, this late ’90s masterwork along with their first album, This Is a Long Drive for Someone with Nothing to Think About. Their new one (and first in eight years), Strangers to Ourselves, is due in early 2015; you can preorder it now.

Orange Juice – You Can’t Hide Your Love Forever

The Scottish jangle-rock band’s excellent first two albums were reissued this year. Though Rip It Up is a classic, it’s harder to get ahold of; You Can’t Hide Your Love Forever is nearly as great.

Linda Perhacs – Parallelograms

Linda Perhacs sole album prior to this year is a gorgeous set of layered Laurel Canyon folk ballads. Rediscovering her as she released only her second album in 44 years, The Soul of All Natural Things, has been a pleasure. Watch her performance from Amoeba Hollywood this year below.

Public Enemy – Fear of a Black Planet

Whereas its predecessor, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, rewrote the rules of hip-hop, sampling and popular music to follow, Public Enemy’s third album is their strongest. Chuck D’s socially and politically charged lyrics and Flavor Flav’s animated persona were never more potent than on tracks like “911 Is a Joke” and the furious title track, while the Bomb Squad’s production took sampling from across rock ‘n’ roll, funk and reggae and strew them together into a breathing Frankenstein of sound.

Sleater-Kinney – Start Together

The indie rock greats reissued their whole catalog this year, which you can get all at once in this box set. If you’d like to go album by album, go in order of greatness: The Woods, Dig Me Out, Call the Doctor, The Hot Rock, One Beat, All Hands on the Bad One and Sleater-Kinney.

Slint – Spiderland

Slint’s classic album Spiderland only seems to get more influential, yet more mysterious, as the years wear on. The band’s lone full-length record is credited with helping to jumpstart the post-rock movement, placing emphasis on Brian McMahan and David Pajo’s deliberate, exploratory guitarwork, while Britt Walford and Todd Brashear’s rhythm section keeps things still grounded in traditional rock ’n’ roll, even as Spiderland taken as a whole could be called anything but. From the muttered opening of “Breadcrumb Trail” and its wheezing guitar squeals through the unsettling riffs and spoken-word ambiance of centerpiece “Don, Aman” and finishing with “Good Morning, Captain’s” chiming uncertainty, Spiderland is utterly gripping—there’s just never been anything like this record.

The Smashing Pumpkins – Adore

I wrote a long essay about how Adore was a gateway album for me; read it here.

The Velvet Underground – The Velvet Underground (45th Anniversary)

The Velvet Underground’s disarmingly beautiful third album gets a deluxe reissue treatment that sheds new light on how the consummate indie pop album came to be, with a remastered stereo mix by MGM engineer Luis Pastor “Val” Valentin that serves to give added weight to an album that seems to float through the ether. The CD versions came out this year; pick up the LP Jan. 13.

Yo La Tengo – Extra Painful

Yo La Tengo’s excellent sixth album (and first classic) gets packaged with demos, alternate takes and unreleased tracks from the time. Balancing Ira Kaplan’s emotional guitar distortion and heartfelt vocals with warm organs and wife Georgia Hubley’s delicate coo, it’s a must for any fan of romantic, dreamy indie rock.