White Heaven - Strange Bedfellow

 

Ultra-rare second White Heaven album released only on vinyl by PSF in 1993. 

bedfellows

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White Heaven - Next To Nothing

 

Fourth album by the best 1970s California psychedelic rock band to ever come out of Tokyo in the 1990s. White Heaven's studio debut, "Out", was an instant classic when it came out on the legendary PSF label. More recently, Black Editions reissued it in an expanded and great-sounding vinyl remaster. This record, however, remains ultra-rare and very expensive on the second-hand market. Now you can enjoy it for (next to) nothing.

free for all

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High Rise - Psychedelic Speed Freaks '84-'85

 

Some of the earliest recordings of the Japanese heavy-psych brutes High Rise. Imagine the raging-Harley amphetamine-crazed energy of Motorhead, but instead of catchy tunes about drinking and gambling you get scorching sheets of white-noise guitar solos that screech over barely-held-together songs about not doing drugs that might have been played on instruments made out of actual motorcycle engines. This is some black leather and dark sunglasses rock n'roll turned up to an absurd degree. 

just say no

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Devo - Pioneers Who Got Scalped: The Anthology

Another double-disc set of de-evolution from 2000, this one features album tracks from throughout the band's career (which means plenty from the crappier albums, like "Total Devo" and "Shout", by which point they had already become irrelevant) but also songs from the self-released early singles and some unreleased music.

disc 1
disc 2

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Devo - Recombo DNA

A double-disc set of demos and alternate versions, released by Rhino Handmade in a limited edition of 5000 (which, to a fan of albums published as cassettes in editions of 30, sounds hilarious) in 2000.

disc 1
disc 2

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Devo - E-Z Listening Disc

What do you get for the spud who has everything? How about Muzak interpretations of  "Come Back Jonee", "Jerkin' Back and Forth" and "Mongoloid"? This is a compilation of two cassettes that were originally released for the Devo fan club, Club Devo, in 1981 and 1984, reissued as a CD by Rykodisc in 1987 and now very much out of print. It's about as "good" as you'd think it would be, but completists can now check off one more box.

Devo - E-Z Listening Disc

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Various - Devil From The East・A Decade Of Yoshida Tatsuya

And the award for the clumsiest and vaguely offensive title of the week is ...

The work of Tatsuya Yoshida is the work of legend. For brevity's sake, I will assume that you are aware of how great he is. This a wonderful retrospective of his earlier work and I wish there were more covering the following two decades.

Released in Japan on Bloody Butterfly in 1994.

Anyway (in the sense of brevity being really overrated), I was at Supersonic a few years ago walking between stages. Well, vaguely floating. Striding towards me were Tatsuya Yoshida, Kazuyuki Kishino and Masami Akita, resplendent in ankle length black leather coats. So I did what any right thinking person would do. I engaged them in a prolonged and well informed conversation about their work and the global and personal impact that they have had. They were delighted to meet me, asked for my contact details and we are still in regular contact.

Or what really happened was that I stood absolutely stock still staring like a fool with drool dribbling slowly down my chin. Extremely randomly, I had the theme tune to Reservoir Dogs running through my head at the same time.

To be honest, I prefer the first version of the truth.

A Decade Of Yoshida Tatsuya

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